Dir: Ari Aster
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Denis Menochet, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Patti LuPone
Ari Aster’s 3 Hour anxiety induced nightmare showcases the good and bad of auteur cinema.
Another repost of an old review to celebrate 1 year of DanLovesFilm this month.
Ari Aster has established himself in recent years as a filmmaker who does not pull his punches when it comes to horrifying his audiences, whether that was with his disturbing tale of a bad break-up in Midsommar (2019) or with the utterly terrifying depiction of grief in the quite outstanding Hereditary (2018). You could even go so far back to what I believe to his most truly shocking body of work which is his 28 minute long short film The Strange Thing About The Johnsons (2011).
When it was announced a couple of years ago that he was in the process of producing a comedy-horror starring Joaquin Phoenix, under the working title Disappointment Blvd, I did not know whether to be excited or scared. Ari Aster is a perfect example of a modern day auteur in cinema who has complete control over his movies. None of his movies are written by the numbers or by a committee, and in the cases of Midsommar and Hereditary, this has allowed him to produce 2 of the most stand out horror movies in the past 10 years in a period where we have seen the breakthrough of other filmmakers in the industry such as Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers. In the case of Beau is Afraid however, it does seem that at times his creative control does get away from him a bit and the film starts to feel a bit too self-indulgent.
The film opens with our protagonist Beau, played by the remarkable Joaquin Phoenix, sat down with his therapist. He very hesitantly starts discussing all the fears and anxieties he has about his life and the world that surrounds him – all to which his therapist’s go-to solution is to prescribe him medication. During the session the topic changes to the subject of Beau’s mother and how he is due to go visit her in her large lakeside estate, a far cry from from Beau’s nightmarishly run down New York City apartment, for the anniversary of his Dad’s death. The thought of visiting his mother is clearly something Beau worries about above all else as his journey to get to see his mother becomes the central plot of the movie as he feels determined to see her no matter what physical or mental state he is in – or does he.
What follows is a set of surreal and often darkly comedic circumstances that begin to take a toll on Beau and you as the audience start to question what is real and what is a pure construct of Beau’s anxiety driven psyche. This leads us to witness an odyssey play out where our main protagonist also serves as an unreliable narrator, as like our central character we do not know what is real and what is not.
What we definitely know is real is that Beau has a very traumatic and almost Oedipal relationship with his mother. Through a series of extended flashbacks we learn that Beau’s mother was not loved by her own so wishes to convey all her love on to Beau in order to give him what she never had. This leads Beau spending his entire life with his mother being the only woman present in it, with the exception of a fleeting childhood holiday romance.
Clocking in just shy of 3 hours and with the central themes of the film being a metaphor for co-dependency and trauma induced anxiety, I can safely say that Beau is Afraid will not be for everybody. In fact, in the screening I was in, about ten people walked out around the 2 hour mark, but there is definitely more to it than meets the eye. My problem with it is there is not as much to it as I think Ari Aster believes there is. It is a film that cannot be taken literally or on face-value and is something that is certainly up for discussion with anyone else who may have seen it but I think it is a case where as an artist, Aster has to rein it in a bit. There is a solid two hours in this film that is absolutely fantastic and shows how talented Aster is as a filmmaker and artist. The film is beautiful, the cinematography by long-term collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski perfectly encapsulates a world from the perspective of a man who questions anything and anyone in it. Phoenix’s depiction of Beau’s almost constant schizophrenic state is something to behold.
Beau is Afraid had me coming out the cinema with a lot of questions and with some answers but is definitely something that will stay with me for a while, and despite me thinking it is not quite as successful in conveying its central themes as Aster’s previous two films, it does keep me excited to see what he goes on to make next.
Beau is Afraid is available to watch on Prime Video and TV
Dan Loves Film 
Great review! I missed this one when it came out in theatres due to the mixed reviews. That being said, I really loved Aster’s previous film “Hereditary”. May end up seeing it because of that.
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My review of “Hereditary”:
https://huilahimovie.reviews/2018/06/13/hereditary-2018-movie-review/
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Well-written review. I was disappointed in the film. It seemed a lot of the yuckiness was for the sake of yuckiness and not to serve any storytelling purpose.
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