"Beau is Afraid" review — Aster's three-hour nightmare is disturbing, but thematically uneven
“You will walk many miles. Dozens will become hundreds. Hundreds will become thousands. Your adventures will continue for years and years.”
The title of Beau is Afraid might be specifically referring to the protagonist of Ari Aster’s new “nightmare comedy,” but it is not difficult for any audience member to slot their own name into the title. The film lulls its audience into a false sense of security with a kindly therapist (played by the ever-lovely Stephen McKinley Henderson), before rocketing you out into the crime-infested streets that Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) calls home. Things don’t go well for Beau: he’s regularly chased by a scary man with tattoos, he misses his flight back home to his mother’s house, he loses the key to his apartment, and his neighbour keeps sending him notes to “turn down his music” despite Beau being fast asleep. And that’s just the start of the movie. After the agonizing, anxiety-inducing first act of the three-hour surrealist epic, the film was very much becoming “Seth is Afraid.”
Aster has been one of cinema’s most exciting new filmmakers for a while now. After releasing his sensational first two feature films, Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), just thirteen months apart, Aster has finally returned from his four-year hiatus with what is shaping up to be a decidedly polarizing cinematic affair. Packed full of mommy issues, family trauma, and a completely helpless protagonist stumbling towards the inevitable (all hallmarks of Aster’s other work), Beau is Afraid, a fantastical Odepian journey, isn’t worried about alienating its audience. But when it’s all said and done, Beau is Afraid doesn’t quite pull together its many narrative threads into anything cohesive. The film’s focus on imagery above all, at which it excels, means that Aster struggles to develop his ideas fully.
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| Armen Nahapetian and Zoe Lister-Jones in Beau is Afraid. Photo: A24. |
Beau is Afraid marks a departure in Aster’s career from the rock-solid horror films that launch him into indie stardom. He’s not here to scare you with tales of possession or cult behaviour, but that doesn’t make this film any less disturbing or alienating. This is by far Aster’s funniest film, although that isn’t necessarily saying much. The moments of laughter the film does contain are less motivated by humour, but rather deep discomfort with whatever is happening on screen (although the name “Birthday Boy Stab Man” might just be one of my favourite on-screen jokes in recent memory). It’s more than just horror storytelling conventions that Aster is leaving behind, but rather it avoids following any sort of conventional narrative. The film moves from set-up to set-up, slowly moving through a whole menagerie of various locations and sequences in a very episodic and often disjointed manner. These episodes vary wildly in tone and pace, some of which prove to be essential to the film’s overarching story, while others are merely obstacles to overcome.
Joaquin Phoenix is so at home in Aster’s world. Phoenix’s anxiety-riddled performance as Beau is the ideal selling out of the film’s internal sense of discomfort. Nearly going mad at every turn, Phoenix crafts a character who is both sympathetic and frustrating. The rest of the cast is quite stunning as well. Patty LuPone shines as Beau’s overbearing mother, Mona, towards the end of the film, with Zoe Lister-Jones killing it as a younger Mona in some of the flashback sequences. Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane are perfectly cast as a “friendly to the point of unnerving” couple that Beau meets after an unfortunate run-in with a truck. Richard Kind pulls a last-minute show-stealing moment as Mona’s lawyer.
The film is a technical wonder with truly stunning cinematography, production, and some wonderful animated segments. The film is photographed by Aster’s frequent collaborator cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, who frames the film with a series of grand tracking shots and immaculately set-up wide shots. It is a, at times, picturesque film which seems to make it all the more disturbing. Production designer Fiona Crombie has outdone herself with her work on Beau is Afraid. Crombie creates brilliant and specific environments for the characters to inhabit, building a world that always feels tactile, but just out of the reach of reality. The film’s third episode, which involves Beau discovering an acting troupe in the woods, features some absolutely gorgeous, borderline sentimental, animation. This animated section is, like the rest of the film, both partially wonderful and fantastic, while also still carrying its off-putting surrealist charms. But despite its technical mastery, I am not entirely satisfied with the end result of Beau is Afraid.
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| Nathan Lane, Joaquin Phoenix, and Amy Ryan in Beau is Afraid. Photo: A24. |
But it’s hard to find much substance beneath the gorgeous sets and fascinating set-ups. It’s hard to break down these shortcomings that I see within the film without diving into spoilers (although, I think that even if I told you every crazy thing that happens in the movie, you still wouldn’t be prepared for the finished product), so I will keep my comments intentional obscure. Beau is Afraid visits a lot of similar thematic territory that Aster became well acquainted with in Hereditary and Midsommar. Beau’s ultimate conflict is with his mother, whose death sends him on this odyssey through the suburbs and forests. But the film struggles to really identify the sources of that trauma besides a few cryptic flashbacks and vague implications of neglect. The film also wants to talk about personal agency (or the lack thereof) but struggles to really bring anything meaningful to the table by the end.
It is also worth noting that Beau is Afraid is a very long movie. At just shy of three hours, I could not help but wonder if the story really necessitated that long of a runtime. While just making the complaint that a film is long is never particularly productive, the film’s approach could have been effective with some more liberal trimming of the material. There are stretches of the film which go on for far too long — particularly some of the sections in the home of a middle-aged suburban couple (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane) in the second episode — without providing much new information. This causes a lot of the narrative pacing to feel inconsistent and drag a little bit too often. Perhaps losing some of this excess would help make for a more cohesive film and make the pieces work together just a little bit more smoothly. At a certain point, the length becomes more self-indulgent than anything else.
It’s easy to see why Aster is such a popular figure in the film world at the moment. Championed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Aster’s filmmaking is deliberately difficult to connect to emotionally and it doesn’t care about beings its own beast. Beau is Afraid is a deeply conflicting movie, and I don’t think it was ever intended to not be such a thing. While I wasn’t completely satisfied with Beau is Afraid, a comment which I think Aster would take as a high compliment, it offers plenty to talk about and will probably be one of the most memorable cinema-going experiences you’ll have all year.
Beau is Afraid is now playing in theatres.
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