Beau is Afraid

Every so often, a major studio will greenlight highly ambitious and personal projects for high-profile artists once they reach a monumental success. Ari Aster swings big in his third feature, Beau is Afraid. A dizzying and wildly anxiety-inducing contemplation of anxiety, depression, paranoia, and burgeoning neuroses that stems from domineering mothers. As evident from the trailer, the film echoes the surrealist traits of author Franz Kafka as well as filmmakers Charlie Kaufman and Terry Gilliam with its hyper-real style and absurdist narrative structure. At its center is a lonely man whose life instantaneously gyrates into chaos as he attempts to make it back home after the sudden death of his mother. With that, the film will certainly lure in Aster’s biggest fans and certainly polarize them, as this is a three-hour art film that is baffling to believe how it will be playing at local multiplexes due to its audacious execution and three-hour running time.

Usually, for a third feature, most successful filmmakers are given more resources, a bigger budget, and more creative freedom if their previous films prosper. A24 certainly owes it to Ari Aster, who turned in not one but two highly successful horror films with Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). Beau is Afraid certainly feels more grandiose and offers more scope than his previous two, but while even stranger and just as horrifying in its own right as his predecessors, the opus feels more like a personal work about certain insecurities or inner demons, such as the work of Fellini or especially Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, as it centers around a frail man grappling with his own sanity as Aster also aims to explore psychological and Freudian themes of what makes us who we are. On an immersive level, many viewers will surely be engrossed and even perplexed by Aster’s manifestations of psychological deterioration found in the film. Most notably, Aster also dives into some compelling ideas about how controlling parents can bring internalized fears and widen our anxieties to the point of being extra-self-conscious of who we are.

Courtesy A24 Films

Themes and ideas aside, there is a larger issue in the film’s last hour that doesn’t quite match the brilliance of the first half. It dives into some grotesqueness in the third act. Perhaps because the odyssey begins to feel exhausting with just how obscurantist the material becomes after a while. Repeated viewings will certainly widen deeper understandings of the films abstractions and visual motifs that consist of keys, locks, and surveillance technology to examine how inescapable it is for children who have controlling parents, even as they become adults. With that, the film applies an abundant amount of artistry to pull the viewer into an episodic and twisty journey, one led by Joaquin Phoenix and a first-rate cast of supporting players that provide a constant amount of engagement even when it slithers into the bizarre.

The film opens in darkness, with distorted voices and conversations. The opening of the film echoes the final imagery of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, and it’s apparent that we’re in the perspective of an infant about to leave its mother’s womb. Right in the beginning, Aster shows we’re born into chaos as we hear the mother scream in the background “Why isn’t he crying?”. It’s an ingenious opening that establishes the themes of the film. Jump-cut 50 years later, we’re introduced to a man, Beau Wasserman (Phoenix), who suffers from deep depression and anxiety. He also resides in a dystopian city named Corrino. A city of urban landscape hell where the grisly streets make Robocop and The Warriors seem quant as the grisly street corners are filled with various acts of violence from drug dealers, addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and a naked serial killer on a stabbing spree roam the streets. The build-up of the heightened city and Beau’s apartment is absolutely brilliant. The way they are staged and shot by frequent Aster cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski brings a hyper-realism that echoes the work of Terry Gilliams, most notably how he shot the gritty city sequences in both The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys. Aster also brings some satire into these sequences that aren’t too far from our own, including an outdoor market where a teenager boy is shopping for an automatic rifle.

Courtesy A2 4

The hyperreal world brilliantly works as a reflection of Beau’s subconscious—he’s a man afraid of just about everything. He’s also a man child that dresses as if he’s a teenager in the 1980s with his slightly baggy and faded jeans and overgrown shirts. A day before his big trip to see his dominating mother (Patti LuPone) for the first time in over a year, everything ends up blundering into chaos. Beau is accused of playing loud music by a mysterious neighbor who slips hostile notes under the door. After waking up very late and with his itinerary approaching soon, he hurries out the door only to go back into the apartment, and within seconds his keys are stolen after he leaves them in the door. He calls his mom to explain, only to be interrupted by awkward silences, and eventually you hear sorrow in her voice. Facing severe anxieties, Beau takes some psychotropic medication, but the water fixtures are down, so he must sprint across the street to get bottled water to wash the pills down. Suddenly, a few dozen homeless people stroll into his apartment complex and eventually his apartment, where they damage and rip it to shreds as if they were in a zombie film.

Beau returns a phone call to his mom only to stumble into a very awkward phone call back to his mother, and he also discovers his mother has died once a UPS man explains how she was brutally killed by a chandelier. Shocked and heartbroken, Beau doesn’t know what to do. He eventually takes a hot bath, which leads to another encounter with one of the homeless men still hiding in his bathroom as a venomous spider is on the loose in the complex. Beau escapes the apartment and runs naked out in the street, only to be attacked by the naked stabbing serial killer and eventually hit by a car.

Courtesy A24 Films

That vehicle Beau was hit by was owned by a caring suburban couple, Roger (Nathan Lane) and Grace (Amy Ryan), who nurse Beau back to health from his accident and the severe stab wounds that he suffered from the “Birthday suit killer” as the local media named him. Playing on Homer’s The Odyssey, Aster shifts gears and takes the film into a more episodic structure as Beau’s determined to get back home so he can attend the funeral of his dead mother. Through Beau’s journey, we get some compelling flashbacks of Beau as a teenager (Armen Nahapetian) and distressing insights into just how domineering his mother was while they are on a cruise ship.

These revelations offer some psychological discernments about how these incidents shaped Beau’s anxieties, psyche, neuroses, and sexual frustrations. Even at age 50, Beau still yearns for Elaine, a childhood flame he had on a cruise ship who appears in the flashbacks (Julia Antonelli) in a very effectively edited hallucination scene. Elaine appears years later (played as an adult by Parker Posey) in the narrative in a hilarious standout scene featuring a clever use of Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby that thematically showcases just how inescapable Beau’s past relationship with his oppressive mother is. Aster and production designer Fiona Crombie (The Favourite, Cruella) do wonders with the mise-en-scene in the film. Not only by using props and motifs with locks, keys, and surveillance, but there are a lot of motifs and signs of Jesus, including a sign that reads “Jesus Sees Your Abominations,” and Beau’s mother, Mona Wassermann, bestows fear on Beau as if she were a godlike authoritative figure.

Courtesy A24 Films

Aster dives deep into Beau’s psyche throughout the film, including the middle section in a forest that taps into Beau’s desires and what his life can be if he isn’t chained to his mother’s controlling neediness and tactics. Aster’s third film proves to be a film of many big ideas, and while he swings big, not everything works. Some of the imagery in the attic sequence brings out some of the goofiest impulses that were found in his previous films. Like the third act involving a therapy group session in Hereditary and the goofy bear suit in Midsommar. Those films felt more like derivative conceptual exercises of Aster’s favorite films. While the concept of overpowering mothers is all too familiar in many horror films such as Psycho, Carrie, Black Swan, and even Aster’s own Hereditary, to name a few, However, Aster prevents the film from feeling hackneyed by sustaining enough suspense, and his third film reaches a tragic vein that is disturbing, occasionally amusing, and oddly resonant. Despite some juvenile visual gags and a lack of self-control, Aster finds a more beguiling framework in Beau Is Afraid that permits him to expertly utilize his conceptual skills and visual motifs upon us, which will certainly hold endless analysis and deep discussions.

Some diehard Aster fans, mindful of his malevolence and deep love for his first films, could very well be impatient with the film. Some audiences and critics are already dismissing the film with the basic keywords of “pretentious” and “self-indulgent.” It’s a film that does not intend to unite audiences. Most surrealism or anything remotely avant-garde and formally daring never unites everyone. Its surrealism and unsettling human truths will be viewed as unpleasant by some, yet it’s just as disturbing as any modern horror film. There is certainly some genius at work in this film. In a flash, Aster establishes a terrifying dream state that is both audacious and wild, but that is eventually sustained with unbelievable gusto and inventiveness. It’s a mind-bender that will inevitably generate a lot of theories, one that some audiences will dismiss instantly as the credits come up.  Ultimately, it will certainly be haunting for many and rewarding for the more advantageous.

BEAU IS AFRAID is now showing in theaters