disappointment blvd?
Why Is Everyone Freaking Out About 'Beau Is Afraid'? Here's What Reviews Say
Elevated horror is what everyone likes to call the subgenre that has popped up over the last decade, and which mostly consists of a set of A24 pictures. It's a synonym for pseudo-horror thrillers with varying artsy styles. Think along the lines of "Midsommar," "The Lighthouse," "Hereditary" and "The Witch," to name a few. Ari Aster might be the biggest name to come out of the elevated horror indie scene, and he has a new film, "Beau Is Afraid," coming out on April 21, 2023.
It's complicated to explain what "Beau Is Afraid" is about, its making was in developmental hell for years (the project got a name change and an hour removed from the final cut). The film stars Joaquin Phoenix and Armen Nahapetian as the adult and younger versions of the titular Beau, alongside a cast that includes Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Parker Posey, Michael Gandolfini and others.
Critics' views of this weird and dark comedy-drama thing has divided opinions to say the least. Some people love it and say it's a masterpiece, while others are less enthusiastic about it. The film releases on April 21, 2023. Is "Beau Is Afraid" a giant swing and a miss, or a home run for Aster?
What it's about (good luck explaining this one)
In its simplest form, "Beau Is Afraid" is about a fearful loser trying to make his way to his overbearing mother's house. Of course, Aster complicates this journey with a cascade of what-ifs, chasing down the worst-case scenario at every opportunity. What's the worst that could happen if you lost your keys? If you missed your flight? If you disappointed your mother?
Set in a reality not unlike our own where big cities are held up as examples of how society's collapsing, "Beau Is Afraid" is an account of the life of Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), a skittish, deeply neurotic man who struggles to cope with an unspecified anxiety order. For Beau, each day is a new opportunity to marvel at and cower in fear of the outside world from the safety of his small apartment — the only place that feels truly safe to him. Though Beau knows that other people have no trouble leaving their homes and leading productive lives, whenever he chances a glance outside his window, all he can see are Mad Max-like scenes of apocalyptic anarchy, and it’s enough to convince him to stay inside.
Have a sick sense of humor? This pitch black comedy is hilarious
The film’s writer/director is Ari Aster, who has always been a funny guy. His excellent, trauma-filled dramas "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" may be packed with the horror of relationships, but it’s the cruel joke underneath that provides their driving force — they are pitch-black comedies about the universal fear of losing free-will, of being screwed from the get-go. "Beau Is Afraid," an enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues, is about being doomed from birth. It's Aster's funniest movie yet.
Aster showcases his warped sense of humor in catapulting Beau, a neurotic and ill-equipped protagonist, into a hero's journey. The filmmaker creates no shortage of impressive sight gags and cringe moments to present how terrifying the world appears to Beau, who lives in constant fear and paranoia. Even the act of crossing the street to buy a bottle of water becomes a nearly insurmountable task as various denizens and obstacles descend upon Beau. Not even Beau’s sanctuary feels safe; hostile unseen neighbors and a pesky Brown Recluse problem highlight his constant instability. Aster wrings a macabre sense of humor through the impressive depth of field here.
This movie runs three hours long — It works, or it doesn't
Aster clearly has some personal demons to work through, and to their credit, A24 allowed him to do that. It never once feels like the filmmaker needed to hold back or change things for audience appeasement or anything. Like all of his movies, "Beau Is Afraid" is not easy to watch. At a minute shy of three hours, it's also the most arduous, but it never drags. We feel like we've been on a journey along with our main character. Aster has called the movie a "Jewish Lord of the Rings," and that feels apt in a lot of ways. In other ways? Just emotional torture porn.
A wildly surrealistic nightmare of primal and modern neuroses, the writer/director’s third A24 feature spends not a minute of its daunting three-hour runtime retracing others' steps, instead diving deeply and madly into the mindset of its protagonist (and, by extension, its maker). Challenging in the most thrilling ways possible, it plays like a mind-bending Oedipal acid trip of epic proportions.
Three hours that definitely put the odd in odyssey, "Beau Is Afraid" could be said to suffer from the same bloat, wandering through bizarre detours of varying effectiveness before arriving at a wonderfully overripe operatic climax elevated by Patti LuPone as the Lydia Tár of single mothers. But even if its pacing is uneven, this is a movie of undeniably impressive big swings.
This is my favorite snippet from one of the reviews. Please enjoy
It's like the satanic speed metal band, Slayer. A Slayer song now and then really gets the blood pumping, but I have never been able to listen to an entire Slayer album. At some point I shout "enough!" and turn the friggin thing off. "Beau Is Afraid" is a Slayer album.
It's not for everyone, to put it lightly
"Beau Is Afraid" is stylish all right — Aster can't stay away from style. Groovy low-angle shots, dream sequences rendered in wacky point-of-view perspectives, dreamlike vistas of dark water shot in glimmering light: Aster borrows from the best (Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman) and the worst (Gaspar Noé) in this belabored work of slapstick agony. It's the most magnificent act of oversharing you'll see all year, a banquet of all the TMI you can eat, just for the price of a ticket. Though when you think about it, shouldn't Aster be paying us?
And yet, with each new masterful sequence and/or singularly demented gag, "Beau Is Afraid" also seems to grow a bit more generic. Aster has always done an immaculate job of interpolating his influences, and "Beau Is Afraid" maintains the spirit of a true original in spite of all that it borrows (the Film Society screening series the director programmed in advance of this movie is an extremely self-aware primer for what fed into making it), but every additional reference highlights how little Beau himself brings to his journey.
TL;DR
This three-plus-hour tale of Oedipal misery sees Phoenix on uncharacteristically boring form and ultimately collapses into silliness.
"Beau Is Afraid" is the "Citizen Kane" of mommy-issues movies. Ari Aster’s follow-up to "Midsommar" drops Joaquin Phoenix into a nightmare fueled by guilt, paranoia and an overbearing mom. It's either the most terrifying comedy or the funniest horror film of 2023.
And while I can't say that Aster manages to thread the needle between surreal nonsense and surreal inspiration without a hitch, I can say that there's no film like "Beau is Afraid" — at least on this side of Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York." It's a gonzo odyssey for our times, a rejection of mediocre cinema, and a paean for all the perverted weirdos out there. This one's for you, sickos.
