‘Eddington’ and ‘Materialists’ make a surprisingly strong post-pandemic double feature on HBO Max
This summer, A24’s splashy, all-star dramatic thriller Eddington didn’t exactly set the world on fire – at least not the world outside of its fictional New Mexico town, which winds up metaphorically and, in patches, literally in flames. Its $10 million domestic total means it was less-attended than 2025 non-hits like Good Fortune, Love Hurts, or The Strangers: Chapter 2. Even in the smaller competition of A24’s in-house box office charts, it wasn’t exactly an arthouse summer blockbuster for the indie studio; that was Materialists, which became their third-ever movie to pass $100 million worldwide. Eddington’s $13 million global take is a notch below that of Death of a Unicorn. It’s probably not what A24 was hoping for, given that it comes from Ari Aster, who has remained one of the studio’s signature directors ever since Hereditary busted onto the aforementioned in-house charts. (It remains in their top five, their only pre-2022 title to do so.)
And yet! It feels like Eddington has had a long tail, which may grow longer still with its debut on HBO Max this weekend. There it will face… Materialists, which is currently #1 on the service’s movie charts. Obviously, these movies aren’t really in competition with each other. But released the same summer just a month apart, they do make an interestingly incongruous double feature attempting to figure out How We Live Now.
Eddington, of course, is not set “now”; it very specifically takes place in the late spring of 2020, as it became both increasingly clear that the COVID-19 pandemic would not be burning out in a matter of weeks; and also increasingly unlikely that Americans would comply with various local lockdowns, mask ordinances, and other flashpoints that active the film’s divisions. It follows the beleaguered town sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) as he grows frustrated with the regulations put in place by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and, less publicly, the combination of depression and rabbit-hole paranoia experienced by his withdrawn wife Louise (Emma Stone). Eventually he decides to opposite Garcia in the race for Eddington mayor, and the movie spirals out into more conspiracy theories, protests, some murder and cover-ups, and a mysterious organization that may or may not be antifa, from there.
PhotoL Richard Foreman /© A24 / Courtesy Everett Collection
It was a lot for audiences, and some critics, myself included. I found myself admiring Aster’s audacity in making Eddington, especially in its blackly comic evocations of 2020-era, while also finding the depth of its dive more than a little exhausting. Maybe it was the moment that the movie kicks into murder-cover-up mode, never my favorite plot engine outside the very best of circumstances (which is to say, Hitchcock), and seemingly beside the point of addressing all that COVID cultural stuff head-on. The striking thing about the COVID era, and something the movie depicts quite well early on, is the way the pandemic teased out a desire to take a stand, even (or especially?) on positions that the stander wasn’t necessarily equipped to handle, probably out a desire to control something in such a chaotic, scary, and unknowable world. I’m thinking particularly of the way teenager Brian (Cameron Mann) makes a clumsy entry into the Black Lives Matter movement in hopes of impressing his crush. By the end of the movie, he’s made an unsurprising but still grim pivot, underlining the opportunism that festered beneath so many COVID-era decisions and insistences.
That feels much more vital than watching a guy bumble through a murder cover-up out of any number of cable dramas (albeit one more brazen in its commitment than those tend to be). So I still think Eddington loses its way as its plot winds repetitively through the film’s back half. But since seeing it last summer, I also can’t deny the number of times it’s sprung to mind, especially whenever the opening of a new A.I.-powering data center crosses my news feed. The data center is a crucial aspect of the film, particularly an ending that might otherwise be seen as either cruel overkill or unnecessary obtuseness. It also came to mind during the recent Bugonia, Emma Stone’s other 2025 movie. That one isn’t as explicit about COVID-19, but it clearly joins Eddington in the realm of post-pandemic cinema, where lost characters (in this case, Jesse Plemons, as a delusional but not entirely incorrect man who really has been screwed over by a pharmaceutical company run by Stone’s CEO) bend their perception of reality in order to cope with impossibly strange and terrible circumstances. Both movies are about turning reactions to current events into an ineffective yet galvanizing form of therapy – a meeting of the moment that turns into a deadly collision.
Materialists isn’t nearly so acidic (or violent) an assessment of the accidental path of the 2020s. In a way, Celine Song’s New York-set romantic drama exists outside the pandemic and its aftermath – perhaps self-consciously so, in a way that ultimately brings it back to COVID-19 whether the characters want to go there or not. Dakota Johnson’s matchmaker character is employed by well-to-do New Yorkers to find themselves a suitable (and often suitably posh) mate, something that could be an attempt to reclaim the efficiency and efficacy of dating after an extended period where socializing more closely wasn’t so easy or possible. By turning love into a series of transactions, the clients in Materialists are attempting to do the same thing as the hapless citizens of Eddington: Take control of a frustrating, unpredictable situation and self-actualize their way out of it.
Photo: Everett Collection
Song takes a less jaundiced view of humanity than her fellow A24 darling Aster, yet she’s not exactly unsparing, either. Materialists turns its eye (and lush 35mm cinematography) on one of the most photogenic cities in the world, yet there’s a pervasive sense that the growing wealth at the top of the city’s strata is further out of reach than ever. (Why else would it be so important to find a wealthy partner, as figures into just about every matchmaking request we see in the film?) The difference is that Song seems to hold out some hope that we as humans can opt out of romance as a capitalistic system, or at least work around it to some degree that isn’t as selfish or misguided as practically every major character in Eddington.
Naturally, that sincerity doesn’t resonate as clearly with the population of any given social feed; going by posts I’ve seen, you’d think Eddington was the A24 champ of the summer while Materialists was roundly laughed out of theaters rather than making more money than any romance of the past year or so. But these movies don’t present an either-or approach (not least because they have completely different filmmakers, approaches, stars, styles… pretty much everything). In a lot of ways, they’re oddly complementary. In a remote small town, there’s ample opportunity to get lost in the feeds and screens that Aster smartly makes visually ubiquitous in his film; New Yorkers, meanwhile, might think that they have enough culture and beauty at their disposal to avoid TikTok nonsense and conspiracy videos, but real-life interactions come at a price. That the matchmaking services exist a tall in the app era makes them seem like a bespoke luxury item; you don’t need a futuristic data center to have your life ruled by moneyed interests. The movies’ shared costar of Pedro Pascal (he’s a charming rich guy in Materialists) even serves a similar purpose embodying those interests: He may be a handsome, charismatic guy, but he’s still looking to buy you off in some form or another.
It’s all a lot more thought-provoking than A24’s ill-fated pair of eat-the-rich quasi-satires from earlier in the year. Together, the studio’s biggest success and highest-profile flop paint an appropriately comprehensive picture of a world that may shut down or stumble, but can’t escape the grip of capitalism.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
