Watching a film about the pandemic inevitably brings contradictions to the surface, and Eddington is a film that digs into those fractures in society. Set in a small New Mexico town, it follows Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who is considering running for re-election while still carrying the damage of a troubled marriage to his younger wife (Emma Stone). She becomes entangled with a local cult just as the pandemic exposes deeper issues of corruption, racism, and fear.

The sheriff, asthmatic and reluctant to wear a mask, repeatedly breaks the very rules he is meant to uphold. He is a figure of contradiction – weak in many ways, not respected by the community, and inconsistent in his message – yet drawn into a web of pharmaceutical corruption, small-town politics, and racial tensions inflamed by Black Lives Matter protests. The incumbent establishment, embodied by the mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is deeply enmeshed in the pharmaceutical industry and in the violence that bubbles beneath the town’s surface.

Director Ari Aster, best known for horror films such as ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar’, brings the same focus on the fissures within families and communities, and the psychological scars that erupt into violence. Here, those scars are political as well as personal. Phoenix plays the sheriff as a lethargic, almost pitiful figure, underplaying to the point where he seems adrift, while Stone, one of the finest actresses working today, is given too little to work with. Her performance, suggestive of Sissy Spacek in ‘Carrie’, conveys her character’s slide into conspiracy thinking but never quite gets the space to deepen.

The film is as much about borders and jurisdiction as it is about the pandemic itself. When a murder takes place across tribal land, the legal complexities intensify the town’s divisions. In this respect the film recalls the work of John Sayles, with its attention to questions of community, land, and belonging. At the same time, it feels like a deconstruction of extremist politics, showing how conspiracy theories seep into families, tearing them apart from within.

Critics have described ‘Eddington’ as a kind of Western, and in some ways it is: a story of authority, justice, and the limits of one man’s power. Yet it is also a bleak parable about how peaceful values can corrode into corruption, and how blame is often deflected onto innocents at great personal cost. If ‘Jaws’ examined the crisis of authority in protecting a community from danger, ‘Eddington’ is its pandemic-era counterpart – less thrilling, perhaps, but equally concerned with how leaders fail when fear takes hold.