This is my movie review for Ari Aster’s "Eddington" using the psychological concept of "projective identification." This is a very loaded (literally) and politically busy movie with lots going on. It takes on myriad topics from incest and cults to conspiracy theories and BLM but I thought it helpful to look at it through this one lens of an unconscious psychological defense mechanism, which I believe explains a lot, if not everything that is happening in this movie.
Like all of Aster's recent films this is a darkly comic, absurdist film, but it's not just a film—it’s a psychological crucible for a nation unraveling at the seams. Set in a fictional New Mexico town during the volatile early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Aster’s latest psychological satire plunges deep into the collective psychosis of American political polarization, using the prism of "projective identification" to lay bare how fear, fantasy, and ideology can distort human perception beyond recognition and to reveal how ideological hysteria—on both the Left and Right— can give birth to monsters no one intended.
At the center of this descent is Sheriff Joe Cross (played in a quietly desperate style by Joaquin Phoenix), a decent if complacent man whose initial moderate stance—"people who don't wear masks should be allowed to shop for food so they don't starve" in the face of what he perceives as stifling and unreasonable blanket mask mandates against an illness that "isn't even here" is challenged by a corrupt, liberal mayor played by Pedro Pascal who engages in unctuous, performative paranoia around masking. Cross is a moderate, aging lawman whose initial posture is one of even-handedness: “Keep the streets calm, let the people blow off steam" but he is pushed beyond his breaking point by the growing hysteria and paranoia of BLM protestors in his home town.
As BLM protests (fueled by angsty, white teenagers comically hyperaware of their own white privilege) swell through Eddington, Aster is introduced to a protest group led by a young girl, Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), an activist whose righteous anger about George Floyd's murder gradually morphs into hyper-vigilance and moral absolutism. Her blend of self-flagellating anti-whiteness and hyper-moralistic identity politics feels almost too absurd—until you realize Aster is holding up a mirror, not a caricature. Hoeferle plays Sarah with a manic intensity, switching between performative tears, impassioned speeches, and violent outbursts as she whips a small army of protestors into a moral frenzy. She doesn’t just want to defund the police—she wants to purify whiteness itself, beginning with her own. Her group, increasingly imbued with suspicion and paranoia, begins to see Cross not as a man, but as a cipher for institutional evil—a white supremacist tyrant in waiting.
What unfolds is a cinematic demonstration of projective identification, the psychological defense mechanism in which one’s disowned traits or fears are projected onto another, who then unconsciously or reactively begins to embody them. Cross, initially bewildered, under the weight of relentless scrutiny and hostile projection, begins to react, absorb and mutate—symbolically and behaviorally—into the very right wing authoritarian and murderer his critics claim he already is. He is less possessed than transformed, shaped by the projected paranoia of those who revile him.
The brilliance of Aster’s direction (and an indication that this movie is NOT meant to be taken literally) is how dramatically and even cartoonishly this shift unfolds: humiliated by his wife's abandonment and by his corrupt Democratic, mask and mandate loving rival in the mayoral election, Garcia, he snaps and kills both Garcia and his son which he then tries to pin on Sarah and then his own black deputy.
But Eddington does not let the "Left" off the hook either. The sheriff’s worst fears—conspiratorial whispers about Antifa "cells" and anarchist saboteurs firing on cops on TikTok—are grotesquely realized in the third act by a literal underground network of black-clad, hyper-ideological, super villain assassins who arrive in Eddington on a private jet and begin executing cops across the city. This turn, audacious and absurd, forces the viewer into a psychic no-man’s-land where every fantasy becomes reality. Aster dares to ask: what happens when the nation’s projections become performative rituals so potent they invoke and summon into existence the very monsters they fear? This move is bound to provoke, but Aster’s intention is not realism—it’s nightmare logic. These Antifa killers are less characters than psychic manifestations, born of mass projection and ideological fantasizing. In this world, belief—once strong enough—becomes flesh.
Critics will inevitably debate whether Eddington equivocates too much or indulges in a nihilistic both-sidesism. But Aster’s intent is neither exoneration nor condemnation—it is exposure. He is not interested in telling us who is right, but rather how our psychological defense mechanisms of projection and introjection (reinforced by digital algorithms creating social media silos) deform reality, trap us in escalating cycles of confirmation bias and retaliation, and ultimately obliterate the possibility of dialogue.
Eddington is a disturbing, intelligent, and deeply discomforting film. It dares to dramatize the psychic feedback loop of polarization not through polemic, but through psychological horror—turning America’s subconscious inside out and laying it twitching on the table. Like all great horror, it does not offer solutions, only revelation. And what it reveals is this: when we fail to own our own shadows, we will find them stalking us in the streets, bearing arms and wearing masks.
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