CANNES, France — The audience made barely a sound for almost 2½ hours at Friday’s premiere of Ari Aster’s slow-then-deranged American political horror story “Eddington.” No laughing. No gasping. Just silence, watching the A24-anointed director’s dark comedy, set in small-town New Mexico at the start of the pandemic, in which a personal feud between the MAGA-coded sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and the liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal) turns into a culture war over mask mandates — and then actual war.
Many rose, applauding and cheering, as the lights came up. Others joined the handful who’d walked out mid-screening and fled for the door. (The attrition rate, we heard, was much higher in the simultaneous press screening.) Aster is an ambitious filmmaker known for challenging his audience’s limits in psychological horror films like “Midsommar,” “Hereditary” and “Beau Is Afraid.” And in “Eddington” — in which the town (pop. 2,465) gets overrun with Black Lives Matter protests and becomes the center of multiple online scandals — lengthy world-building gives way to plot twists involving gunfights, conspiracy theories and antifa that are so insane, the fun of the movie becomes wondering just how off the rails it can get.
Were people at the Cannes premiere riveted? Stunned? Even Aster couldn’t tell.
“I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you think,” Aster said, to laughter, in his standing ovation remarks. “It’s a great privilege to be here, a dream come true. Thank you so much for having me. I don’t know. Sorry?”
Like Aster’s film (which comes out in the States on July 18), the festival started slow and has now exploded, with a flurry of highly anticipated movies premiering on Friday, Day 4. Saturday brought premieres of Richard Linklater’s tribute to Jean-Luc Godard, “Nouvelle Vague,” and Lynne Ramsay’s “Die, My Love,” with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. And new work from Wes Anderson, Joachim Trier, Spike Lee, Julia Ducournau and first-time director Scarlett Johansson still to come.
Here are the films getting the most buzz as of Day 5 of 12.
End of carousel
Walking out of French-Spanish director Oliver Laxe’s “Sirât,” a transfixing and punishing tale of European ravers on a doomed quest in the Moroccan desert, I ran into Bridget Mills, a 21-year-old University of Georgia film student who was practically shaking. “I feel like I need a hug,” she said.
Evocative of “Mad Max,” Laxe’s first entry into Cannes’s main competition, “Sirât” is what Variety calls an “extraordinarily strange and nerve-racking” road trip through what may be the end of the world. (The title is an Arabic word for the thin bridge between heaven and hell.) Catalan actor Sergi López plays a desperate father who comes to an illegal Saharan rave with his young son and dog in search of his missing daughter. But when soldiers show up and start rounding up E.U. citizens, the father starts following a grizzled “family” of ravers — all portrayed by nonprofessional actors with extraordinary faces as well as disabilities, including missing limbs — who begrudgingly agree to take him to the next rave. There’s a menace to the tone and the spare but core-shattering moments that kept the audience in my screening riveted, despite long, dialogue-free stretches of thumping house music, and the sounds of wind and giant off-road tires grinding against rock and sand. “It’s the kind of film that Cannes attendees from far and wide come to the festival for: sui generis and evading classification,” wrote Screen Daily. Already, speculation on the ground is not about whether it’s going to win a big prize, but which one.
The incredible success of Netflix’s “Adolescence” bodes well for “The Plague,” a psychological body-horror film about the nightmares of puberty, set in a boys’ water polo camp in 2003. Since its Friday premiere, it has become perhaps the hottest American film at the festival — with buyers circling to bring it to U.S. theaters. Think “Lord of the Flies” in a pool.
A remarkable cast of mostly first-time actors — plus Joel Edgerton as their laughably ineffectual coach — brings believable awkwardness and cruelty to director Charlie Polinger’s feature debut, which he based on old journals of his acne-scarred days getting bullied at a summer sports camp. In between masturbating in their bunks and smashing up a scrapyard with baseball bats, the movie’s 12- and 13-year-old boys are all trying to avoid catching “the plague,” which frighteningly smart, redheaded pack leader Jake (Kayo Martin) tells newcomer Ben (Everett Blunck) will leave anyone infected with a leprosy-like skin rash and a brain turned to “mush.” Their outcast campmate, proud weirdo Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), already has it and gets relentlessly taunted. Nothing is low-stakes. The discovery of a pimple, the mispronunciation of a word, each misstep that might send a character teetering from popularity to social ruin is accented by the foreboding score from musician Johan Lenox (who brought orchestral scale to the music of Travis Scott and Kanye West.) Female critics have been giving it higher marks than male critics, who may simply find it triggering. Minutes after its Friday premiere, none other than Charli XCX gave it 5 stars on her Letterboxd, saying she was still sitting in her car “reeling.”
Cannes has an entire competition, “Un Certain Regard,” for first- and second-time filmmakers. So when “Sound of Falling,” only the second film from Berlin-born writer-director Mascha Schilinski, was programmed as a competition film on Day 2 of Cannes, veteran festival-watchers took notice. Schilinski’s sprawling epic, told from the perspectives of girls and teens across four generations of women on a northern German farmstead, could be seen as an almost exact counterpoint to “The Plague.” As a storyteller, Schilinski is poetic and impressionistic, dropping viewers in and out of the film’s various epochs with an almost Lynchian disregard for orientation. Are we following young Alma (Hanna Heckt), a little girl with the palest blond braids who, at the start of the 20th century, is too young to understand that their maid has been sterilized so men on the farm can rape her without risk of pregnancy? Or Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a young teen in the early 1980s who’s coming into her own sexuality while trapped among leering male relatives? Brutality for these women seems to be carried across time like a curse, even to what appears to be the modern day. But the joy gets bigger, too, the freedoms wider. “We May Have Already Seen the Best Film at Cannes This Year,” Alison Willmore wrote for Vulture. It’s been at the front of the Palme d’Or conversation for days, even though many who’ve seen it told me they felt like they needed to see it again to really get it. Could this early front-runner make it all the way?
Cannes no longer invites Russian directors to the festival, and festival head Thierry Frémaux told the press that the policy would continue until the country stopped its military aggression in Ukraine. Instead, we have “Two Prosecutors,” a stark, pitch-black satire about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s persecution of dissidents, from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa. The film opens in a regional Soviet prison in 1937, where an old man, incarcerated for “antisocialist behavior,” is forced to burn letters pleading for mercy and attempting to expose the prison’s illegal practice using torture to induce false confessions. Somehow, a single letter, written in blood, makes its way to a brand-new local prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), who insists on meeting with the prisoner, a former prosecutor (Alexander Filippenko) — and then heads to Moscow to bring these injustices to the attention of the Communist Party. It’s intensely suspenseful, even if the outcome is obvious, as Kornyev pushes his way through layer upon layer of bureaucracy, with every new obstacle signaling this will not end well. It’s been the best-reviewed film of the festival, perhaps because everyone at Cannes has totalitarianism on the brain. Variety compared it to reading a Kafka novel, “where the pages are spotted with age, but the insights remain painfully, vividly fresh.”
Like the fictional small town in “Eddington,” Cannes is divided. Some found Aster’s film a brilliant social critique, others a painful, pointless slog. The satire takes place during the covid-19 pandemic, but this is just the trigger for deadly misunderstandings in a community and country that has lost sight of the truth. Several international journalists told me they found it way too specific in its American and New Mexican references and that it won’t play well overseas. The Guardian called it “tedious” and “weirdly self-important.” Variety found it “bracingly outside-of-the-box,” praising in particular Phoenix’s turn as an incompetent right-wing sheriff. Willmore described it as “centerless” in Vulture but found herself (“Sirât”-like!) on a bridge between admiration and hatred: “I didn’t love it — I’m honestly not sure I’d even say I liked it — but it gets at the way our shared reality fractured in ways that may be irreparable, leaving a situation ripe for grifters and opportunists to step in and take over.” Whatever their opinions, it has people talking.
