Beau is Afraid – Review
179 Minutes, Rated R
Written and Directed by Ari Aster
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below, then listen as he and Ryan discuss the movie in more detail. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
A paranoid man embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother in this bold and ingeniously depraved new film from writer/director Ari Aster.
Ari Aster is certainly a polarizing writer/director. His previous films, Hereditary and Midsommar (also both from A24), divided audiences and critics alike.
**Please note that I enjoy both those films.**
Beau is Afraid will do nothing to win any converts to his camp of supporters.
I hadn’t even watched the trailer for this film and had only been aware of rumblings of… dissatisfaction from other outlets (none of which I read).
But I knew I was going to have to watch it, so let’s talk about it.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau, several iterations of Beau in fact, and across the 3 hour (okay… 1 minute shy of 3 hours) run-time, we are bombarded with scene after scene of surrealist/absurdist psychological horror, coupled with Aster’s trademark long, lingering camerawork.
It is easily some of Phoenix’s best work to date, as Beau is simultaneously a flat and incredibly nuanced character, and he inhabits that skin seamlessly throughout the film.
Here’s the problem, though: unlike his previous films, Aster provides no context for anything that is happening here. Whereas Hereditary and Midsommar both begin by establishing a baseline of “normal” in the world he is about to subtly shift into disturbing psychological drama, Beau is Afraid provides no such jumping-off point for the audience; they are simply dropped into a world that looks more like Grand Theft Auto: The Aster Edition than anything identifiable to the audience.
From continuous, cartoonish, street violence to naked mass-murderers being caught on camera but not by law enforcement, to random pursuits by overly tattooed madmen, to seemingly insane interactions and reactions in otherwise normal situations (like having a neighbor complain about noise when you’re not making any), there is nothing identifiably “normal” in the world Beau inhabits, and so there is nothing for the audience to grab onto in order to care about Beau (or anyone else here).
While part of me would like to be able to argue that this is done by Aster simply to emphasize our current media oversaturation with madness and the shifting of what might be considered “normal” to begin with, I don’t feel like I can do so in good faith.
Beau is Afraid plays like a film that had a good pitch, and executives looked at Aster’s track record and simply said “go for it.” This is not a film for mass audiences; it’s not a film that will garner any kind of critical consensus unless that consensus is negative, and it’s a film that ends as Aster’s other films do: with long lingering shots following a completely bat-shit crazy sequence.
And I love bat-shit crazy, which should be abundantly clear to longtime followers, and while Beau is Afraid contains a great many scenes that (despite their bat-shit crazy nature) play pretty well in a vacuum, they are not stung together in any way that makes a narrative compelling enough to actually care about by the end of the bloated run-time.
So while there are good concepts, scenes, and a great performance by Phoenix, there is literally no reason for anyone to actually watch this as a movie, but only, perhaps, as an exercise in self-flagellation.
It feels appropriate that I am dropping this review on 4/20, as I think if I’d have been high, I may have enjoyed this film more.
Beau is Afraid hits theaters Friday, April 21, and stars Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, with Parker Posey and Patti LuPone.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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