Ari Aster has made his career creating horror films in which his main characters are pawns for far more sinister forces that manifest the nightmarish interiorities of his protagonists. Hereditary (2018) pits Toni Collette and her family’s generational trauma to be the poor unsuspecting victims of their queen Grandmother’s demonic cult; Midsommar (2019) portrays a grief-stricken Florence Pugh as being manipulated by both her gaslighting boyfriend and a Swedish commune they visit for a 90-year-old festival, only to be at the mercy of cult fishing out human sacrifices. Aster’s characters have no free will, and to that extent, their fates are predestined, and their misery and anguish push them further to their breaking points. The horror speaks for itself; anyone who ever felt powerless is relegated to either succumbing to these forces or paying the consequences for their deflections.

By the end of Beau Is Afraid (2023), Aster’s third directorial feature, there’s a lingering final shot that is bound to divide audiences as to whether Aster’s film about a nervously anxious, sexually repressed, mother-fearing middle-aged loser was in on the joke or was itself the joke where the audience was just catching up from the beginning. People will groan in disbelief: “Really, that’s what the last 2 hours and 55-ish minutes were all about,” or they will grin and smile against their better judgment and silently applaud Aster for having the chutzpah to intertwine the exaggerated reality of the narrative and the reality of watching Joaquin Phoenix plead for his misdeeds of being a tormented mommy’s-boy. There certainly won’t be a movie on this scale released by a major studio in quite a while. At least not with the kind of brass balls this movie contains. (After cleaning up the Oscars and maintaining a brand of atypical entertainment for a decade, A24 has cemented itself beyond being niche and small.)

From the moment of birth, Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) was introduced to a world of pain and anxiety. The first frame is a POV of an undisturbed Beau being yanked from his mother’s womb as she shrieks and yells in hysterics at the state of her newborn child. Now in his adult years, he lives in a highly fantastical reality of city life that consists of dead bodies on the street, a loose naked serial killer labeled as “Birthday Boy Stab Man,” homeless vagrants that surround his apartment complex, and neighbors that berate him to keep his music levels down, even when there’s no sound coming from his unremarkable room—madness, and pandemonium encapsulate the hell that Beau treks through on a daily basis. After a non-constructive session with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), it’s revealed he is going to visit his domineering mother, Mona (Patti LuPone), on the anniversary of his father’s death, whom Beau has never met. (It is later revealed his father died while conceiving Beau into his mother.) Through a series of high-wire, darkly comedic events, Beau finds himself missing his flight to his mother, and as he explains his situation over the phone, we bear witness to the piercing disappointment and failure she projects onto her sad sack of a son, as she trusts he’ll “do the right thing.” From there, Beau is pushed forward (either by the universe or pure bad luck) to return home to his mother and come to terms with the fears and consternations that have shackled him to being developmentally arrested.

Beau Is Afraid is broken into four distinct parts. When Beau finds himself being chased by his panic-induced misfortunes, he knocks himself into a deeper surrealist reality of angst. After being chased out of his apartment, he is struck by a truck driven by Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane); they treat his wounds and pamper him like a sick animal while he sets his comfort in Toni’s (Kylie Rogers) room, Grace and Roger’s daughter. The seemingly kind couple is born with more confusion and panic as Beau finds himself at the mercy of their possessiveness for him to take the place of their recently deceased son. Surprisingly, he’s not fond of being adopted and makes his way into a whimsical Peter Pan fantasy of traveling theater actors known as “The Orphans of the Forest,” and the second act is partially comprised of a dazzling extended stop-motion animation sequence directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (2018’s The Wolf House). As Beau finds the slightest comfort in fantasizing about a reality in which his fears and overwhelming mother don’t dominate him, and that illusion leads Beau to the gobsmacking third act that finds Pattie LuPone snatching the film from Phoenix and delivering a thunderous awe-inspiring monologue and revealing more to Beau that’s, perhaps, too much to process, much less, visualize.

The film is also intercut with Beau’s childhood, as we see teenage Beau (Armen Nahapetian) on board a cruise with his mother (Zoe Lister-Jones as the young Mona), as he finds himself love-struck by a young girl, Elaine (Julia Antonelli). This fuels Mona’s jealousy and attachment as she creepily informs Beau has a heart murmur that his father and his previous male generations had, where once they ejaculate they will die of a heart attack (safe to say, Beau has avoided all companionship despite promising Elaine he will wait for her when they’re old). This is one of many of Aster’s absurdly comedic bents that twist the film’s narrative to feeling more loose and malleable to the bizarre reality Beau is stuck in; essentially, Aster is tormenting Beau to the highest degree of lunacy that emasculates and ridiculous Beau. The humor is very specific and almost personal to a fault that it becomes hard to feel we’re not watching a filmed session for Ari Aster in therapy. Or some psycho-sexual awakening from a controlling mother.

From Beau is Afraid via A24

Credit to Joaquin Phoenix for managing to create one of the most remarkable and stretched-out performances of his career. He careens from long-jawed confusion, absolute terror and fright, to embodying a miserably adventurous spirit that’s fascinating and hilarious to watch. It’s God’s Job being put through a more humiliating grinder, and he also happens to take deviant glee in Beau making sense of his misgivings. It’s discomforting and hilarious watching Phoenix pop off the screen as if his head were on fire. Aster manages to emphasize the undercurrent of black humor that’s laden in most of his works.

There’s a sadistic quality in how his characters’ feeble attempts to clarify the preposterous circumstances they find themselves and Aster finds that amusing. Everything in the world is a threat to Beau. Aster and production designer, Fiona Crombie, creates an exaggerated reality that only an anxiety-ridden individual could imagine. The decrepit, faulty apartment building where graffiti paints the walls, the unstable elevator sparks when its door opens, and the grayish coloring that extends to the crime-infested city that replicates Gotham City–it’s a phenomenal start that highlights Beau’s interiority. The brisk and encompassing cinematography by frequent collaborator, Pawel Pogorzelski, lingers either behind Beau or by his side, as we can only extend our understanding of the world through Beau’s lens. 

Outside of Phoenix, it’s startling to see an actress like Patti LuPone come into full form in the third act and swiftly steal centerstage from Phoenix, making his performance as small as Beau feels when he must contend with his mother’s persona. LuPone is exemplary, every statement delivered with plenty of contempt and sadness, yearning for any semblance of unconventional love that resembles a skewed oedipal relationship, as LuPone’s Mona is more powerful and influential than just a dejected, pitiful mother. In limited scenes, Lister-Jones portrays a darkly obsessed and creepy young Mona who clings to Beau as more like a trophy than a son. Nathan Lane is a standout as the hip, sunshine-happy Roger, relating and conversing with Beau in a way that would be cringe-inducing if not for Lane’s charismatic presence. Some of the film’s best laughs are born from Lane’s laid-back, chilled aura, despite trying to comfort a disturbed PTSD soldier living in their house and constantly pilling his daughter with medications as if they were candy. Kylie Rogers’s Toni is a raging force of brash intensity who sees Beau as a threat to the tranquil life of her home (and specifically, her pink bedroom). For a young actress going toe-to-toe with Phoenix, she manages to make him feel just as small and confused as LuPone’s Mona. And lastly, credit to Parker Posey for her brief but exceptionally memorable scene as she portrays Elaine all grown up and comes back into Beau’s life in a zany, freakishly amusing sex scene that will go down as one of Aster’s best scenes of his filmography.

Undoubtedly, Aster was given full creative & financial freedom from A24 to make a film he wanted to make, and he’s certainly succeeded on that front. This isn’t to say you should love a film without being mindfully critical, as this elongated odyssey didn’t have to be three hours: there are stretches of the film that could’ve been shortened to maintain the narrative’s momentum, and the second act animation set piece still feels independent and shoe-horned into the film. (As if Aster wanted to incorporate an artsy animation sequence because he could.) This is not a perfect film; it’s not his best film, but it is surely the most unfiltered and squeamishly personal we may ever get–this is Aster challenging himself on what he can get away with and how much an audience can sympathize with a pathetic character as unremarkable as Beau. There is no mystery to solve, no inquiry to uncover, no significance that we can impart for ourselves once the credits roll. The film is a tragicomic phantasm of the most damning unconditional love that should ever exist between a parent and a child. Beau Is Afraid is not interested in you feeling neutral by the end of its cinematic crank: it’s blunt in its metaphors and open with its imaginative reality that allows Aster to explore some deep-seated emotional baggage and whether we love it or hate it, Aster is in a rarified group of filmmakers we’ll be talking about for the foreseeable future. 

Review courtesy of Amritpal Rai