Beau is Afraid

An imperfect movie that I'm glad exists.

Last night after putting our kid to sleep my wife and I cracked open a bottle of wine and decided to watch the latest by Ari Aster, Beau is Afraid. His two previous movies didn’t blow me away. I enjoyed Hereditary, but except for the cinematography I found Midsommar dull, Aster is a talented director so I wanted to give his new one a try. I also think Juaquin Phoenix is one of the best actors working right now, so anything with him in it gets elevated towards the top of the pile.

Beau is Afraid is a three-hour neurotic anxiety attack. Not a perfect movie. Maybe not even a good movie, my wife hated it, and I agree with her criticism of it. It’s self-indulgent, incoherent, and pretentiously try hard. It feels like a student art film that was given a budget beyond its merit causing it to spin into absurdity and self-indulgence.

Beau is Afraid starts with the title character played by Phoenix living in his crapsack apartment in a psychotic version of a modern city where corpses lie on the street, homeless naked psychotics stab you in the street, and all sorts of methheads roam in an unhinged orgy of drugs and violence. Beau is afraid of all of this, so much so that we see him running from his therapist visit to his apartment where he locks himself up, covering his head with a pillow so he can tune out the sounds of violence and degeneracy all around him.

The initial plot thrust is Beau’s upcoming trip to visit his mother, on the anniversary of his father’s death. A father who died before Beau was born. We find out through Beau’s therapy session that there is resentment and anxiety about his mother and that he is a man wreaked by anxiety, so much so that his therapist prescribes a significant amount of medication. All of his anxieties come to a head in the first part of the film when Beau forgets his keys in the door only to have them stolen along with his luggage. From this point forward it all goes downhill as he locks himself out of his building and his apartment gets taken over by a group of psychotic street people who have an orgy of drugs and insanity, destroying his place, and leaving him stranded in the street.

This first part of the film which takes place in what one can imagine as a midwestern normicons idea of New York is the highlight of the movie. From this point on each section becomes a bit more degraded and in a way, this makes sense now that I know that Ari Aster made a short film titled Beau that took place entirely in his apartment with similar themes. After the urban scenes, Beau wakes up in the pink-walled K-Pop postered room in some sort of suburban nightmare. He is being nursed to health by a strange couple, who rescued him from the naked homeless stabber. This portion of the movie falls strictly into the suburban world is scary territory overplayed in every horror movie since the 80’s but it does have an interesting twist of boomer-tier denialism that I liked.

Then the movie goes off the deep end into arthouse weirdness. Beau ends up at some sort of Renfaire theater group in the middle of the woods, a psychotic veteran comes to kill him, and finally, he ends up at his mother’s funeral, who isn’t dead, has awkward sex with Parker Poesy, sees his dead twin brother and a giant penis monster that might be his father, chokes his mother, and yeah…

So, I don’t know what the hell this movie was about. I’m guessing the trauma of a controlling Jewish girlboss mother, the lack of a father, anxiety, overuse of medication, sexual repression, and every other neurotic side effect of modernity.

But I liked it. Not because it was a great movie, but because it was made. I love art that challenges me, leaves me thinking, and induces feelings of discomfort and anxiety, and Beau is Afraid does all of this. This is a movie given a huge budget, allowing its creator to explore his artistic vision. In our era of non-stop Marvel movies, and idiotic remakes I’m glad someone can attempt to make something different, even if they don’t succeed in making something great.

So, in the end, I’m not sure what to think about Beau is Afraid, except that I liked it and I hope more movies like it get made.