With Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster makes it easy to meme, “Men will literally make an entire movie about anxiety and their mothers instead of going to therapy.” Yet the director has clearly both been talking through his issues with a professional and working them out while making this film. This three-hour surreal odyssey is highly personal and deeply weird, falling somewhere between an unbroken fever dream and an endless waking nightmare. But, you know, funny.
You can’t know what to expect from the oblique trailers, but those who go in convinced they’re getting another movie like the disturbing horror of Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar will likely wonder what the hell is going on. Horror is definitely present in this film, with some moments of brutal violence and truly shocking imagery. After all, it wouldn’t be an Ari Aster movie if no one’s head got utterly obliterated. However, the filmmaker leans even more into black comedy, while adding plenty of absurdist humor to his third feature. There’s nothing traditionally scary in Beau Is Afraid, but it fills you with a constant sense of panic and unease, feelings that might make you giggle as much as its bizarre sense of humor. These anxiety-inducing images burrow into your brain, making you wonder days later if it’s a remnant of watching the movie or something you dreamt after eating pizza at midnight. Or both.
The basic plot is at once simple and difficult to explain. At its most elemental level, Beau Is Afraid follows Joaquin Phoenix’s bewildered, easily intimidated Beau as he travels home to visit his mother (Patti LuPone) and encounters numerous obstacles along the way. It’s as familiar — and fantastical — as a fairy tale, but there is so much going on here, and talking about it with any detail would threaten the joy and confusion of each wild turn the movie takes in its episodic wandering. Shot by Aster’s frequent collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski, each segment has a different feel and visual style, ranging from an apocalyptic cityscape in unsparing sunlight to the layers of a forest at night. One jaunt finds an aging Phoenix traversing a wondrous animated landscape, upping the phantasmagoric elements even higher with its story-within-a-story structure.
Beau Is Afraid simultaneously creates a sense of having never seen anything like this, while offering flashes of familiarity to works like The Odyssey, The Truman Show, Defending Your Life, and Synecdoche, New York. It’s Kafkaesque and Kaufmanesque, with Beau’s obstacles found both internally and externally. His world feels like a catalog of phobias at every turn. If one element doesn’t unnerve you, just wait: surely something in the next scene or two will.
Yet for however strange and scary the outside universe is, Beau’s own idiosyncrasies match it on every level. His call history lists his mother, his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a pharmacy, and MovieFone. He lives an isolated life punctuated by his own fears and nervousness, with their roots found in an unsurprising source. In some ways, this feels like a departure from the horror genre that Aster excelled in with his first two films, but he keeps revisiting twisted family dynamics in new and newly disturbing ways.
Beau Is Afraid curls the audience up in their seats out of second-hand embarrassment at witnessing something so intimate and raw. Freudian adherents will have plenty to mine in the relationship between Beau and his mother, but even those who insist on a literal interpretation of everything on screen will find the movie’s meaning clear — or at least as clear as it can be — in a late moment that offers the most deranged attic scene since Hereditary. (What was the deal with Aster’s childhood attic?!?) Anything that possibly could’ve been considered subtext is brought to the surface in this truly wild sequence.
Phoenix perfectly mumbles and bumbles through Beau’s various levels of panic, which range from mild discomfort and confusion to all-out hysteria. In this collaboration with Aster, he has created an entirely different brand of antisocial weirdo than his Oscar-winning turn in Joker — and one that’s far more interesting. He’s at the center of every scene (except those where a teenage Beau is played by Armen Nahapetian), surrounded by a cast that rotates in and out with every new horror Beau has to endure, including Parker Posey, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Richard Kind, and Zoe Lister-Jones.
Beau Is Afraid itself is an act of endurance, not only in its runtime but also in its deliberately discombobulating approach. This isn’t a movie meant to be half-watched; its ambition, scope, and sheer strangeness require your full attention, even if giving that level of engagement is emotionally and mentally exhausting. Beau Is Afraid gleefully alienates the audience at every turn, immersing them in an experience whose overall unpleasantness will outweigh any of the pleasures of its craft or its inventiveness for much of the audience. When the credits appear, you either won’t be able to say a word or you won’t be able to stop talking — or thinking — about it for days.
B
“Beau Is Afraid” is out now in New York and Los Angeles. It opens Friday nationwide.
