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

Aster sat down with The A.V. Club after a screening of Eddington at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre to talk about the terrifying future we’re all barreling towards. Eddington and Beau Is Afraid both seem like films where you woke up in a cold sweat and needed to write down what your brain had conjured up.

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.

A24 is known for its prestige arthouse films, but in its early days as a distributor, it made most of its money from elevated horror films like Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar. Over a decade in, the ambitions of A24 and Aster have expanded beyond genre film. But for both, the more recent results have been mixed.

He's collaborated with everyone from David Fincher to the Safdies, but the Iranian-born cinematographer, most recently of "Eddington," wants them all to feel like family.

Writer-director Ari Aster's fiendishly funny film stars Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as a sheriff and mayor on politically opposing sides in a well-off community during the summer of 2020. "'Eddington' has something to offend (or annoy) just about everybody,

Ari Aster, the man behind some of Hollywood’s most unsettling films, takes his own anxiety and puts it onscreen.

A sheriff, a mayor and a virus walk into a bar in Ari Aster’s bleak and brain-sick satire that stars a dueling Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone.