CANNES: The memory of the COVID-19 pandemic still lingers, the deaths and the economic destruction it caused still play on the mind. Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” which just played at the Cannes Film Festival in France, is a brutal look at what the virus did to humanity, the kind of misinformation we were fed and the losses, monetary and emotional, we all suffered.

“Eddington” is a fictional town in the US state of New Mexico and the movie opens as lockdown begins.

In the Cannes title, the mayor of Eddington, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), and Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) are at loggerheads. Their bone of contention is the medical mask — Cross refuses to wear one thus setting a bad example, encouraging people to defy the rule.  Cross also resents Garcia's support for the construction of a giant online server farm and decides to run against Garcia as an anti-lockdown candidate in the upcoming mayoral election.

This forms the main plot, but interestingly it is the sub-plots that add pep and zing to the film. Cross's wife Louise (Emma Stone) suffers from hysteria and depression while Garcia's problematic teen son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) is in love with Sarah (Amelia Hoeferie), who bills herself a warrior for social justice.

Aster manages to grip us with all these diversions and distractions in what could have otherwise been a rather dull narrative. The satire on the sidelines is hilarious, and despite a serious plot that treats the town as a microcosm of America’s problems — from police brutality to racism —   the writer-director manages to keep the audience engaged until the finish line.

The film could have done with tighter editing, though, and it isn’t till the halfway mark that the plot begins to speed up with a segway into a farcical crime thriller.