Score: 5 / 5
Some of the best film scholarship and criticism of 2023 will be written about Beau is Afraid, so I'm going to take a backseat for now and just relay some of my rabbit-trail thoughts about it. Because it's magnificent, and I'll need to see it at least once or twice more to develop a better relationship with it, although frankly just once was enough to fill my soul and bother my mind for several weeks.
Much as his co-artists in what I'm calling the triumvirate of horror auteurs (Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers), Ari Aster has already created two major titles: one, a razor-sharp and sickly specific breakout horror gem, and the second, an expansive and daring assault on both senses and sensibilities. This is true for all three, and the other two have since released a third film each, which while horrific in their own ways, also branch out to include other genres, science fiction and historical war/fantasy respectively. Aster now follows suit with his own break-out-of-the-mold horror comedy and psychological "trauma drama." At least, that's what I'm going to call Beau is Afraid, because its three hour runtime spans the gamut of topics and ideas, most relating to self identity and perception, family relationships, and the psychological damage that comes from and informs each.
It might be fair to say that Beau, the titular character played magnificently by Joaquin Phoenix, is afraid of everything. He seems afraid of living, as his apartment in squalor suggests; the literally sparking elevator made me shriek with each appearance. His demeanor is one of perpetually making himself smaller, stooping his shoulders and tightening his mouth and brow, pulling back his voice into a childlike whimper. He's afraid of everyone outside, who Aster dramatizes in bizarrely raucous fashion as a madhouse of pure insanity. He's afraid of his mother, who he calls early on and whose ominous presence will inform the rest of the story. You see, it's almost her birthday, and as Beau is preparing to fly to her, many surreal setbacks (including loud gaslighting neighbors, stolen keys and luggage, and a water outage) stop him. She manipulatively complains before dismissing him, inciting the plot, which is effectively his journey to her.
Beau's odyssey through the world is hard to define, as we are presented it primarily through what he must experience it as being. His anxiety is palpable, but we're not really given a precise diagnosis, even by his psychiatrist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who prescribes a new experimental drug that must be taken with water. Naturally, when Beau's tap water stops running, he panics, getting the whole thing off to a bang when he wanders across the essentially war-torn neighborhood street to buy water from the convenience store and, in his absence, allows the entire block party of criminals into his unit to trash it. Then he gets a call from a UPS delivery person who says his mother is dead. The whole thing is the definition of a tragicomedy, and by this point it's clear that Beau is little more than a little boy who never really developed and is suddenly dealing with an aging body. He also needs to deal with some serious mommy issues.
Apart from conversations about Beau and his mother (played to award-worthy perfection by Patti LuPone), their relationship, and of course the psychosexual mental disorders that characterize both, it's important to note that the film equally demonizes everyone, and while we are clearly meant to follow Beau's journey, he's not exactly a likable or even reliable point of reference. More importantly, Aster clearly wants all of his film to be symbolic of other, loftier ideas, riddles with which we are meant to dwell and meditate on our own relationships with everything from psychotropic drugs, society as a whole, domesticity, parent-child relations, virginity and sexuality, existential purpose, artistic license in storytelling, mental illness and disorders, and of course questioning the dangerous codependency of our cultural systems. Sound like a lot for one film to handle? It is.
And Aster does it all with such passion and enthusiasm, it's remarkably easy to get swept up in it. Ruthlessly funny, alarmingly vindictive, Aster takes us on a trippy roller coaster of excess, forcing us to feel at once claustrophobic and agoraphobic. How he does it will take many theorists time to unpack, but he does it apparently effortlessly, forcing us into a headspace where we have to laugh to keep from screaming, and where we must constantly attempt to keep ourselves oriented even as it makes us question our own reality. The narrative is, despite all these chaotic musings, sharply defined by distinct chapters of various tonal shifts with unique characters all along the way. There is mother herself, who finally appears near the end in all her glory and horror, aptly named Mona (close to mom, close to money, and of course the sexual and painful "moan" that she offers multiple times). Her surname, and presumably Beau's, is Wassermann, which combines the German for water and of course an exaggerated man, of which there is no strong example in this story (Aster's use of water would be a fascinating study here, used variously as amniotic fluid, a dirty bathtub, a means of medicating, a theatrical flood, and the floor of a prosecutorial arena).
When Beau eventually finds himself injured and taken to the home of a doctor and his family (played by Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), I was reminded briefly of the unhinged and surreal family of I'm Thinking of Ending Things. It's kind of funny except that it's deeply horrifying, and the themes of filial guilt and complicity are hammered home several times before Beau flees in terror. Later, he finds himself in a Shakespearean forest complete with traveling band of actors, and he completely loses himself in their play; we're treated to an animated sequence of experiencing Beau's own fantasy story as if on the stage, and this is where the arts all collide, where Aster himself hammers home his own messaging about the relationship between art, the subject, the object, and the audience who pours themselves into it. It should also be noted that Beau occasionally endures flashbacks to his youth, where his psychosexual issues are rooted, and wherein he attempts to relate to a young girl his own age as well as a younger version of his mother, played similarly to award-worthy perfection by a mesmerizing Zoe Lister-Jones.
Despite my only barely scratching the surface of this movie here, let it suffice to say that it requires repeat viewings and lots of dialogue with other viewers. I'd love to hear Aster's shot-by-shot commentary on this, but I doubt he'd do one, much less explain the significance of everything. It's meant to be interpreted and projected upon, mused and debated over, and ultimately enjoyed for the holistic, horrific experience it is. Endlessly funny and deeply disturbing, Beau is Afraid is unlike anything we've ever seen, and it's already in my top ten favorites of the year.
