The numbers on Ari Aster’s `Eddington` don’t reconcile. On one side of the ledger, you have every conceivable input for a blue-chip cultural asset. The director, Ari Aster, is a name that generates both critical attention and box office heat. The cast is a portfolio of A-list talent: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler. The premiere was at Cannes, the gold standard of festival launches, where it received a nearly seven-minute standing ovation (a metric whose predictive value is notoriously unstable).
On the other side of the ledger, you have the output: audience and critical reception that can only be described as a volatile, sideways trade. A 69% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 65% from audiences. These aren’t catastrophic figures, but for a project with this pedigree, they represent a significant and puzzling market failure. It’s the equivalent of a star-studded tech IPO that opens flat. The initial data from the premiere—the tearful Phoenix, the sustained applause—suggested a breakout hit. But the broader market data tells a completely different story.
This discrepancy is the entire story. It’s not about whether `Eddington` is “good” or “bad.” It’s about the disconnect between its prestige packaging and its divisive public footprint. What happened between the standing ovation on the French Riviera and the lukewarm reception in the real world?
Anatomy of a Polarizing Asset
To understand the reaction, you have to first understand the product. `Eddington` isn’t a straightforward Western. It’s a satirical neo-noir set in a small New Mexico town during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It’s about paranoia, political polarization, and the fracturing of society into hostile online tribes. Aster himself described his intent as being "diagnostic than prescriptive," aiming to capture the "mean-spirited" energy of the era, a sentiment he explored in ‘Eddington’ Director Ari Aster Looks Back On His Visionary Satire: “It’s About Where We Are” - Deadline. He wasn't trying to make a crowd-pleaser; he was trying to hold up a cracked mirror.
And this is the part of the analysis that I find genuinely fascinating. The film’s most common criticism—that it’s “mean-spirited”—is an explicit confirmation of the director’s stated goal. It’s like complaining that a horror movie is scary. The audience isn’t necessarily rejecting the film for failing; they’re rejecting it for succeeding at what it set out to do.
The qualitative data, scraped from online discussions, reveals a perfect bimodal distribution of opinion. There is no middle ground. On one end, you have viewers calling it the "most politically relevant film of the year" and a Best Picture contender. On the other, you have a commenter like Michael P Riley stating, "I hated this movie…I couldn’t finish it." This isn't a film that people find "just okay." It functions less like a broadly appealing consumer product and more like a high-risk, high-volatility stock. You either buy into its thesis completely, or you liquidate your position immediately. There is no "hold" rating for `Eddington`.
So, what does that do to our primary metric, the aggregate score? A film that scores a 95% from half its audience and a 35% from the other half averages out to a tepid 65%. To be more exact, it’s 65% on the dot. That number is statistically accurate but descriptively useless. It completely masks the underlying volatility and tells you nothing about the actual experience of watching the film. Is a metric still useful if it obscures the most important variable in the data set?
A Feature, Not a Bug
This leads to a necessary methodological critique. We have to question the tools we’re using to measure success. Ari Aster himself has a history of clashing with these systems. His debut, `Hereditary`, was the only film he ever test-screened. It scored poorly and later received a disastrous CinemaScore from opening-night audiences, yet it’s now widely regarded as a modern horror classic. Aster has called aggregate scores "disastrous for challenging films," and looking at the data for `Eddington`, it’s hard to argue he’s wrong.
Trying to evaluate `Eddington` with a single Rotten Tomatoes score is like using a sledgehammer for watch repair. The tool is mismatched for the object of analysis. The film is designed to provoke, to alienate a certain percentage of its viewers as a core function of its narrative. It’s an artistic provocation wrapped in the commercial packaging of an A-list thriller. The resulting schism in the audience data isn't a sign of the film's failure. It’s a sign of its very specific, and perhaps deeply uncomfortable, success.
The film is a mirror to the balkanization it depicts. It sorts its audience into the exact same tribes its plot is about. You’re either in, or you’re out. You see it as a vital diagnosis of a sick society, or you see it as a symptom of that same sickness. The film doesn't just portray polarization; it actively creates it. How do you assign a single number to that? What score do you give an experience that is, by its very nature, designed to be bifurcated?
The Signal Is the Noise
My analysis suggests we’re looking at this all wrong. The market isn't mispricing `Eddington`; the market is behaving exactly as the film’s creator intended. The divisive scores, the split commentary, the very "mean-spiritedness" that repels half the audience—this isn't noise that obscures the film's true value. This is the value. It’s the entire point.
Ari Aster didn’t make a film that failed to achieve a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score. He made a film that successfully manufactured a 65% score by generating a near-perfect 50/50 split in passionate sentiment. He set out to create a diagnostic of a polarized world, and the primary data point proving he succeeded is the polarized reaction itself. The film’s reception is the final, meta-textual act of the film itself. The real story isn't in the average; it's in the variance. And the variance on `Eddington` is telling us that the system is working exactly as designed.
Tags: Aster
