Eddington Hurt People Hurt People (8/10 stars) Does anyone remember what the fuck happened during the pandemic? It seemed so long ago yet so near, so vague a past yet so distinct, with so little yet so much happened. Eddington emotionally encapsulates the 2020 I remembered, more impartially satirical than Don’t Look Up, less stylistically romanticized than Asteroid City, and more realistically horrifying than Civil War. There’s so much misinformation and misunderstanding, so much resentment and remoteness, so much confusion and chaos that it seemed an obligation to hurt others in order to defend ours. But how do we know what to defend without empathy? How do we empathize without conversation? How do we converse without risking being offensive? And if we stay silent, how do we know anything? So in the end, we all become like Joe, spontaneously shooting whatever shadow of a figure on the empty crossroad, fearing for our dear lives without even knowing what danger there might be. Other than his fastidious shot designs and meticulous storytelling techniques, Ari Aster is a master in gradually amplifying common anomalies to an extreme as to create horror, whether the accumulated angst in Hereditary or the sunlit brutality in Midsommar. In Eddington, true horror is the state of society, which includes the cynical and the aloof, the cultic and the stagnant, to a point where civilization loses its way. I think it’s nice to occasionally have a movie that reminds us of the pandemic and of how we nearly lost our way, therefore I believe Eddington deserves better marketing and more recognition at the awards.