Ari Aster, director of 'Eddington': 'We have lost the awareness of a world bigger than our little selves'

Portrait With "Eddington," a brilliant horror fable that he has the secret to, the 38-year-old director humorously twists the anxieties of the Covid crisis and the neuroses of Trump's America.

Ari Aster at the premiere of "Eddington" on June 26, 2025, in Los Angeles. CHRIS PIZZELLO/AP/SIPA

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Evil, Ari Aster's major subject, is first and foremost a family affair. Before the aptly named "Heredity" , a brilliant variation on "The Exorcist" that launched him into the big leagues in 2018, his graduation short film, "The Strange Thing about the Johnsons , " a horror comedy that knits its unease around incest, laid the groundwork for an obsession. Not only do its antihero characters, dogged by bad luck—from Dani, the martyred student in "Midsommar" (a formidable closed-door horror admired by Martin Scorsese), to the title role in the neurotic " Beau Is Afraid "—never shake off their traumatic childhoods, but they end up inexorably devoured by them. even in their flesh by a demonic atavism. In his latest film "Eddington", Joe Cross ( Joaquin Phoenix ), blessed with a depressive wife and a conspiratorial mother-in-law, is no exception, the tortured sheriff of a small town in New Mexico on the verge of self-destruction, eaten away by the furious madness of social networks and the psychosis of Covid.

At Cannes, where we met Ari Aster, the temptation is great to play barroom shrink with this talkative and affable thirty-something New Yorker, clearly delighted by our enthusiasm for his film (he knows that "Eddington" has divided the press), yet extremely evasive when it comes to discussing his own Gordian knot. Yes, he admits, his taste for the perverse mechanics of clan and the laws of fate also has its roots…