Beau is Afraid (2023) review

Five years after his debut film Hereditary and four years after his sophomore film Midsommar, Ari Aster and his mommy issues are back in his third feature film Beau is Afraid.

The best way to describe Beau is Afraid is this: what most movies do when they have a scene with a person who is paranoid is they show their heightened perspective and then cut to someone else’s perspective where the reality of the situation is much less hostile or over-the-top than the first perspective would have you believe (think the scene from from Breaking Bad where Jesse Pinkman is high on meth terrified that a gang of bikers is coming to kill him and it’s just a group of kid’s on bikes). Beau is Afraid is like that if they never cut to the reality of the situation and just ups the ante for three solid hours, leading to a one-of-a-kind, bonkers nightmare-logic horror/comedy epic.

I love both of Asters previous movies, both were landmark moments for me in terms of taste as well as creative inspiration, so needless to say I’ve been looking forward to a third movie ever since Midsommar came out 4 years ago. So, unfortunately, it brings me no pleasure to tell you that I thought Beau is Afraid fucking SUCKED.

I’m just kidding. I had a blast with Beau is Afraid, and after sitting on it for a few days I think it’s Aster’s best by a mile for me. However, only bad bitches will like Beau is Afraid, I’m afraid. Even by Ari Aster's standard, this is gonna be a lot for most people to want to endure. Aster is a director who wears his influences on his sleeve, arguably too much. While Hereditary feels like a combination of Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now, and Midsommar is basically an unofficial remake of The Wicker Man, Aster has always managed to rip off other movies in a way that still makes the movie feel like his own. With Beau is Afraid it feels like Aster’s take on something like Synecdoche, New York, a movie I admire a lot more than I enjoy, keeping the entire film within the mind and experiences of a man going through a crisis, and the world around him reflecting the internal crisis. The movie is 100% the world’s least-therapy-going man airing out his mommy issues and generational trauma for 3 hours, but he does it in such a nightmarishly amusing way that I would watch 6 hours of it.

Where Synecdoche, New York wallows in a depressing, one-note tone for the majority of its runtime, Beau is Afraid is so much more chaotic, dynamic and reflective of the character’s mind, leading to a mix of terror, discomfort and humor that I’ve never seen accomplished so smoothly.

Beau is an anxiety riddled, paranoid middle-aged man going on an epic, disturbing odyssey to visit his mother, who he has some very, very, very, very complicated feelings towards, to put it mildly. He’s awkward, timid and terrified of nearly everything and everyone that crosses his path, leading to some of the funniest and most disturbing scenes in recent memory. The film had me laughing uncontrollably, (WITH it, not AT it, an important distinction) wheeze-laughing harder than any other movie I can remember in recent memory, only to have my jaw drop in shock and horror within seconds. The sex scene, the brown recluse scene, Bill Hader’s cameo, the entire stretch of the movie at Beau’s apartment, the paint scene, the weed scene with the daughter, the ATTIC SCENE(???), pretty much every single scene of the movie was making me chuckle and/or laugh out loud and wince with second-hand embarrassment or disgust.

The nightmare/dream logic that the film is presented in comes together perfectly with Beau as an inherently unreliable protagonist/narrator. Not only is the movie shown through the lens of his mental illness, but each section of the film is distinguished by Beau being hit on the head and knocked out, adding more deliriousness to the already extremely unreliable protagonist.

Beau is played perfectly by Joaquin Phoenix, obviously he will get a lot of praise for this because he is fantastic but I wanted to give credit some of the other performances in the film. Patti Lupone and Zoe Lister-Jones, who play Beau’s mother Mona are both fucking incredible here. They’re not in it a lot, but when either of them finally shows up, she’s terrifying. Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane are great as the couple who takes Beau in after running him over, as is Kylie Rogers as their insane daughter. Everyone’s great, I don’t wanna just list off the entire cast because the entire supporting cast is phenomenal.

I’m seeing a lot of people being confused by this movie, which is interesting to me because I don’t think there’s a shred of ambiguity to be found here. Usually a lack of ambiguity in a movie this out-there is a negative for me (cough, Synecdoche, New York, cough) but the wildly chaotic tone, humor and style helped the story feel dynamic. I guess if you are looking at it from a completely literal lens, which you probably should not, given that it’s basically functioning like a nightmare, but even then I feel like the core of the movie is very clear, it’s just a lot to process. That core of generational trauma and parental issues is something Ari Aster has been cooking for a while, even before his feature films with Beau, a short film version of the apartment sequence in this film, Munchausen, about a mother poisoning her son to keep him from leaving her to go off to college, and The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, about a son sexually assaulting his father, the DNA of all those short films and his feature films is very present in Beau is Afraid, making it feel like the apex of his career. Go to therapy, man.