BEAU IS AFRAID: Embrace the Chaos, Appreciate the Ambition
Ari Aster's new movie is getting mixed reviews. Is it good, or is it bad? The truth is, it doesn't matter.
“I’m so glad we decided to get high before this.” - A woman at the front of the movie theater said to her friend, in her inside voice, after a stunned crowd sat in silence for a good two minutes.
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I weaved through rush-hour traffic to go deep into the Maryland suburbs, somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington, for an early Monday evening screening of Ari Aster’s new “passion project” Beau is Afraid. I was running late and didn’t have time to think about what I was about to see.
It had been at least six months since I saw a movie on the big screen, but early returns had me sold on a theater trip. Before it was released, some critics were calling it the most daring movie they’d ever seen. Others claimed it was the worst movie they’ve ever seen. Such visceral and impassioned responses generally mean a movie is worth checking out, even if it ends up fulfilling its worst-case scenario. I actually meant to see it the night it premiered, but in the spirit of full transparency, I struggled to find three-plus hours to dedicate to a movie showing. This was also why I was slightly hesitant to go see the film: if it was to be boring, paced poorly or ripe with bad acting, that’s a lot of time to sit in excruciating pain.
But, I mused, Aster deserved my time. Both Hereditary and Midsommar did something to my soul upon first watch, and I don’t even consider myself a horror movie fan. For all of his previous two films’ jump-scare tactics and dark motifs, the twisted psychological horror and cinematography are what set them apart. They were both tremendous successes, which is why Aster got the bag for his newest movie. Beau is Afraid is both his longest running and largest budget movie to date.
Aside from the knee-jerk social media reactions, another reason I was compelled to go see this movie was the clear trepidation exhibited by A24. As a distributor, A24 are the savviest internet marketers in the movie industry. The machine behind Moonlight, Uncut Gems and Everything Everywhere All At Once made those movies mega-hits before they even hit theaters (it also turns out that two of those movies are tremendous, and the other cleaned house at the Oscars). Then, ahead of Beau is Afraid, there was nary a peep, radio silence. It’s clear that A24 put barely any money towards the movie’s marketing efforts, which generally indicates the suits behind the budgets were wary of its success at best. The humor in this assumption compounds when you remember that it cost $35 million to make this film, the most expensive in the already storied history of A24.
The financiers in charge of Beau is Afraid may have been scared but the creatives involved weren’t. The press tour for the film was interesting enough to drum up valuable social media discourse. On April Fool’s Day, Ari Aster invited fans to New York’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema to view a director’s cut of 2019’s Midsommar. Instead, they were treated to a premiere of Beau is Afraid and a subsequent Q&A by Emma Stone, who kicked off the proceedings by asking Aster, “Are you okay, Ari?”
This, by the way, was also a Q&A session that was supposed to include comedian Nathan Fielder— an anxious comedy heavyweight— but did not, because he allegedly took too much acid with Aster himself before the movie premiere. “That’s likely the reality of the situation,” Phoenix mused, his eyes a million miles beyond the crowd. I think he might’ve also taken some acid; he looked like a man working hard to avoid spontaneous combustion.
In a separate interview, Phoenix urged young, exploratory moviegoers to play it safe, “I just wanted to make a public service announcement and say, do not take mushrooms and go see this fucking movie.”
This is why, when the woman broke the suburban Maryland theater’s stunned silence on Monday with a welcome quip about getting high before the show, I hope, for her sake, she just meant weed. I don’t know if I could have made it past the opening scene under the influence of any psychedelics at even a mild dose.
Because this is what I saw.
I saw a phallic, Freudian epic. There’s an intentional lack of context about our main character, Beau (Phoenix): a poor, underdeveloped and anxious man living in squalor, crippled by harrowing anxiety about his upcoming trip home to see his wealthy mother. After his key is stolen along with his suitcase, he delays his trip, much to his mom’s dismay. A series of absurdly unfortunate events strike, so he waits until the following day to book his trip. These events include but are not limited to: a neighbor who mistakes Beau’s silence with accusations of loud music coming from his studio, and thus launching into audible warfare; his apartment being overrun by ne’er-do-wells and hooligan junkies desecrating every square inch of the place; and a penny-pinching convenience store owner who won’t let him slide, three cents short of a much-needed water. By the time he’s able to book a flight, he learns his mom was struck and killed by a chandelier.
This news breaks Beau, and no sooner do two and a half more hours of madness ensue. Per Letterboxd’s apt one sentence review of the film, “A paranoid man embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother.” This is an understatement. The rest of this movie was excavated from the deepest recesses of Aster’s brain. The film feels like less of a “passion project” in the flesh and more of a deep-rooted exposé of familial fears only partially unpacked. We witness three hours of human discovery, confusion, psychosis, hope, death, sadness, nostalgia and anxiety in excess. We’re not even sure any of what’s happening is real. Beau, a lonely, celibate, middle-aged virgin represents some sort of dark sexual repression, and is an unreliable narrator. His mom enacted some deep-seated trauma on him, something terrible, something we don’t find out until the movie’s end and provides us with no real answers. It’s a master stroke that moves mountains for the first 45 minutes and then stretches another hour into two, but it still works. The movie veers into dark, absurd, laugh-out-loud comedy as much as it does the fears deep inside a man’s soul: a nightmare for anyone with mommy issues or anxiety. The feelings ebb and flow with the uneven pace, but the sad beauty of Phoenix’s performance carries a weight; Beau’s saga is anchored by the endless grappling of what it all means. What is masculinity, morality, manipulation? What does that look like? His therapist, the only person we see Beau explore his mommy issues with, betrays his trust. His mom is allegedly in on the masquerade and is relayed each word of every session by the faux therapist— probably the most heart-stopping betrayal for a man obsessed with earning his mother’s love in endless futility.
Otherwise, it’s nearly impossible to give a blow-by-blow of this movie. So much happens (but to some who don’t trust the narrator, maybe nothing happens). At one point, we become acquainted with a PTSD-riddled war veteran with the scars of Iraq in his eyes and the trauma in his mind. He lives in the back of a surgeon’s house in an attached trailer and later breaks into Beau’s mom’s attic with heavy artillery, unsuccessfully sparring with a giant penis monster that impales his skull. Beau— who is told that if he ejaculates he will die— gets his first ever nut off with a long lost childhood love to the dulcet tones of Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby”, brimming with the relief of life, until he realizes the woman he just had sex with died instead.
No, I did not ChatGPT an absurd movie plot. These things actually happened— on screen, at least— along with many more inexplicable moments. Nonetheless, Phoenix gives a masterful, committed performance. It’s a lot to take in, and even more to process, but it’s not hard to “get”. It tows the line and sometimes crosses into a caricature of a black tragicomedy but it is done with just enough earnestness, brute force and humor to work.
Beau is Afraid is far from a perfect movie, but aren’t most? It’s ambitious, daring, tense and deeply moving. Even people who hated the movie— those who unleashed on Twitter or stood up yelling in movie theaters as credits rolled— were responding viscerally. The worst thing a movie can do is make you feel indifferent; hating art is much closer to loving it than we think. Take, for example, Martin Scorsese’s comparison of the public’s response to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, a period piece that was widely panned upon release but has since become a popular favorite of his legendary catalog. Or take David Lynch’s Eraserhead, his debut film about a hopeless man fathering an alien baby in a stark industrial wasteland. Upon its release, Eraserhead was labeled as the most divisive film of its time. Most people, in fact, hated it, writing it off as a low budget shock-inducer. But, over time, it transcended from a random flop to a cult favorite to an American classic. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Beau is Afraid follow the same arc, as the movie evokes the same feelings of uneasiness, hesitation about familial trauma and hopelessness. For as much as this film is Aster’s homerian take on The Odyssey, it’s also his Eraserhead.
As more reviews come in, the general consensus seems to be more forgiving than some earlier viewers. Maybe it’s because they are less reactionary or addicted to hot takes. Or, maybe, it’s because the movie is actually good. I’m still not 100% sure— after all, it is the most unhinged piece of cinema I’ve ever seen. But what does it matter? I spent three hours in a movie theater alone thinking, laughing, reeling, holding back tears, and then woke up every morning since, wanting nothing more than to do it again.