Ari Aster may be A24’s leading in-house auteur; a homegrown talent that both represents the film studio’s brand and continued potential. Hereditary and Midsommar were both high-concept, performance-forward horror films that were critical darlings as well as sleeper hits. His third feature, Beau is Afraid, is the most expensive film that A24 has ever produced, a financial investment that is both an endorsement of one of their own, as well as a statement of their own ambition. This is Aster’s Blank Check movie, a free pass to make everything he wants free of corporate interference. The end result is certainly indulgent, a three-hour collection of some of the most unsettling imagery one can find in a commercial film. Impressive in scale if uneven in execution, Beau is Afraid certainly illustrates the extremes to which Aster is willing to go.
Joaquin Phoenix plays the titular Beau, an infantile, middle-aged man living in a run-down apartment in the middle of the most chaotic urban hellscape ever imagined. Phoenix, an actor with a reputation for intense immersion, goes predictably deep here, perhaps even sabotaging the film’s humor by tapping into Beau’s sadness so completely. Aster’s version of horror has always been more psychological than gore – the nuance within the performances in his films will often scare you more than anything you actually see – but Beau is a visual translation of various Freudian theories, an attempt to actualize the absurd sexual anxieties within Beau’s troubled mind. Aster wants these images to be funny, and sometimes they are, but Phoenix treats them with the utmost seriousness.
Aster’s script has a relentless energy. Ostensibly about Beau attempting to visit his mother (played in flashbacks by Zoe Lister-Jones, and then later by the legendary Patti LuPone), the film consistently creates barriers that prevent him from doing so. At first the barriers are comprehendible, if eccentric. A noisy neighbor keeps him up and causes him to miss his alarm, he loses his keys on his way out the door. Things become increasingly stranger and stranger. He’s run over by an upper class couple (a hilarious Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who take him to their house and make plenty of excuses to prevent him from leaving. At one point he enters a performance community that specializes in immersive theater, and he loses hours imagining an entirely different arc to his life. At other times, he remembers the horrors from his own life which play out vividly in flashback (where he’s played by Armen Nahapetian).
Putting aside the fact that Aster has constructed a film that emulates nearly the exact structure of most of my nightmares, Beau is Afraid is further proof that the thirty-six year-old director has a remarkable talent for the unnerving and the disturbed. But where Hereditary and Midsommar shocked with their direct, unselfconscious approach, Beau is instead an exercise in bad taste. It’s never quite clear if the film’s macabre imagery is a result of the script’s extremely subjective point-of-view, and I think Aster has a lot of fun needling the audience who may be confused as to how real what their seeing actually is. When you’re not overcome with the creativity of the chaos, it starts to become clear how little there is beneath the surface. A clinical case of the Oedipal Complex writ large, when it fails to make you laugh, you’re often left wondering why you’re watching something so upsetting.
The performances are various versions of grandiose, funny in their own way even if they don’t find any true cohesian. Parker Posey gets a few scenes as the adult version of a girl Beau loved as a child. She walks away with some of the film’s best line readings and most of the movie’s genuine laughs. As much as Beau is Afraid is a showcase for Aster’s flair for creative sight gags, it is also an example of his overwrought writing. Hereditary and Midsommor could lean on horror movie tropes to sand the edges of their pricklier story beats. Beau doesn’t give us the release of being scared, not does it allow you the satisfaction of comprehension. The effort is commendable, but the end result feels like a flood of TMI, an anxious man’s psychosexual neurosis maximized to operatic proportions. It’s three hours of the discomfort you feel when a less-than-close friend overshares.
Written and Directed by Ari Aster