Pandemic paranoia takes place in the American west: npr

Films, which are known as “periods”, bring the audience back to the Renaissance or to the Victorian England.

Are you ready for a period of pandemic?

Eddington Keep its name from a fictional small town in New Mexico at the end of May 2020. And like every good western there is an argument. Pedro Pascal plays the mayor who tries to enforce masking and social distancing, and Joaquin Phoenix is the sheriff, who believes that everything should be a choice, not a mandate. The hysteria in the city is high and things go south.

The film Is written and staged by someone who knows something about building tensions, Ari Aster (Middle SommarPresent HereditaryPresent Beau is afraid).

“This became the center of the cultural wars in this country in which people argued for public health and security, and then they had people who argued for personal freedoms,” said Aster Morning edition Host of a Martínez. “It is about a group of people who live in different realities who are not accessible to each other … they push them into deeper beliefs and paranoia.”

Aster experienced the closures from the Covid era from his house in New Mexico and saw the gap in the sympathy of his community in 2020. Nevertheless, he tried to write every character in a letter Eddington With sympathy – so that the viewer could not determine Aster's own policy.

“For me, a large part of the project was to withdraw as far as possible and to include as many voices as possible that are part of this cacophony.”

The film is essentially divided into two halves: the increasing tension of the region's pandemic policy and the early black lives Matter protests and disinformation spread on the Internet – and then in the middle of the film, the tension builds on what seems inevitable: violence.

“I think that violence basically the logical next step is too much of what happened,” said Aster. “They fill people with anger and hatred and give them a very clear scapegoat, and there is a logical end point.”

Some critics described the film as satire, and Aster agrees.

“But what it is most critical is this landscape in which we were all very successfully divided, and it has become almost impossible to imagine reaching each other.”

Aster hopes that the audience will find solidarity when observing Eddington In a theater next to people who may have been at the opposite end of the cultural war of pandemic five years ago.

“If it has something hopeful about the film,” he said, “it is a time piece was And maybe you have a chance to see how we Are. And there could be the question: do we want to stay in this way? And what is in our power to step on it? Because it seems to go directly towards a wall. “

The audio version of this story was produced by Lilly Quiroz.