Ari Aster’s Fascination with Conspiracies

A constant in the horror auteur’s work is manipulative characters shaping the reality of their vulnerable targets, and Eddington – with its Covid deniers – is no exception. Here, Billie Walker examines the cunning conspirators in each of Aster’s films.  

To wonder if you are a pawn in a grand scheme is an integral part of the human condition. It’s a nagging curiosity that leads us to philosophy, spirituality and, in some cases, conspiracy. Ari Aster, who gained widespread acclaim in 2018 for his claustrophobic domestic horror Hereditary, has so far dedicated his filmography to asking not only is someone pulling the strings, but, if so, who are they?

For Aster, the answer is rarely a deity. Instead, through his depictions of strained family dynamics (The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, 2011; Beau is Afraid, 2023), occult worshippers (Hereditary) and a Scandinavian cult (Midsommar, 2019), audiences witness extremely manipulative characters bending their chosen targets to accept their (often questionable) worldview.

Aster’s latest, Eddington – a comedy-western set in small-town New Mexico during the pandemic – is his most overt examination of conspiracy yet. There are very few of us who have found our family manipulated by Satan worshippers or been indoctrinated into a cult, but many have come across those who deny the existence of the Covid virus. Throughout his career, Aster has specialised in presenting dark secrets and their consequences. 

Long before the director tackled right-wing, internet-fuelled conspiracies, one early short went viral online for its controversial topic. The Strange Thing About the Johnsons shocked viewers with its unflinching exploration of incest and sexual abuse. The film centres on young Isaiah (Brandon Greenhouse), who has a violent, sexual fascination with his own father (Billy Mayo) that only intensifies as he grows up. More than the decades-spanning abuse, what is truly uncomfortable to watch is Isaiah’s mother (Angela Bullock) refusing to confront the situation.

She pretends not to hear, denies what she sees and continues to live as if they were a happy family. It is a cone of silence that those who have experienced domestic abuse are painfully aware of, one in which a pretence of unity papers over the truth. Aster may have investigated new topics, but The Strange Thing About the Johnsons demonstrates his early interest in how conspiracy and secrecy shape a community, whether that be a nuclear family or a wider network. 

To keep and uphold a secret, the conspiring community must silence conflicting ideas by constantly talking up their own philosophy. Exploring conspiracy on a much larger scale, Midsommar follows Dani (Florence Pugh), her boyfriend (Jack Reynor) and his friends during their stay with a closed-off community in Sweden, where they observe the group’s traditions. The community manipulates their guests in much the same way as the family in The Strange Thing, who silence the father’s protestations by claiming their abnormal behaviour is in fact normal.

To prevent dissidence, the Midsommar community – which turns out to be a death cult – hammers home their morbid philosophy. Even as the outsiders watch volunteers sacrifice themselves and the numbers of other tourists dwindle, co-conspirators repeatedly promise their guests that everything is as it should be. The fact that Dani’s boyfriend and his friends willingly accept – and therefore normalise – the cult’s practices encourages her to follow suit.

Midsommar primes its audience for folkloric horror, unlike Aster’s debut feature Hereditary, where the central family’s sinister undertones are not immediately apparent. In the film, Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is coming to terms with the passing of her mother Ellen (Kathleen Chalfant). This death doesn’t break the grip the matriarch has over the Grahams, and it’s only posthumously that her carefully laid plans of supernatural possession come to light.

Occultists who once worshipped with Ellen start coming out of the woodwork, ostensibly to comfort Annie, but actually to manipulate her. Unbeknown to Annie, she is at the centre of a multigenerational plot by these satan worshippers, who orchestrated a series of traumatic events to terrorise her family. Grief leads many of us to search for the meaning of death but, for the Grahams, every violent act is more than just tragic coincidence.

Often key to Aster’s films are protagonists so blinded by grief that they aren’t conscious of their part in a grand plan. In Hereditary, it is this vulnerability that makes each family member a target for the possessing force, while in Midsommar the sudden death of Dani’s entire family makes her susceptible to the cult’s influence. Throughout the sunlit pagan horror, Aster’s tourists act as if they are in control of the situation, viewing the festival as a research opportunity or simply a chance to act out hedonistic fantasies. The most arrogant are oblivious to the danger. Dani’s sensitivity separates her from her fellow travellers, saving her from being a sacrificial lamb but turning her into an executioner. Her final surrender to the cult proves that there are those bereft souls who would rather accept the world of conspiracy than suffer alone.

The main conspirator of Eddington is its mask mandate-refuting sheriff Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), who is campaigning against the level-headed Democrat Ted (Pedro Pascal) for the mayor’s office. Joe doesn’t at first appear vulnerable in the ways that Annie and Dani are. He buys the erroneous hypothesis of a ‘plandemic’ – a term coined by conspiracy filmmaker Mikki Willis in a trilogy of works arguing that the coronavirus outbreak was a hoax – because he’s stubborn. He doesn’t want his freedom restricted even in the most limited way of covering his face indoors (despite being a high-risk asthmatic), and is willing to believe anything that enables him to retain a modicum of control. 

Interestingly, Aster chose Phoenix for Eddington after casting him in the titular role of his previous, most abstract, film Beau is Afraid, which presents a similarly paranoia-fuelled world. However, there are marked differences between the two pathetic, all-suffering figures.

A terrified, truth-avoiding Beau spends the entirety of Aster’s Freudian odyssey running from his mother (Patti LuPone), believing she controls his reality. Joe, however, is so convinced of the ‘truths’ he has been fed on social media and radical podcasts that he cannot let them go. As his election campaign stalls and the townspeople reject his conspiracy, he takes drastic action attempting to bend the world to his will – with horrific consequences. As well as being Aster’s first foray into real-world conspiracy, Eddington is the only one of the director’s films where a conspirator fails to manipulate those around him.

When humans question whether there is a meaning to the seeming chaos of life, we are often looking for control. Conspiracies, and their networks of believers, offer answers that simplify life’s nuances, and can be easily folded into our personal philosophies. Throughout his career, Ari Aster has demonstrated how conspiracy can grip both the individual and the wider community. For Eddington, he takes the secretive world of conspiracy from the domestic sphere (The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, Hereditary) and moves it onto the global stage of the Covid crisis, shifting his focus from the manipulated to the manipulator. Aster’s films ultimately present how life-altering fringe beliefs can be.

WATCH EDDINGTON IN CINEMAS