EDDINGTON(2025)

Title: Eddington

Written by: Ari Aster

Draft date: 2/29/24 (Production Meeting Draft)

LOGLINE

In a dying New Mexico frontier town during the COVID-19 pandemic, an asthmatic sheriff launches a populist mayoral campaign against the incumbent, but his escalating grievances — personal, political, and conspiratorial — drive him to commit murder and frame his own deputy, unleashing a chain of violence that consumes everyone around him.

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Sub-genre: Political Thriller, Crime Drama, Contemporary Western

Keywords: Small Town, Law Enforcement, COVID-19 Pandemic, Conspiracy Theories, Political Corruption, Anti-Government, Racial Tension, Domestic Terrorism, Moral Descent, Framing, QAnon, Social Media, Protest, Murder, Ensemble Cast, Disabled Protagonist (late), Male Protagonist, Hispanic Theme, Native American Theme, Southwest, Gun Violence, Radicalization, Media Manipulation

MPA Rating: R (pervasive strong language, graphic gun violence, bloody aftermath of shootings, knife violence to the head, brief sexual content, drug use)

Budget Tier: High ($40M–$100M) — extensive New Mexico desert and small-town locations, large ensemble cast, significant action and pyrotechnic sequences (explosions, flaming ground designs, extended gunfight through town), drone and vehicle stunts, period-accurate 2020 pandemic setting, multiple night exteriors requiring substantial lighting.

Pages: 131

Time Period: Late May 2020 over approximately one week, with a flashback seven years prior and an epilogue set June 2021 — roughly 80% in May 2020 / 10% in 2021 / 10% flashback.

Locations: Almost entirely set in and around the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico (population ~2,400) — a western-style bar, a sheriff's office with holding cell, residential homes, a grocery store, a restaurant courtyard, town streets, a desert shooting range, a hill overlooking a house, the Rio Grande riverbank, a museum, a gun shop, parking lots, a data center compound, and a Pueblo reservation border area. Approximately 70% exteriors. Requires a substantial desert landscape, a town that can be dressed as a run-down frontier community, a private jet interior, a hospital entrance, and a large ribbon-cutting ceremony set. Night action sequences require controlled fire effects on asphalt, an explosion, and a sustained multi-block urban gunfight with significant property destruction.

Lead: Male, approximately 50, White, asthmatic, initially presented as an earnest small-town sheriff with friendly eyes who progressively reveals himself as a self-righteous, conspiratorial, and ultimately homicidal figure.

Comparables: No Country for Old Men (Coen Brothers) — violent moral reckoning in the New Mexico desert with a law enforcement protagonist overwhelmed by forces beyond his control. Falling Down (Joel Schumacher) — an ordinary man's grievances escalate into increasingly violent and delusional acts. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy) — a protagonist whose ambition and sociopathy are revealed incrementally through escalating criminal acts. Don't Look Up (Adam McKay) — satirical ensemble depicting societal collapse through competing ideological factions and media distortion.

SYNOPSIS

LODGE (Adult), a mentally ill homeless man clutching a dead pigeon, wanders the New Mexico desert ranting about conspiracies near a data center development sign, heading toward the small town of Eddington. In late May 2020, Sheriff JOE CROSS (50), an upright-seeming lawman eating a burger in his parked car, has a tense encounter with a TRIBAL OFFICER (Adult) and OFFICER BUTTERFLY JIMENEZ (30s) from the neighboring Santa Lupe Pueblo over mask-wearing and jurisdictional boundaries. Joe receives a radio call about Lodge causing a disturbance at Garcia's Bar. At the bar, Mayor TED GARCIA (50s), his advisor WARREN (mid 40s), and council member PHIL (60s) discuss a secret data center development deal. Joe confronts Lodge, who breaks into the bar. Lodge physically overpowers Joe before fleeing. ERIC GARCIA (19), Ted's son, films the altercation on his phone.

At home, Joe lives with his wife LOUISE (late 30s), a troubled artist who makes dolls and embroidery, and her mother DAWN (70s), a conspiracy theorist who maintains a memorial to Louise's deceased father, the former Sheriff RICHMOND. Louise rejects Joe's sexual advances and the household is thick with tension. Dawn feeds Louise QAnon-adjacent material and needles Joe about his relationship with Ted, implying Ted did something terrible to Louise. The next morning, Joe intervenes at a grocery store when an unmasked old man named FRED (elderly) is physically ejected. Joe removes his own mask in solidarity, confronts Ted inside, and buys Fred's groceries. Inspired, Joe records a video announcing his candidacy for mayor, framing his campaign around anti-mask, anti-lockdown, anti-big-tech populism.

Joe enlists his two deputies — MICHAEL (25), a well-built Black deputy and talented marksman, and GUY (30), an earnest but limited White deputy — to run his campaign from the sheriff's office. Joe secretly arranges for friends to buy Louise's artwork to boost her confidence. He promotes Michael to Sergeant. Meanwhile, Eric and his friend BRIAN (18) attend a desert party where Brian tries to impress SARAH (17), a progressive activist, but Eric swoops in and flirts with her instead. Sarah is revealed to be Michael's ex-girlfriend. Joe drives through town broadcasting anti-Ted messages and encounters a small Black Lives Matter protest organized by Brian and Sarah in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Joe dismisses them.

Joe prepares a romantic dinner for Louise, but she fails to show. She arrives late with Dawn and three strangers, including VERNON JEFFERSON PEAK (early 30s), a charismatic conspiracy influencer who claims to be a survivor of elite child trafficking. Vernon captivates Louise. That night, Joe presses Louise about a past incident where she was arrested for taking a stranger's baby from a grocery store. He asks whether her father or Ted abused her. Louise deflects.

The next day, Joe oversleeps as the George Floyd protests intensify. Property damage hits Eddington. Eric posts the photo of Joe wrestling Lodge, framing it as police brutality. At a sparsely attended town hall, Joe publicly accuses Ted Garcia of being a statutory rapist who impregnated Louise at sixteen — an accusation Dawn has cultivated for years. Louise responds by posting a Facebook video denying everything, stating the abuse came from someone else, not Ted, and calling Joe and Dawn's narrative a fiction. Vernon arrives in his Winnebago and Louise leaves with him.

Devastated and increasingly ill with what appears to be COVID-19, Joe confronts Ted at his fundraiser party. Ted slaps Joe twice. Humiliated, Joe drives off. That night, Joe finds Lodge burglarizing Ted's bar. After a confrontation, Joe shoots Lodge three times, cleans up the crime scene, and dumps the body in the Rio Grande. Joe then drives to a hill overlooking Ted's house and assassinates Ted and Eric with a sniper rifle. He enters the house, plants a spray-painted "NO JUSTICE NO PEACE" message on the wall, and steals a commemorative watch from the Governor.

The next morning, Joe holds a press conference blaming the murders on Antifa terrorists. He and Guy interrogate Sarah about her purse left at the crime scene. Brian, motivated by jealousy over Sarah and Eric's relationship, comes to the sheriff's office and implicates Michael by revealing he sent Michael a photo of Eric kissing Sarah the night before the murders. Joe and Guy find Michael's AR-15 in his car, and Joe plants the stolen watch under Michael's passenger seat. Michael is arrested despite his desperate protests of innocence. Butterfly, investigating independently, notices that Joe's distinctive handwriting matches the spray paint at the crime scene.

Michael is freed from his cell when someone sets a dumpster fire as a distraction. Joe pursues Michael into the desert, where Michael has been placed by unknown assailants who detonate an explosive, killing Guy and wounding Michael. Joe is attacked by masked men in an extended, escalating gunfight through Eddington's streets. He arms himself from a gun shop and accidentally shoots Butterfly's leg off. Butterfly is then killed by the attackers. A knife is driven into Joe's skull. Brian, who followed the chaos, shoots and kills the masked attacker, saving Joe's life.

Joe is taken to a hospital but turned away from the ER due to his COVID fever and sent to an overflow tent. A flashback reveals Joe and Louise seven years earlier, when Joe first won the sheriff's election and they dreamed of starting a family and leaving town.

One year later, Joe is paralyzed and wheelchair-bound, his face locked in a grotesque contortion. Dawn, now acting as his caretaker and political proxy, presides over the ribbon-cutting of the SolidGoldMagikarp data center — the same development Ted had championed — built on shared Eddington-Pueblo land. Warren works alongside Dawn. Michael, scarred from the explosion, now serves as sheriff. At home, Dawn discovers that Louise, now pregnant and visibly transformed, is deeply involved with Vernon's growing political movement, her artwork serving as its iconography. Dawn and Joe stare at a video of Louise — happier than she has ever been — in devastated silence. Michael practices his marksmanship alone in the desert at night. The final image is Eddington's twinkling lights dominated by the massive data complex looming above it.

COMMENTS

PREMISE — Excellent

The premise sets a small-town New Mexico sheriff's populist ambitions against the overlapping crises of 2020 — pandemic lockdowns, George Floyd protests, conspiracy culture, and rural economic anxiety — and uses this volatile cocktail to chart one man's descent from aggrieved civic figure to murderer. The central dramatic question is not whether Joe will win the election but how far his self-justifying righteousness will carry him, which gives the material a moral gravity that pure political satire would lack. The match between protagonist and setting is potent: Joe is both the town's protector and, increasingly, its most dangerous inhabitant, and the frontier isolation of Eddington ensures there is almost no institutional check on his behavior. The premise's richest tension lies in the gap between Joe's self-image as a defender of his wife and community and the reality that he is exploiting both. Louise's trauma, Dawn's conspiratorial worldview, Ted's genuine flaws, Michael's vulnerability as the only Black officer — all of these feed Joe's rationalizations in ways that feel structurally inevitable rather than contrived. Compared to Falling Down, which follows a similar arc of white male grievance escalating to violence, this premise is more politically specific and more interested in the ecosystem of enabling voices (Dawn, Vernon, Guy, social media) that make Joe's radicalization feel communal rather than solitary.

STRUCTURE — Good

The first five pages establish the world, the jurisdictional tensions, and Lodge as a recurring catalyst with efficient economy. The inciting incident — Joe's spontaneous campaign announcement video around page 21 — lands at roughly 16% of the page count, slightly late but dramatically earned by the grocery store confrontation that triggers it. The commitment to the central conflict sharpens when Joe publicly accuses Ted of rape at the town hall (72-73), which falls at approximately 55% — functioning as a midpoint that irrevocably raises stakes rather than as a delayed second-act break. Ted and Eric's assassination (81) arrives at roughly 62%, creating a structural pivot that transforms the material from political drama into crime thriller. The extended action climax begins around page 110 and runs through page 123, constituting over 10% of the total page count, which is substantial but propulsive. The epilogue (124-131) compresses an entire year into seven pages and introduces significant new information — Michael as sheriff, Louise pregnant with Vernon, Dawn running the data center — that recontextualizes everything preceding it. This epilogue is the most structurally ambitious section, functioning as a bitter coda rather than a resolution, though its density risks feeling rushed relative to the deliberate pacing of the first 80 pages.

CHARACTER — Excellent

Joe is a fully realized and deeply unsympathetic protagonist whose arc moves from self-deception to violence to paralyzed impotence. His want (to be mayor, to be respected, to be Louise's protector) is clearly established by page 21, and his need — to reckon honestly with Louise's trauma rather than weaponize it — is something he never achieves, which makes the arc tragic rather than redemptive. The five-beat arc is complete: backstory as Richmond's protégé, clear goals, a deep weakness (self-righteous denial), active pursuit of those goals, and devastating change — albeit involuntary change, through paralysis. Louise is the most compelling supporting character, whose dissociative fragmentation (referring to herself in the third person on page 43, the ambiguous "how should I know?" on page 60) communicates more about trauma than any exposition could. Michael functions as Joe's most consequential victim, and his arrest sequence (99-104) is the material's moral nadir precisely because his protests are so reasonable and Joe's guilt so legible. Dawn is a masterful creation — simultaneously sympathetic in her grief and monstrous in her conspiratorial enablement — and the final image of her presiding over the data center ceremony is a devastating punchline. Guy is thinner, serving primarily as a compliant instrument of Joe's worst impulses, though his racist logic during the framing discussion (97-98) is chillingly specific.

CONFLICT — Good

The central external conflict — Joe versus Ted for the mayoralty — operates as a container for a deeper conflict between Joe's need to control the narrative of Louise's abuse and the truth that keeps escaping his grip. The formidability of the opposition escalates through distinct phases: political rivalry (pages 7-27), public scandal (72-76), murder and cover-up (78-82), and finally the mysterious masked attackers (110-123) whose identity and motivation remain deliberately opaque. This last escalation is the conflict's most provocative and most problematic element. The masked men function as an externalization of the chaos Joe has unleashed, but their operational sophistication — controlled fire designs visible by drone, coordinated sniper positions, explosives — is never explained, and their connection to any established character or faction is left entirely ambiguous. The internal conflict is more consistently effective: Joe's self-deception is the engine driving every disastrous decision, from the rape accusation (72) to Lodge's murder (79) to the framing of Michael (102). The resolution distributes consequences unevenly — Joe is paralyzed, Guy is dead, Butterfly is dead, Michael is scarred but ascendant, Louise is free — in a way that resists moral tidiness.

DIALOGUE — Excellent

The dialogue demonstrates exceptional ear for the way political language, conspiracy rhetoric, and interpersonal manipulation sound in overlapping, interrupting streams. Characters are sharply differentiated: Dawn's conspiratorial monologues have a specific cadence of rhetorical questions and pseudo-logical connectives ("Please: ask yourselfs that!" on page 14), Joe's speech patterns shift between folksy warmth and bullying condescension depending on his audience, and Vernon's charismatic patter ("Your question is to make me feel shame," page 56) marks him instantly as a practiced manipulator. The simultaneous dialogue formatting — used extensively throughout, as in the Joe/Ted exchanges (pages 8-9, 20, 27) — creates a naturalistic cacophony that mirrors the characters' inability to listen to each other. Sarah's protest rhetoric (47) is pitch-perfect in its passionate specificity and slight overreach, capturing exactly how a politically awakened seventeen-year-old sounds. The weakest dialogue belongs to Guy, whose lines occasionally flatten into expository function ("Crime a passion makes sense," page 97), though this flatness is arguably characterization of his limited imagination.

PACING — Good

The first 80 pages maintain a steady, accumulating pressure that mirrors Joe's tightening spiral, with scenes rarely overstaying their welcome. The grocery store sequence (17-21) efficiently combines character establishment, political conflict, and the campaign announcement in a single unbroken movement. The dinner-that-never-happens sequence (51-58) is the longest sustained domestic scene and earns its length through the introduction of Vernon and the escalation of tension within the household. The extended gunfight sequence (110-123) is the most significant pacing risk: at roughly 13 pages, it shifts the material into action-genre territory with sustained physical peril that, while viscerally effective on the page, represents a tonal departure from the slow-burn political thriller of the preceding 100 pages. The epilogue (124-131) compresses enormous narrative distance — Joe's paralysis, Dawn's political ascent, Louise's transformation, the data center's completion — into a rapid montage that could feel either bracingly efficient or insufficiently developed depending on execution. The TikTok video summarizing Brian's trajectory (125-126) is a particularly sharp compression device.

TONE — Good

The tone navigates a treacherous path between dark satire, domestic drama, and genre violence, and it mostly holds. The early scenes balance gallows humor (Joe's diabetes crack to the Tribal Officer, page 4) with genuine menace in a way that establishes the material's willingness to be uncomfortable. The conspiracy-theory dialogues (Dawn's monologues, Vernon's testimony) are presented without editorial commentary, which is the correct tonal choice — the material trusts its audience to evaluate these claims within the dramatic context. The most jarring tonal shift occurs at the assassination (81), where the abrupt, clinical description of Eric's death — "his feet twisted in the jagged remaining shards in the doorframe" — marks a point of no return not just narratively but tonally. The action climax's genre escalation (Joe acquiring a machine gun from a gun shop, spinning and firing, page 120-121) edges toward the operatic in a way that risks undermining the grounded realism of the preceding material. The epilogue's bitter irony — Dawn parroting the same conspiracy rhetoric while presiding over the tech development Ted championed — achieves a tonal coherence that retroactively justifies the preceding volatility.

ORIGINALITY — Excellent

The decision to set a moral-descent thriller specifically within the overlapping crises of May-June 2020 — COVID lockdowns, George Floyd protests, QAnon radicalization, rural economic collapse — is genuinely novel. No produced film has attempted to synthesize these elements into a single small-town narrative with this level of granular specificity. The closest comparison is Falling Down, which similarly charts white male grievance escalating to violence, but that film operates as parable whereas this material insists on the documentary texture of its moment — the specific mask debates, the specific social media platforms, the specific conspiracy theories circulating in May 2020. No Country for Old Men shares the New Mexico setting and the sense of violence exceeding any individual's capacity to contain it, but that film's antagonist is a force of nature whereas here the protagonist is his own antagonist. The most original structural choice is the epilogue's revelation that the data center deal — the thing Joe ostensibly opposed — gets built anyway, with his own mother-in-law presiding, suggesting that individual moral catastrophes are irrelevant to institutional momentum. The "I CAN'T BREATHE" campaign slogan (page 40), which Joe deploys for anti-mask messaging while the phrase simultaneously becomes the rallying cry of the George Floyd protests, is a detail of savage ironic precision that could not exist in any other temporal setting.

LOGIC — Fair

The most significant logic issue involves the masked attackers in the climax. Their operational capabilities — precision explosives arranged in readable patterns from drone altitude, coordinated multi-sniper urban assault, pre-positioned accelerants for the "NO PEACE" fire design (112) — suggest a level of planning and resources that is never attributed to any established character or organization. The material implies these are the same domestic terrorists whose videos appear on the dropped phone (113), but their specific motivation for targeting Joe and Eddington is never clarified. This ambiguity may be intentional — suggesting that Joe's violence has attracted larger, more organized predators — but it creates a causal gap in an otherwise tightly plotted narrative. A smaller but notable issue: Joe plants the Governor's watch in Michael's car (102), but the timing of when he could have done this is unclear, as Michael's car is at the sheriff's office where Michael would presumably notice Joe accessing it. The jurisdictional dispute over the crime scene (84-88) is handled with convincing procedural detail. Joe's COVID symptoms progress on a plausible timeline across the week.

CRAFT — Good

The writing operates at a high level of visual specificity, with action lines that function as precise shot descriptions — "We begin on a CU of a weathered, sunwashed old sign" (2) — without becoming directorial in a way that impedes reading flow. Character introductions are consistently strong: Joe is introduced through a YouTube video about convincing a partner to have children (3), which immediately establishes his domestic situation without a word of dialogue. The simultaneous-dialogue formatting, used extensively throughout (pages 4, 8-9, 20, 28-29, 31, 43, 64-65, 87, 89, 98, 101), is technically demanding but dramatically effective, capturing the material's central theme of people talking past each other. The production draft format includes asterisks marking revised lines, which occasionally clutters the reading experience but does not impede comprehension. The recurring motif of Joe's distinctive Disney-style E (23, 105) — which becomes the forensic detail that connects him to the crime — is planted early and paid off with satisfying precision. A few minor errors appear: "Your" for "You're" on the flyer (38), "Quantaco" for "Quantico" (87), and "striks" for "strikes" (81), though these may be production-draft artifacts. The phone-camera and social-media inserts are formatted clearly and serve the thematic architecture of a world mediated through screens.

OVERALL — Recommend

Eddington is an ambitious, sprawling crime drama that uses the specific chaos of May-June 2020 to chart a small-town sheriff's descent from aggrieved populist to murderer, framing his moral collapse within the overlapping crises of pandemic lockdowns, racial justice protests, and conspiracy-theory radicalization. The strongest elements are Character and Dialogue: Joe Cross is a fully realized protagonist whose self-deception is rendered with uncomfortable precision, and the ensemble — particularly Louise, Dawn, Michael, and Vernon — populates a world where every character's delusions feed someone else's. The dialogue captures the specific cadences of political argument, conspiracy rhetoric, and small-town power dynamics with an authenticity that grounds even the most extreme plot developments. The weakest element is Logic, specifically concerning the masked attackers whose sophisticated capabilities in the climax are never adequately sourced or motivated, creating a causal gap at the narrative's most critical juncture. The extended action sequence (110-123) is also a tonal risk, pushing the material from grounded realism into genre territory that, while viscerally effective, asks the audience to accept a significant escalation in register. The epilogue is a devastating structural achievement — the image of Dawn presiding over the very tech development that was supposed to be the enemy, Joe locked in his wheelchair, Louise thriving apart from all of them — that retroactively enriches every preceding scene with bitter irony. The craft is consistently strong, with visual specificity, thematic density, and a distinctive authorial voice evident on every page.