BEAU IS AFRAID – and confused and feeling guilty and often fleeing in panic, as he is caught in a world of bizarre events, in director/writer Ari Aster’s nightmarish fever dream of a movie, BEAU IS AFRAID. And mostly, Beau has mommy issues. This unsettling horror mind-trip, with a touch of darkest humor and surrealist fantasy, has the prefect star, that master of madness, Joaquin Phoenix, who plays an anxious, nervous man who might be prone to hallucinations who sets out to do a seemingly simple thing: visit his mother.
Craziness is afoot and there is plenty for Beau to be afraid of in Ari Aster’s BEAU IS AFRAID. The weird, imaginative and sometimes darkly humorous BEAU IS AFRAID is a squirm-inducing experience from a director who is scary good at creating unsettling movies, whose previous films MIDSOMMAR and HEREDITARY are striking examples of stylish psychological horror. While some films defined as horror are more bloody than actually scary, this is one that is truly scary, like the director’s previous two. BEAU IS AFRAID is masterfully-made, creative and often visually beautiful (particularly in a haunting fantasy sequence in the middle) and brilliantly acted, but it is a crazy, sometimes unsettling experience. While it is a creatively impressive film, it is not something for everyone, nor perhaps even an experience one would repeat.
Despite it’s nearly 3 hour length, it never drags and keeps up an almost breathless pace as the terrified Beau flees from one danger after another, and it is a tour-de-force performance by Joaquin Phoenix, with fine supporting work from Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Parker Posey and others.
In BEAU IS AFRAID, Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), an anxious, solitary man, is just trying to travel to home to visit his mother, but is beset by a host of obstacles that evokes the trials of a modern odyssey. But unlike Odysseus’ travels to get back to his loyal wife and comfortable home, Beau’s destination is to visit a mother with whom he has a toxic relationship. Sort of Freud meets Homer.
Beau lives alone in a modest apartment in an impoverished, chaotic and crime-ridden area of a big city, one that seems to be a cartoonish version of all the violent stereotypes of a crime-filled New York. Beau is seeing a psychiatrist ((Stephen McKinley Henderson), who prescribes a new medication with a warning of side effects. This therapy session early in the movie gives us a glimpse into Beau’s troubled relationship with his strong mother (Patti LuPone), as her timid only child. Although the therapist questions the wisdom of Beau’s plan to visit her, Beau is determined to see his beloved mother, on his parent’s wedding anniversary, which is also the anniversary of the death of the father he never met. On his way back to his apartment, Beau stops at a street-side vendor to buy a little white ceramic figurine of a mother and child as a gift for his mother.
Visiting his mother seems such a simple thing but everything goes wrong that could. A series of unfortunate events, starting with an alarm clock that does not wake him, prevent him from catching his plane. Calling his mother, he gets a response that suggests Beau has been unreliable in the past, which both doubles his guilt and resolve to get home. But even more disasters ensue, as Beau tries to make his way through a remarkably malevolent world.
The film starts out with such over-the-top absurdities and dark humor, that the audience is forced to laughter. But the laughter becomes more nervous and uncomfortable as the film unfolds, until it fades away entirely in the later part of this journey of delirious horror.
Beau is buffeted by multiple horrific events which increase his fear and often his sense of guilt, and generally send him running in panic. At one point, he is essentially trapped in the suburban home of a seemingly well-meaning couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who had accidentally hit him with their car, sharing space with their resentful teen-aged daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers), which shortly descends into an unexpected madness. A flashback to Beau’s youth, and a cruise with his mother in which the pubescent Beau (Armen Nahapetian) meets a girl (Julia Antonelli), gives insight on his toxic relationship with his mother (played at that age by Zoey Lister Jones), in a gorgeously-shot Freudian interlude.
The flashback is one of many with uncomfortable scenes skirting some disturbing stuff. The film purports to be an exploration of modern life and its challenges, and there are a host of awful forces surrounding Beau, starting with a crowd gather on a city street, who are urging a man on a skyscraper ledge to jump, and a corpse laying in the street, ignored, near his apartment, and later a deranged war veteran intent on murder pursuing him through the woods. But, for the most part, it is all about his mother. While the movie plays with stereotypes about overbearing Jewish mothers, Beau’s issues with his mother goes well beyond that and deep into creepiness – enough to make you wonder about the writer of this script.
Still, it is hard to overemphasize the impressive cinematic and visual artistry (from director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski) in this film, despite the squirm-inducing events taking place. One particularly impressive example of the visual artistry comes midway through the film, in a fantasy sequence that provides the audience (and the character) with a welcome break from Beau’s trials in the film. An escape into the woods leads to a magical fantasy sequence, in which Beau meets a traveling theater troupe and while watching their play, becomes a different character on a very different life journey, putting Joaquin Phoenix in a partly-animated and color-drenched landscape. This beautiful, creative fantasy sequence provides a respite from the terror of the Beau’s experiences and a relaxing breather for the audience, as well as the film’s highlight. After this delightful interlude, however, we come back to Beau’s nightmare journey.
Whether what is happening in this whole film is only in Beau’s imagination, whether it is all a nightmarish fever dream, the result of his new medication, a hallucination of a mentally ill mind, or some combination of those things, is never made clear in this crazy film. One has to admire the film’s artistry and the director’s skill and that of the actors but this film is an unsettling experience.
Casting Joaquin Phoenix for this role is the perfect choice, and in fact, the whole cast is impressive as well. Phoenix gives the kind of tour-de-force performance he is famous for, in this case, not as a villain but as a victim. Whether he is a victim of his own weakness, a mentally ill mind, a domineering mother, a series of unfortunate events or just evil afoot in the world, is not clear, but it sure falls hard on the unprepared Beau. Patti LuPone gives a powerful performance as Beau’s mother, a strong personality who has a host of her own issues, and represents some classic bad parenting. Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan play a weird couple who are obsessed with their son who was killed in the military yet ignore their angry teen-aged daughter.
At nearly 3 hours, BEAU IS AFRAID has all the earmarks of being yet another of those films that incubated during the Covid lock-down, joining a line of inward-gazing, and often long, films by major directors that were released last year and this. Among those are Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s visually lush BARDO: FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTH. BEAU IS AFRAID has several things in common with the rambling, surreal BARDO, but where that film is an imagined biography, here the major tone is terror.
BEAU IS AFRAID is impressive as cinematic art and a nightmarish psychological horror film that fits in well with director Ari Aster’s previous works HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR and features a perfectly-cast Joaquin Phoenix, but it is an intense experience that is not for every audience and one that is even more disturbing than the previous two. Frustratingly, nothing is really resolved in this story, although we do get the answers to a few questions, and little is really revealed about Beau’s or his mother’s inner life or motivations.
BEAU IS AFRAID opens Friday, Apr. 21, in theaters.
RATING: 3 out of 4 stars
