It’s not something I’m entirely proud of, but I tend to get kind of pissy when a director proves to be a bold new voice in the realms of a particular genre (let’s say horror) and then suddenly chooses to leave it for pastures new. Now, I’m freely admitting here that this is most definitely a “me” problem, but that didn’t stop me from getting all sulky when I found out that Ari Aster was going to follow up his horror two-punch of Hereditary and Midsommar with something far more personal and way more weirder.
While surrealistic paranoia comedy was hardly on my 2023 bingo card, Aster forged ahead with Beau Is Afraid, an utterly bizarre mesh of art house, horror and Lynchian strangeness that may have saved the director a ton in therapy bills, but cost studio A24 around thirty mill to produce. Admittedly, I slept on the film when it came out presumably because I was still too busy pouting like a child – but after finally witnessing Beau Is Afraid I can safely say this: at least Aster didn’t ditch straight horror in order to play it safe…
Beau is afraid, like, a lot of the time. Stricken by chronic anxiety, this middle-aged man attempts to keep it together while living in a grotty apartment in a hell hole of a crime infested city (there’s a moldering dead body literally lying in the middle of the street). While he risks living his home to visit his therapist, the biggest constant in his life is his wealthy mother, Mona, and is due to fly out and visit her for the anniversary of his father’s death who supposedly died of a heart murmur while conceiving him. However, things start to unravel when he takes some new medication without properly following the procedure properly and thus starts a gargantuan, bloated odyssey as Beau’s already panicked existence takes an epic turn for the worse.
After missing his flight due to a stolen set of keys and the fact that every homeless crazy and strung out junkie decides to file into his apartment and wreck it, Beau is hit with a devestating blow when her rings his disappointed mother to find her phone being answered by a random UPS delivery driver who has some shocking news – Mona has had her head crushed by a falling chandelier. Shocked and horrified, things immediately get even more fucked thanks to a local nude serial killer dubbed Birthday Boy Stab Man and a passing food truck that rams him into unconsciousness.
From here, things get really weird. Rescued and patched up by a kindly couple, the battered Beau wakes two days later finds out that thanks to a stipulation in his mother’s will, she will not be buried until her son is present despite prolonging the ceremony being a huge, Jewish no-no. With Beau’s stress rising and events becoming ever more unhinged, our frazzled hero has to endure a deranged war veteran, a suicide pact that involves guzzling paint, a forest based theatre troupe and something lurking in his mother’s attic that’s too unbelievably phallic for words, before he gets to the end of his traumatic journey.
When it comes to moves such as Beau Is Afraid, you’ve got to admire the big swings it takes to get it here. Whether it’s Aster himself who jotted this obviously personal, yet highly ridiculous tale or the people at A24 who signed on the dotted line, the fact that such a thing exists at all is something of a minor miracle. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be up for an experience that, for lack of a better description, feels like you’ve taken the wrong drug (possibly bath salts) while trying to watch a Werner Herzog production of The Wizard Of Oz. In actual fact, my personal feelings about Aster “softening up” after exploring beyond the horror genre now seem even more horribly childish as the mental terrors the film passes off as comedy are far more bewildering than anything that popped up in either Hereditary or Midsommar.
While I would argue that Aster’s wildly experimental work has more in common with The nightmarish likes of Phil Tippett’s Mad God or David Lynch if he was as David Fincher, it has actually given me more respect for him as an artist for indulging so deeply in symbolism and subjectiveness. However, does this equate to Beau Is Afraid actually being any good and the truthful (and fittingly abstract) answer is, “define good”. If you’re looking for clean narrative lines, logic and easy answers then I’m sure Disney has another live action remake of an animated classic due any moment now, but if you’re willing to put yourself in the proper mindset to go on this bezerk trip, be warned, Aster isn’t afraid to go fully indulgent with conflicting tones, diverging threads that seemingly go both nowhere and everywhere and utterly no sense of a three act structure seemingly anywhere. Maybe you’ll laugh, maybe you’ll hate it, but chances are you’ll find yourself weirdly drawn to bits of it while other stretches of it spit you out like chewing tobacco into a surrealistic spittoon.
I personally truly loved the cruel, farcical nature of the first hour, found my attention wandering during the second and finally being amusingly perplexed by the third. Would I suggest taking out an hour to speed the film along? Actually probably not, because a movie as gleefully fucked as this needs to just do it’s thing regardless of usual constraints such as a conservative run time or a plot you can follow. However, while Aster is dead set on taking this three hour anxiety attack and using it to give us something of a remarkable cast. Featuring such an atypical selection of actors as Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Parker Posey, Bill Hader, Richard Kind and Patti LuPone to deliver his vicious farce, everyone seems all in to help usher in a movie that features a scene where a deranged army vet fights a giant penis monster to the death. However, to dissmiss Beau Is Afraid is to dismiss a genuinely panic inducing performance from Joaquin Phoenix who literally spends the entire film in a state of some sort of nervous breakdown. With his thinning hair, doughy mid-section and a constant look of bemused fear etched on his face, he’s simply remarkable – although you do wonder if they had to smuggle some diazepam into his drink after every take to calm the dude down…
One of those films that stubbonly defies description, whether you actually enjoy Beau Is Afraid is seemingly of no importance. Some undoubtedly will seem the film as some sort of mirror into the realms of male mental health and childhood trauma, others will simply be pissed that they wasted three hours – but the truly genius move of Aster is that they’re both right. Beau may be afraid and you may be confused, but Ari Aster is brave to attempt a film that’s so unsafe as a career move. So what’s the final verdict? Confounding? Bold? Overstuffed? Funny? Pompous? Terrifying? Stupid? Haunting? Forgettable? Unhelpfully, the answer is yes.
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