Movie Review : Beau is Afraid (2023)
No one is really afraid of what happens in horror movies. Sure, they get your blood pumping for a couple hours. But no one’s afraid of ghost on the Monday morning commute. No one believes Michael Myers is gonna catch them at a restaurant. Horror movies are frightening, but they offer punctual scares that require a particular context to work. So, Ari Aster's new movie Beau is Afraid would technically not be a horror movie if we go by that definition. This bad boy only deals with things you’re REALLY afraid of.
Beau is Afraid tells the story of Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), a man scarred by his relationship to his domineering mother. He's a barely functioning adult who lives in a cruddy apartment and struggles to make himself heard or get anything done. When his mother dies unexpectedly, Beau decides to travel home to attend her funeral only to be met with an absurd level of hostility from a cruel and uncaring world. I would like to tell you it was all for a purpose, but it's a little more complicated than that.
Anxiety Attack : The Movie
This movie is supposed to be a surreal comedy, but it almost gave me an anxiety attack in the theatre. For once, the trailer is doing a remarkably poor job at explaining what is actually is. Don't get me wrong, Beau is Afraid can be laugh out loud funny. But it's also the equivalent of spending three hours watching every anxious thought you’ve ever had come true. Remember when I said this movie only dealt with things you're really afraid of? Anything you're really afraid about in your life actually happens in Beau is Afraid.
From your home key being stolen by a stranger in your lock to getting abducted by well-meaning, overbearing weirdoes after getting hit by a truck, every terrifying ordeal you’ve ever been afraid of actually happens to poor Beau Wasserman. To a point where it gets fucking grueling. What is the point of making a movie that so ruthlessly fucks with the audience's sense of security like this? There's two way you can interpret it, depending to which degree you also suffer from debilitating anxieties.
If you're pretty secure about your life, Beau is Afraid is an inventive, mildly funny and aesthetically excessive comedy about psychological trauma that features a hapless and slightly unsympathetic character. If you’ve ever been overwhelmed by your own thoughts, Beau is Afraid is a litmus test for your own emotional resiliency. It's really difficult not to feel for Beau Wasserman at some point over the three excruciating hours where Ari Aster gleefully is torturing him. Because you're afraid to someday be him.
I don't live that many transcendent emotional experiences in theatre and I most certainly have never lived through one like this. I don't know about you, but I've never felt a powerful connection to a character who I never ever want to be. Not until I met Beau Wasserman. He's like an autoimmune response to the "literally me" characters. Beau is the "Oh fuck, please God. Let me never ever sink down to this level of dysfunction", If you have anxiety, know what you're getting into. But this movie is clearly for you.
Beau is Tripping Balls (or not)
That said, Beau is Afraid is really two movies. The first ninety minutes are a medieval torture chamber of the mind and the last ninety are a psychedelic nightmare that was invented by the sleep paralysis demons of Lewis Carroll and Wes Anderson. Once Beau shows the backbone to pull himself from his own inertia and travels (not so) metaphorically back to his mother's womb, Beau is Afraid become another film. It becomes a cruel and unusual celebration of the death drive and I mean this in the best possible way.
Beau regresses through every opportunity life is dangling at him (and it his dangling opportunities at him) on his way to what is at the same time his mother's tomb and the place where he was nurtured and brought up at a young man. Preoccupied by his desire to end his suffering, but also by his desire to disappear into the role his mother has crafted for him, Bo walks backwards through his life and towards his own self-destruction. Sure, it's Freudian as fuck. But it doesn't mean it's not ghoulish.
I wouldn't change anything to the first half of Beau is Afraid, but I do think that the "wink wink" references to Hereditary fall flat in a movie that operates on such a high level of terror. It's only a couple of scenes, but I would go as far as saying they're the only clumsy scenes in Ari Aster's entire cinematography I would qualify of clumsy. It doesn't deter from the overall ghastliness of the experience, but it could've done without. It works with the whole Freudian themes of the second half, but it's awkward and silly.
*
I do believe Beau is Afraid is a great movie and like all great art, it's going to divide audiences. I'm glad it exists though and someone willingly financed such a creative clusterfuck. Is it better or worse than Hereditary? It's hard to say since its thrills are so thoroughly uniquel, but it did feel slightly more bold and complete. There's no corny ending in Beau is Afraid. There's just the unending nightmare of being. This film will either be studied in 100 years or completely forgotten in six months because it's too fucking much.
