Certificate: 15
Running Time: 178 mins
UK Distributor: Sony
WHO’S IN BEAU IS AFRAID?
Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Kylie Rogers, Denis Ménochet, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley-Henderson, Richard Kind, Hayley Squires, Michael Gandolfini, Théodore Pellerin, Mike Taylor, Armen Nahapetian, Zoe Lister-Jones, Julia Antonelli
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Ari Aster (director, writer, producer), Lars Knudsen (producer), Bobby Krlic (composer), Pawel Pogorzelski (cinematographer), Lucian Johnston (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Anxiety-prone Beau (Phoenix) sets out on a bizarre journey to visit his mother (LuPone)…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON BEAU IS AFRAID?
No matter what you may think of his movies, including and especially his latest offering Beau is Afraid, filmmaker Ari Aster certainly has a knack for knowing exactly how to not give audiences what they want. His debut feature, the acclaimed supernatural horror Hereditary, may have been marketed just like any other paranormal chiller, but viewers were left stunned by some of the truly shocking twists and turns that took them by full surprise, namely the fate of one character whose face was all over the promotional material. Then, for his follow-up feature Midsommar, he Trojan-horsed a psychologically testing break-up movie into an eerie Wicker Man-like cult thriller.
And now, there’s Beau is Afraid, which has the simplest of premises – a guy goes to visit his mother – only for Aster to pull the rug out from the viewer with ferocious might, and blindside them with a nightmarish anxiety-ridden odyssey into madness, much of which is far from what anyone would necessarily call conventional. Like his other movies, though, this one is bound to divide audiences – which it already is, with one camp of critics and viewers declaring it to be a Kafkaesque masterpiece and another dismissing it as self-indulgent nonsense – and, once again, position Aster as an auteur who is unafraid to go against expectations and present something that almost nobody knew they wanted.
As for me, I found myself greatly respecting the ambition and the tenacity of Aster’s vision, though not without some understandable criticisms that may or may not fall into line with everyone else’s opinions.
But first, a slight expansion of that simple logline: Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is a middle-aged man suffering from major anxiety, which isn’t helped by the fact that the heightened world around him, from his comically crime-infested neighbourhood to the passive-aggressive phone conversations with his mother Mona (Patti LuPone), appears to have been designed specifically to bring him down. He plans to visit his mother for a few days, but one thing leads to several other things, and Beau finds himself on a bizarre journey that sees him encountering serial killers, nerved gun-toting cops, seemingly friendly couples that won’t let him leave, PTSD-ridden lodgers, woodland theatre performers, and other beings that would be an utter crime to reveal in this review.
Between its opening birth scene told entirely from the perspective of the newborn baby, and the very final shot which comes close to rivalling the one in Pearl as the most chilling in recent memory, this is a very unpredictable film as Aster continuously throws the viewer off with an endless parade of surreal imagery and ideas, many of which are ones that haven’t been seen that much in other things. Aster offers a dream-like reality where anything can and most likely will go wrong for the main character, with nearly every fear that comes to mind all but guaranteed to be confirmed in a universe where Beau, played with excellent nervousness by Joaquin Phoenix, is a mere product of the anxiety caused by the surrounding chaos. We are very much in Beau’s mind throughout the entirety of this film, and through his eyes we see a grotesque and mean-spirited society where nobody, not even his own mother – played with as much force and horror as Toni Collette in Hereditary – is above treating this otherwise well-meaning person like the filth underneath their shoes, and it makes for some disturbing, but also darkly funny, moments that leave you shocked as much as they do unnerved.
Aster has already proven himself to be a highly confident filmmaker, and with Beau is Afraid he continues to push his artistic skills to the very limit, which can often result in some dazzling but occasionally unsteady displays of visual excess. A lengthy central sequence mixes live-action footage, hand-drawn animation and set designs, and green-screen technology to create a mesmerising fable-within-a-fable, and it is not only gorgeous to look at but the story being told is one that you’re oddly engaged with, and are keen to see how it ends, even if it means the rest of the film has been put on hold in order to show it. That does tie in to one of the film’s major flaws, which is its heavy stop-and-start approach to storytelling; it’s a long sit at just under three hours, but not all of it is used to further the diegetic themes and ideas, with some scenes – including, as wondrous as it is to watch, the aforementioned central sequence – going on for a while before finally moving on to the next thing, and even then it’s hard to watch without seeing exactly which parts could have been cut out entirely.
As I mentioned earlier, there’s already a number of critics and audiences who view Beau is Afraid as unapologetically self-indulgent, and while I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to say the same thing, part of me does completely understand where they’re coming from. Bloated runtime aside, which isn’t always used to further the plot and themes, Aster’s film does tend to present itself as an all-too cerebral experience, where it’s practically begging film students to draft entire dissertations based solely on its visual symbolism. In that sense, I can see it being very off-putting to some people, but oddly enough I felt pretty much the exact same thing about Tár, and between the two I’d honestly rather rewatch Beau is Afraid because, as dense as it can be, it at least has a twisted sense of humour about itself, and isn’t entirely up itself to ignore the underlying tragicomedy presented within the narrative.
Overall, I did like Beau is Afraid, and found it to be a fascinating, if imperfect, replication of a lingering nightmare for someone with deep, lingering anxieties. As someone who occasionally suffers from panic attacks myself, I appreciated the absurdist approach that Aster goes with that highlighted the irrational fears one might have in everyday life – from letting down close family members to awkward encounters with past acquaintances – and put them all in one massive, insane blender that makes it okay to laugh at them as well as be genuinely triggered by some of them.
Once again, Ari Aster has refused to give his audience what they might be hoping for – and that is precisely why he’s one of our most interesting new auteurs.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Beau is Afraid is a heavily ambitious odyssey into the bizarre reality of its anxiety-ridden protagonist, which filmmaker Ari Aster impressively realises with unpredictable tangents and shocking imagery that can at times be darkly funny, although its stop-and-start approach to its already bloated storytelling can make it off-putting to some, or even most, viewers.
Beau is Afraid is showing in cinemas from Friday 19th May 2023
