One of Our Greatest Young Filmmakers Just Made a COVID Movie. Uh-Oh.

As the head of a trauma center in an American city, The Pitt 's Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) has seen it all. Even when his emergency room floods with victims of a mass shooting, he keeps his calm and leads the way, saving lives and teaching the next generation of doctors with a stern generosity. But there's one thing he's still not over. Throughout the 15-hour day that makes up the Max show's first season, he has periodic flashbacks to the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the brightly colored side room usually reserved for children was converted into an overflow area for the hardest-hit patients. It was there that Robby's beloved mentor was left clinging to life on an ECMO machine, and there, with the hospital's resources stretched to the breaking point, that Robby had to make the excruciating decision to take him off life support, knowing another patient's chances of survival were greater. Five years later, the memory of that day is enough to reduce The Pitt ’s stoic hero to a quivering mess.

COVID fucked us up. All of us, whether we lost loved ones or livelihoods, worried that our children might not survive or that they might be scarred for life. And yet, though it's barely been three years since the Omicron wave, those times can seem as blurry and distant as an old photograph shoved back on a shelf so it doesn't catch our eye by accident. Dr. Robby's flashbacks make up only a tiny fraction of The Pitt , but Ari Aster's Eddington , which premiered at Cannes on Friday and opens in US theaters on July 18, brings the feeling of that time back with the sharp sting of a cotton swab jabbed into the back of your nose.

I hadn't thought about that feeling in years. But when Eddington ’s Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the sheriff of a small New Mexico town, goes in for his COVID test, that particular mixture of pain and confusion came rushing back to me like a slap in the face. Aster takes an obvious delight in working his audiences' nerves, but nothing he's done before—not Hereditary 's creepy cult or Midsommar 's smug grad students or Beau Is Afraid 's mommy-issues cringe—has triggered my fight-or-flight instinct like the scene in Eddington where an elderly man in a checked shirt and baseball cap loudly demands to be allowed to enter a supermarket without following COVID precautions, claiming he “can't breathe in a mask.” It's triggered many of Cannes' critics, too, and is currently sitting at the bottom of Screen International's critics' grid , with the lowest score of any film in competition. But the movie's visceral unpleasantness serves a purpose, plunging us back into a time we've tried to forget as thoroughly as possible, even as its effects, examined and otherwise, are still very much with us.

Defined by the conflict between Phoenix's Sheriff Joe, a dimwitted but determined lockdown refusenik, and Pedro Pascal's Mayor Ted Garcia, a corrupt progressive intent on giving much of the town's outskirts away to a massive data center, the movie follows a community's descent into individual and collective insanity, sparked by the fear of an uncontained and poorly understood virus and catalyzed by political division and online conspiracy theories. Although the town of 2,600 hasn't had any major issues with police misconduct, its young people—one of whom totes around an outward-facing Angela Davis book and owns an Instagram handle that ends with “bernieorbust”—have taken to the streets to protest systemic racism and their own white privilege, which they promise to stop exercising just as soon as they've finished making this speech. Everyone, in short, is as annoying as possible.

Although Aster throws in some absurdist touches—the company behind the proposed data center is named “solidgoldmagikarp,” a moniker derived from Pokémon—he's never made a movie situated this close to reality. Or perhaps reality has never been so close to Aster-land, a place where being left alone with one's thoughts is the shortest route to losing your mind. The isolation of COVID drove us all hysterical to one extent or another—I never doused my groceries in disinfectant, but I do remember frantically crossing the street after hearing someone cough a full block away—and though the town of Eddington never succumbs to the coronavirus itself, you can feel other forms of infection spreading further. Joe's mother (Deirdre O'Connell) spouts Plandemic -type rants derived from Facebook posts and email forwards, and his wife (Emma Stone), whose long history of mental illness has been turbocharged by the chaos around her, has fallen under the influence of a grifter guru (Austin Butler) who preaches that “You are not a coincidence.”

All of Aster's protagonists are conspiracy nuts who turn out to be right, but in Eddington they're constructing the conspiracy as much as they're discovering it, turning the world into what they already perceive it to be. Joe sees a hostile universe intent on depriving him of his freedoms, and bristles at the mayor's flexible definition of state mandates, declaring that it's “essential business” when he wants to meet a few colleagues at a bar. So the sheriff responds in kind, launching an insurgent mayoral bid to unseat the dreaded Ted Garcia and drafting his deputies as unofficial campaign staffers. (That may be small change as political conspiracies go, but it still counts as one.) Self-righteous rule-followers preach mask mandates while their own masks slip below their noses, and decry disinformation while reminding scofflaws that the virus can live on paper for days. There's no need for external forces to turn the world upside down. They're making it happen to themselves.