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Ari Aster, Hollywood’s Master of Dread, Is Afraid of Everything

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He could see that something was off. When Ari Aster went to his friends’ homes for childhood sleepovers, his dread would escalate as the situation became clear: These people were too wholesome. They said devoted things to one another and sat down for dutiful family dinners. It was revolting, baffling. These were humans — why were they acting like everything was hunky dory?

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Aster, the 39-year-old auteur who made the relentlessly unsettling films “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid,” has a long list of realities that his brain registers as mortifying or terrifying. “In a way, ‘Beau Is Afraid’ — that’s him,” says Lars Knudsen, laughing. He would know, as the person who has produced all of Aster’s films. “He’s afraid of everything,” Knudsen says. There’s having a body, obviously: Aster doesn’t like to wear shorts, lest people discover he has legs. He endured a span of childhood during which a paralyzing stutter made it nearly impossible for him to speak to anyone outside his family. He has hypochondria, worrying about a parade of ailments that one friend says he forgets as quickly as he became convinced he had them. Existence requires making decisions he finds incapacitating, like where to live or what to order at restaurants. “I’m constantly torn up about questions, just about my life,” he says. “One place where I’m not so ambivalent is in making a film.”

His latest is “Eddington.” Its first half is framed as though “High Noon” were transplanted to May 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Unlike traditional Westerns, the characters in “Eddington” aren’t isolated on remote pieces of land; they’re sealed off in algorithmically curated cocoons of information.

The story follows a sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who decides to run for mayor of Eddington, challenging a mildly sanctimonious incumbent (Pedro Pascal) who he believes once slept with his wife (Emma Stone). The characters — activists, law enforcement, charlatans, kids trying to have sex — have various grievances, most of which are justified. They also use bad information to make terrible choices, which escalate toward the most Aster-ish cataclysm imaginable.