As Joe and Ted’s rivalry grows more fraught and petty, news of George Floyd’s murder mobilizes a small but enraged band of local protestors, some of whom have self-serving intentions. A white teenage boy named Brian (Cameron Mann) hastily brushes up on racial justice CliffNotes to impress a white teenage girl named Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle), who Aster has written as the personification of performative allyship and white fragility. During a BLM protest on Eddington streets, Sarah angrily confronts her ex-boyfriend Michael (Michael Ward), a deputy sheriff who is one of the only Black people in town. “You should be protesting with us!” she shouts, inches away from his face. Before the protest, Michael spent his day getting constant pleas from his white colleagues to explain how he felt about the George Floyd tragedy.

It’s disorienting, or even debilitating, for a movie to thrust us back into a period we are still crawling out of. It’s like rebreaking a bone that never fully healed. “We haven’t metabolized what happened in 2020,” Aster recently told Slant Magazine. “We’re still living it. We’re out of lockdown, but whatever process began there, we’re still in it.” Aster began writing the script for Eddington during the same months it transpires, before he paused to work on Beau Is Afraid. That both films are fueled by paranoia is no coincidence. The pandemic made us fear fellow humans on the most basic, biological level: Proximity to another body will harm me. That anxiety metastasized into an existential terror, as political rhetoric became another kind of highly transmissible, airborne virus.

Aster expresses this surging cross-contamination by splicing in references to the many plagues of 2020: Donald Trump, cryptocurrency, Covid-hoarding, pedophilia rings, the media’s portrayal of Antifa. His method is frenzied, often absurdly humorous. But one of my favorite manifestations of this cacophony is Deirdre O’Connell’s performance of Joe’s mother-in-law, Dawn. Her dialogue is constant and frequently overlaps with Joe’s as he tries to communicate with Louise. In one scene, he stands at an open sliding glass door, trying to console his wife. Dawn rambles on, issuing crackpot theories in the background. Visually, she appears in shadow behind Joe, a specter beyond the lace curtain. Dawn is an oracle of disinformation throughout Eddington—a network of fear made corporeal.

Dawn might be the most distilled embodiment of Covid-era panic, but every character eventually turns their interpersonal issues into a kind of political performance. Brian, who stumbled into the BLM movement to impress a girl, winds up at the center of a media frenzy. Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) sends a makeout selfie to his friend, and it becomes incriminating evidence in accusing an innocent man of murder. Joe launches his campaign on a platform of neighborly trust and personal freedom, and bloodies his hands with smear tactics and violence.

That Joe ultimately embarks on a violent rampage seems inevitable. The gunfire, the bloodshed, and the body count are brutal, but never surprising. There is a dullness that seems very intentional, an echo of the ambient carnage that is on constant rotation in the U.S. During my screening, as a character is abruptly shot through the chest, a man in the back row laughed, possibly out of discomfort—or simply desensitization. A woman whipped around and swiftly chastised him: “Why are you laughing?! Jesus,” she hissed. It was another microcosm of a nonconsensual reality, made manifest in the movie theater.

“Evil is sentimental,” one character tells Joe halfway through the film. Human behavior has far less virtue. Aster understands that our greater political atmosphere invades the far reaches of our psyche, often undetected, like the ingestion of so many microplastics. So too does the motive of one person radiate outward, rippling in a space of sociopolitical relevance. Anyone is capable of anything, Aster posits. Those who deny that potential are the greatest threats.