This feels like Ari Aster trying to do a Coen brothers film. And not really succeeding.

Rather bravely, the story starts in a New Mexico town in the first months of the pandemic. Charismatic mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) leads the charge with mandatory face masks and social distancing while trying to get a mega tech development off the ground in their rural backwater. 

At odds is grizzled sheriff Joe Cross (Joachim Phoenix) who ‘can’t breathe’ with a mask on and starts to see himself as the saviour of the little people, mostly Boomers who don’t want to be told what to do. In the mix is Cross’s wife Louise (Emma Stone) who might be agoraphobic and makes delightfully creepy dolls, and her conspiracy believing mother, a belligerent homeless man, a youth Brian (Cameron Mann) who fancies a girl who’s a Black Lives Matter activist and a goateed guru (Austin Butler). 

There are a lot of threads – COVID deniers, well meaning white activists, toxic masculinity, George Floyd, First Nations autonomy, and secret and overly complicated sabotage. It’s not that it’s badly done but it feels a bit of a meandering mess. Phoenix does a good job as a middle aged man whose world is falling apart. None of the other characters get much depth though and play to stereotypes. I think this contributes to a sense of superficiality to the twists and turns of the story. It treads an uncomfortable line between parody and drama, which in the end undermines each.

In the Aster films I have seen, I feel like he has a tendency to fumble the ending by undermining the tension and mystery of the whole. This one is less marked but I think it’s because it feels like he fumbles the whole thing.