This is my movie review for Eddington using the psychological concept of projective identification. This is a very loaded, and politically busy film with a great deal going on. It takes on myriad topics, from incest and cults to conspiracy theories and BLM, but I found it helpful to view it through the single lens of an unconscious psychological defense mechanism, which I believe explains much, if not everything, that is happening in the film.
Like all of Ari Aster’s recent work, this is a darkly comic, absurdist film, but it is not just a film. It is 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 into the collective psychosis of American political polarization. It uses the prism of projective identification to lay bare how fear, fantasy, and ideology can distort perception beyond recognition, and to reveal how ideological hysteria on both the Left and the Right can give rise to monsters no one consciously intended.
At the center of this descent is Sheriff Joe Cross, played in a quietly desperate style by Joaquin Phoenix. He is a decent, if complacent, man whose initial moderate stance, that people who do not wear masks should still be allowed to shop for food so they do not starve, is formed in reaction to what he perceives as unreasonable blanket mandates against an illness that “is not even here.” His position is challenged by a corrupt liberal mayor, played by Pedro Pascal, who engages in performative paranoia around masking. Cross begins as an aging lawman attempting balance, with a posture of maintaining order while allowing people to blow off steam, but he is gradually pushed toward collapse by the rising hysteria and paranoia surrounding BLM protests in his town.
As protests swell, fueled in part by angsty white teenagers who are comically hyperaware of their own privilege, Aster introduces a protest group led by Sarah, played by Amélie Hoeferle. Her righteous anger over George Floyd’s murder evolves into hypervigilance and moral absolutism. Her blend of self-flagellating anti-whiteness and rigid identity politics feels exaggerated at first, until it becomes clear that Aster is presenting a mirror rather than a caricature. Hoeferle plays Sarah with manic intensity, oscillating between performative tears, impassioned speeches, and violent outbursts, as she drives her followers into a moral frenzy. She does not simply seek to defund the police; she seeks to purify whiteness itself, beginning with her own. Her group, increasingly driven by suspicion, comes to see Cross not as a man, but as a symbol of institutional evil, a white supremacist tyrant in waiting.
What unfolds is a cinematic demonstration of projective identification, a psychological defense mechanism in which disowned traits or fears are projected onto another person, who then begins, consciously or unconsciously, to embody them. Cross, initially bewildered, becomes subject to relentless scrutiny and hostile projection. Under this pressure, he begins to react, absorb, and ultimately transform into the very authoritarian figure his critics accuse him of being. He is not simply overtaken; he is shaped into that role by the projections directed at him.
The brilliance of Aster’s direction, and a clear signal that the film is not meant to be taken literally, lies in how exaggerated and even cartoonish this transformation becomes. Humiliated by his wife’s abandonment and undermined by his corrupt, mandate-driven political rival in the mayoral race, Garcia, he snaps. He kills both Garcia and his son, then attempts to frame Sarah and later his own Black deputy.
At the same time, Eddington does not absolve the Left. The sheriff’s worst fears, including conspiratorial ideas about Antifa cells and anarchist saboteurs, are grotesquely realized in the film’s third act. A literal underground network of black-clad, hyper-ideological assassins arrives in Eddington on a private jet and begins executing police officers across the city. This audacious and absurd turn places the viewer in a psychological no-man’s-land where fantasy and reality collapse into one another. Aster poses the question of what happens when projections become so potent that they take on a life of their own. These figures are less characters than manifestations of collective fear, born from ideological obsession. In this world, belief becomes embodied.
Critics will likely debate whether Eddington equivocates too much or indulges in nihilistic both-sides thinking. However, Aster’s aim is neither to exonerate nor to condemn. His aim is exposure. He is not interested in determining who is right, but in examining how psychological defenses such as projection and introjection, amplified by algorithm-driven social media silos, distort reality. These processes trap individuals in escalating cycles of confirmation bias and retaliation, ultimately eroding the possibility of dialogue.
Eddington is a disturbing, intelligent, and deeply unsettling film. It dramatizes the psychological feedback loop of polarization not through straightforward argument, but through horror. It turns the American subconscious inside out and lays it bare. Like all effective horror, it offers no solutions, only revelation. What it reveals is this: when we fail to confront our own disowned traits, we will encounter them externally, armed, masked, and impossible to ignore.
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