In Ari Aster’s dark comedy, Joaquin Phoenix plays the sheriff of a New Mexico town riven by political clashes and pandemic anxieties.

In the A24 horror auteur's ‘Eddington,’ Joaquin Phoenix is a small-town sheriff struggling to keep the peace in a locked-down town.

Located in a fictional small town in New Mexico, the film centers around the lives of the townspeople during the thick of the pandemic. At the epicenter of it all is the budding rivalry between two of the town’s most prominent leaders: Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal),

The first and maybe only true jump scare in Ari Aster’s “Eddington” comes right at the start. A barefoot old man trudges down the center of a road running through an empty Western town. He’s ranting and incoherently raving as he climbs a craggy hill silhouetted against a twilight sky. He gazes, or maybe glares, out at the town below.

The film takes place in May 2020 in the fictional town of Eddington, New Mexico, and becomes a battleground when Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) clashes with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) over plans to bring an artificial intelligence data center to the community.

Eddington will only available to watch in a movie theater, when it opens in the U.S. in theaters on Friday, July 18. You can find a showing near you via Fandango. The Eddington movie is not yet available to watch online or on streaming.

Ari Aster puts his signature bizarre touch on the spring of 2020, when pandemics, politics, posts and pings drove America around the bend.

Review: The problem with an anarchic satire like “Eddington” is that any criticism could easily be dismissed with a “that’s the point” counterargument.