2025 Larry Prater Award For Best Viewing : Eddington

This is Ari Aster’s second win here in three years, and it matters that the margin was considerably thinner this time.

Not because 2025 was a great movie year, but because it was a lesser one, filled with solid, professional films that rarely aimed beyond their own competence. These were good, sticky movies like One Battle After Another or Bugonia, films that lingered in the mind and rewarded attention. They just didn’t rupture anything. They refined existing languages. Masterpieces tend to arrive when someone decides refinement is beside the point.

What ultimately nudged Eddington ahead was its willingness to mutate mid-sentence. Halfway through, the film abruptly shifts from a Covid-era post-traumatic haze into a conspiracy-driven neo-noir Western and instead of collapsing under that tonal whiplash, it gains velocity. Aster treats genre the way a bored chemist treats stable compounds: as something begging to be destabilized. The movie doesn’t build toward its ideas so much as ambush them. That audacity matters.

The mutation itself grows out of an idea so aggressively un-American it almost plays like a prank: violence never fixes anything. It only multiplies the damage. The moment one character violates another’s physical integrity, rendered in a way that’s ridiculous and unmistakable, the movie begins its accelerated moral free fall. Every subsequent action is worse, louder, more self-justified. Eddington doesn’t argue this point with speeches or symbolism; it demonstrates it like a failed experiment that keeps failing harder. In doing so, it exposes how excess, certainty, and moral righteousness metastasize when they’re allowed to dress themselves up as necessity.

Eddington lacks the raw, claustrophobic commitment of Beau Is Afraid because it isn’t as nakedly autobiographical. That turns out to be its strength. By stepping back, Aster becomes the first filmmaker to look at the Covid years without hysteria or nostalgia, just recognition. Not judgment. Not absolution. Perspective. And in 2025, that felt rarer than originality, riskier than provocation, and more unsettling than any nightmare he’s put on screen.

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