Eddington: A kid playing with Knives

I cannot begin to explain to you how much I anticipated this film. Or, maybe I Cannes - maybe you've seen me anticipating this film for weeks.

Sometimes, I'm the wokest woman in the room, and sometimes I love Mission Impossible movies - therein lies my duality. I'll allow any film to challenge me, if it does so with intelligence. If I believe in it's sincerity, it's wit, it's research - if I believe the artist behind it is trying to have an informed discussion with me – Even if they're selling me American Hegemony, I will have the discussion.

The best way I can explain why I couldn't even muster applause for this film, not even out of respect, is that I feel Ari Aster picked up a bunch of knives that he had no business handling, and started juggling. From his own accounting, he doesn't quite understand the story he is trying to tell here. It isn't even saved by some of the most talented actors, and some of their best performances.

Aster at the typewriter pulled together half-baked, 2D renditions of memes, thoughts and feelings from 2020 and mashed them side by side in a Seth Macfarlane-esque "takedown of everybody", in a story that winds round to nothing. His film has contempt for pretty much everyone, and I would respect it if the contempt felt earned, organic, intelligent or believable. Instead, these pastiches barely have enough time to finish cooking before the next thing, and the next thing. This is a film, a feature length film, of, like, 5-6 underdeveloped attitudes and feelings we had in early 2020. That's it. That's the entire movie. Just 5-6 feelings we didn't analyse in 2020, presented as is, without any development, let alone analysis.

I understand there is a school of film thought that says you simply make the film via observation. If so, such film should try for some objectivity, some nuance, some kind of detail, if that's all you're going to do – if you're just going to point, I'd appreciate knowing exactly where you're pointing.

I was heartbroken out of the theatre, and now I feel next to nothing. The madness of this film will fall away into the annuls of time, some frames will show up in a few dudebro Short Film Pitch Decks, and I won't have much else on the subject to say. It's a film so beyond further analysis, so banal in its attempt to try to do something great, that I question why it was made, and why those who took part in making it actually did so – though I may make concession to the fact that there was an attempt here, a really good one, to try to give the world a film that made sense of what happened in 2020.

Unfortunately, if you make no effort to make sense of a phenomenon, you can provide no sense of it to others. Eddington is a disappointment to me, because I could so clearly see its bright and brilliant promise. I am going to endeavour not to hold this film against anyone going forward – but, it will be hard.