Review: Beau Is Afraid

Beau Is Afraid
Cert: 15 / 178 mins / Dir. Ari Aster / Trailer

Well. It's usually a sign of a good night when you get in from the cinema*¹ and your partner asks how the film was and you realise you can describe in intricate chronological detail what happened, but you have almost no idea what the film was about.

Beau is Afraid then, is production company A24 having an absolute normal one...

BEAU

Ari Aster returns to bring us Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged and deeply-troubled man trying to catch a domestic flight to visit his cold yet over-protective mother on the anniversary of his father's death, when his entire life suddenly falls apart in the most extraordinary sequence of events. What unfolds is a hallucinogenic psychodrama - part therapy-session, part panic attack - filled with guilt, grief, discovery and recrimination. Like Philip Larkin, transmogrified into hard celluloid. It's always engaging and never knowingly straightforward.

Phoenix gives a masterfully emotive performance of course, although to be fair we'd expect little else at this point in his career. So much of the film is just extended reaction-shots of the lead actor that it's actually quite amazing in itself. The central storyline is a meth-enhanced cheese dream of Clockwise, a persistently dark and escalated farce which constantly blurs the lines between fantasy and tragedy. Although at a certain point you can stop trying to connect the points of symbolism and just relax into how absurd the whole thing has quickly become.

MADISON COUNTY

That said, this is being variously billed as Horror (among other genres) when it's really not. Aster's previous outings Hereditary and Midsommar had a far more linear narrative to rein in their very focused shocks, whereas this makes Darren Aronofsky's mother! look like an insurance documentary. As well as a flamboyant number of plot-feints, every scene in the movie veers between slightly-too-long and excruciating (which means the entire film is either far-too-long or perfectly elongated, depending on how you're approaching it). It's a calculated exercise in testing the commitment and patience of the viewer*², and the film snob in me respects the fuck out of that. I have to respect it because in terms of emotional storytelling it's a masterpiece; it's just a masterpiece that I did not particularly enjoy the experience of sitting through.

Full marks then for how uncompromisingly demanding this film is of its audience, yet still managing to secure a mainstream cinema release. Ari Aster glibly reaches so far that he will leave many people cold, and if anything I love it more for that.

Beau Is Afraid is 100% what it's supposed to be, and yet so much so that I cannot honestly recommend this to anybody...

*¹ It should be noted that in 2023, advance-screenings of subtitled Korean and Arabic dramas attracted very healthy audience numbers in this provincial multiplex, whereas only nine people wanted to see what lunacy Ari Aster was offering this time. One has to assume that's down to previous experience when even Russell Crowe's Italian accent can somehow get bums on seats... ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Credit where it's due though, not one of the nine people walked out throughout the film's almost-three hours. And bonus marks for you if you watch right this to the very end (like six of us did). ^{[ BACK ]}

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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