Calling Eddington “Centrist” Misses the Point
Calling Eddington a “centrist” film is one of the laziest readings I’ve heard this year; and it completely misses what Ari Aster is actually doing
I rewatched Eddington recently (it’s streaming on Max now), and the second viewing really sealed it for me. I liked it in theaters; but on rewatch, it clicked into something much sharper and more disturbing. It’s brilliant. Easily Ari Aster’s best film, and firmly in my top five of 2025.
I also picked up on a lot more this time around; especially in relation to one of the main critiques I heard when the film first came out: that Eddington is somehow “centrist,” politically disingenuous, or trying to play both sides. If you walked away with that reading, I honestly think you missed what Aster is doing here.
I can understand why the film was polarizing. It’s deeply transgressive. Cynical, pessimistic, bleak. This is Aster at his most nihilistic. But “centrist” is one of the least accurate ways to describe it.
Yes, the film critiques institutions. And yes, Aster depicts both sides critically. But he absolutely does not depict them as equally dangerous.
Aster skewers progressives as performative; obsessed with optics, fluent in therapeutic jargon, moralizing without material action. It reminded me of a bit from Marc Maron’s recent special Panicked (also streaming on Max), where he jokes that liberals are basically annoying people into fascism.
And yes; Aster is saying that performative liberalism is annoying.
But he is not saying it’s the real danger.
In Eddington, the Right is depicted as paranoid, conspiratorial, and genuinely violent. Not just wrong or misguided, but fatal; ideologically possessed and structurally dangerous. One side is irritating and hollow. The other is lethal. That distinction is not subtle, and it certainly isn’t “centrist.”
There was one thing I either missed or didn’t fully understand on my first viewing that really drives this home. Spoiler warning here.
In the final quarter of the film; when everything spirals into chaos; I initially read the violence as surrealism. Just Aster pushing things into an abstract, nightmarish register. But on rewatch, I noticed the connection between an earlier scene; where we briefly see a group of men on what appears to be a private jet, surrounded by Antifa imagery; and the violence that follows.
Aster is not depicting actual Antifa. He’s depicting right-wing accelerationists cosplaying as Antifa.
This is straight out of The Turner Diaries playbook. These men are coordinated, militarized, heavily armed, technologically resourced, and very obviously well-funded (they’re literally on a private jet). This is not a decentralized, reactive movement (see Antifa). This is not a ragtag group of protesters. This is a paramilitary operation with money, infrastructure, and intent.
Throughout the film, we see news footage of these false-flag operations; acts of terror staged to look like leftist violence. The targeting of infrastructure. The pursuit of mass civilian casualties. The deliberate use of confusing imagery to manipulate public perception. These are classic right-wing accelerationist tactics.
The goal is destabilization. Chaos. Making the town (and the country) blame progressives for the destruction.
Would anyone seriously call that a centrist position?
Aster is very clearly saying something here: the Right is not merely reactionary or offensive. It is calculated and violent. The danger is asymmetric.
The film’s final moments drive this nihilism even further. In the closing shot, Aster cuts to a massive, humming data center. This is the true cathedral of the modern world. Infrastructure. Surveillance. Computation. The invisible systems that actually govern us.
Just before this, we see the mother-in-law installed as the de facto mayor. Aster is telling us that local politics is puppet theater. The real authority exists elsewhere. The machinery; the data systems, the corporate interests, the surveillance infrastructure; remains untouched, humming away in the background.
We want to believe a human is in charge. But the systems we’ve built no longer need humans to run them.
Fuckin bleak!
I loved it lol