Beau is Afraid and the audience is mindf**ked: A Review 

You might know Ari Aster from Hereditary, a story that begins with a woman grieving her mother and later gaslighting her son for another death in the family. You might also know Ari Aster from Midsommar, a story that begins with a woman grieving the death of her sister and then finding herself in a Swedish cult of sorts. The so-called cinephiles might have even watched Aster’s early short films, most of which again delved into twisted families and their twisted secrets. 

This year, the writer-director is back with a three-hour-long self-indulgent nightmare fuel AKA Beau is Afraid. And yes, family theatrics play a chief role yet again. Joker star Joaquin Phoenix who is easily the number one choice whenever a director needs a “depressed white male with existential crisis”, stars as the titular coward, Beau.

Dwelling in a dystopian town where stabbings happen on the daily and people walk and talk like zombies, Beau leads his mundane life with occasional visits to the therapist. But when he plans on meeting his mother (with whom he clearly has some dark Oedipal dependency going on), he goes through a series of unfortunate events that is bound to remind one of the early Covid-era paranoia. 

Beau swallowed an antidepressant without water and grows paranoid for the side-effects that might follow. But with all taps and bottles dried up, Beau makes a run for the grocery store on the opposite street. All this time, he leaves his apartment door unlocked as he had lost his keys a few moments earlier. In a fit of paranoia, he buys the water bottle but is delayed at the store counter for he doesn’t have the exact change to pay the shopkeeper. All this while, the hoodlums on the street enter his apartment and ransack it while Beau is locked out of his building altogether now.

The one paragraph that you read above captures just a fraction of anxiety-inducing claustrophobia that envelops Beau is Afraid. But unlike Hereditary, Aster doesn’t want to scare you anymore. He wants to make you laugh in a twisted way. While you will definitely empathise for Phoenix’s mild-mannered and gullible hero, you also can’t help but laugh at him like he’s a depressed Charlie Chaplin exploring the world with slapstick mannerisms and situational humour. 

Without delving much into the spoilers, Beau is Afraid primarily covers the blood-soaked, antidepressant-fuelled, hallucinatory journey that a man must undertake to meet his mother. Riding off that clout that he received from his previous two films, Aster gets full freedom to indulge in the bizarre hi-jinks that his brain (and his apparent mommy/daddy issues) can conjure. 

Expect animated psychedelic sequences, surreal flashbacks and just a seemingly never-ending odyssey towards a finale of twists that you would never see coming. Because of its ambitious runtime and multiple themes juxtaposed in no particular sequence, Beau is Afraid is clearly not a film made for everyone. 

Thankfully, Phoenix is in full form as Beau. If his naivety and teary-eyed screen presence was replaced by the over-the-top theatrics of any other actor, Beau is Afraid might have been even more Herculean to sit through.

Equal credit needs to be given to Patti LuPone who plays an older version of Beau’s mother for some brief yet integral scenes. Eating up all of her scenes with clenched teeth and an authoritative tone, she’s bound to remind you of Toni Collette’s goosebumps-inducing performance in Hereditary (one of the biggest Oscar snubs that still hurts to this day). 

For a film building unease out of closed spaces, Beau is Afraid is also filled with hauntingly stunning modern architecture thanks to production designer Fion Crombie (who earned an Oscar nomination for The Favorite). The last time, a swanky apartment led down some dark rabbit holes was in the case of Parasite.

But even beyond its Parasite-like modernism, Beau is Afraid’s production design also includes some immersive prop sets that just reaffirm the film’s theme of serving as a tragic play of sorts. Despite his timid nature, Beau is a perfect stand-in for the hero of a Shakespearean production or a Greek tragedy (he’s anyway a lot like Oedipus). 

Love it or hate it but you can’t just get it out of your mind. Aster’s bizarre ambitions border both artistic genius and artistic pretentiousness. Ultimately, it’s the genius that surpasses pretentiousness (it can be understandably opposite for others) but at a perplexing genre-bending pace. 

A word of caution in the end. It will be better if you avoid watching a film like this with your parents. Still, I wonder what Aster's mother would think about Beau is Afraid. 

We’re going with 4 out of 5 stars for Beau is Afraid.