Midsommar and Hereditary director Ari Aster is once again set to shock with this surreal, gory western featuring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, which is premiering at the Cannes Film Festival.

Ari Aster's first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, were adored by fans of so-called "elevated horror", but his third film, 2023's Beau is Afraid, was more divisive: even its fans admitted that Aster's psychedelic therapy session was on the self-indulgent side. His fourth film is slightly less excessive and sprawling – which makes it more excessive and sprawling than almost any other film you're likely to see this year. If Beau is Afraid seemed to be about Aster's own fears and neuroses, Eddington is about the more general fears and neuroses of the US in the year 2020. The writer-director puts everything into his blackly comic modern western – Covid-19 and online conspiracy theories, Black Lives Matter and white privilege, cult leaders and cryptocurrency – even if he can't quite work out how to weave all of those subjects together. The film would probably have been better if it had been more focused (and shorter), but Aster's deranged vision makes most directors seem timid in comparison.

His central idea is that all of the US's most contentious talking points are squeezed into the tiny desert town of Eddington, New Mexico. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a shambling, barely competent sheriff, Joe, who likes to argue that none of these problems are "here problems": yes, the pandemic is terrible, and yes, the killing of George Floyd was a disgraceful crime, but they don't affect remote and dusty Eddington, so why should he wear a mask, and why should he put up with anti-racism demonstrations? Anyway, he has plenty of more personal aggravations to worry about. The town's mayor, Ted (Pedro Pascal), has signed a deal allowing a vast tech-hub to be built nearby; Joe's wife, Louise (Emma Stone), has longstanding anxieties that may or may not be related to the mayor; and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell) is obsessed by his own inadequacies as a sheriff and a husband. Joe's solution to his disgruntlement, which is as ill-thought-through as everything else he does, is to run against Ted as an anti-lockdown candidate in the imminent mayoral election.

For a while, both the film and the sheriff ramble slowly........

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