Ari Aster And Joaquin Phoenix Are Already Set For Another Project Together

Hot on the heels of their love-it-or-hate-it niche hit "Beau Is Afraid" (the aggressively off-putting film opened to big numbers on four screens, but will likely not go over well with mainstream audiences), Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix are evidently ready to run it back.

According to cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, who has shot all three of Aster's films, the filmmaker's next movie will be "Eddington." Aster has been dropping hints about this project for the last four years, but he's been especially chatty about it during the press tour for "Beau Is Afraid." Per World of Reel, the confirmation came from Pogorzelski as he was speaking at a seminar in Nashville.

What is "Eddington?" If you've been following Aster's career since his 2018 breakout "Hereditary," you know all about it. If not, allow me to fill you in.

Five years ago, Aster revealed during a Reddit AMA that "Eddington" was nearly his first movie. Per Aster:

"Although it's sort of a — I don't know if you'd call it a revisionist Western. It's contemporary; one foot is in the Western and one foot is even more heavily in the noir genre. So it's like a film noir ensemble Western dark comedy."

One year later, during an AMA for "Midsommar," Aster elaborated:

"For like five years, I was trying to get that Western-noir dark ensemble comedy going. That won't be the next one, by the way, though I do still want to make it very badly. I made 'Hereditary' first, but I always had 'Midsommar' in my back pocket, like it was right there in me."

Flash forward to March 2023, when Aster told The New York Times that his next film would "almost certainly" be a Western featuring Phoenix. The only other detail Aster has let slip is that the film is set in a New Mexico copper-mining town.

What would an Aster Western-noir look like? After three films, the director has established himself as something of a genre satirist. "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" are straight-up horror, but the character dynamics are so overheated that the movies edge into camp. At least, that's how they play for me. I know people who thought "Hereditary" was one of the scariest movies of the 2000s. I thought it was a fully intentional hoot.

I'd love to see Aster take a skewed, Nicholas Ray approach to the Western and make his "Johnny Guitar." But after the bizarre "Beau Is Afraid," it's a fool's errand to pin him down. Aster is a befuddling original.