Three’s a trend, so they say, and with Beau Is Afraid writer/director Ari Aster does just what his previous two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, did – he gets everyone talking. Terrible, some said. Brilliant, said others. Maybe it can be both at the same time, you could conclude, sitting right on the fence. And, fence-sitting coming naturally to some people, that is what it is – a brilliant meta-movie that simply doesn’t know when to stop and so outstays its welcome.
In one of many comedy moments which seem less well advised the longer Beau Is Afraid goes on – it’s three hours long – Aster starts the action at the moment Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is born, with a baby’s-eye-view shot of Beau emerging from his mother’s vagina, to a cold room where a woman (his mother, we’re guessing) is screaming in the corner. He is set upon by indistinct figures brandishing metallic, sucking instruments, picked up, held upside down and slapped.
Beau has good reason to be afraid, we surmise. And from here the action jumps decades into the future where the entirely passive and still fearfully anxious Beau is visiting a shrink to tell him of his latest attack of anxiety and existential guilt.
The doctor puts him on new meds, warns him about not taking the pills without water, which of course Beau does, thus launching us into the rest of the film, a paranoid, schizoid nightmare attack of psychosis in which Beau is subject to psychological torture, as if he’d been inserted into one pitiless horror movie after another.
It starts with Beau getting notes pushed under a door by a neighbour who is asking him to turn his music down. It’s the middle of the night, Beau is in bed and isn’t playing music. The notes keep coming, all night long, becoming increasingly aggressive, until the unseen neighbour eventually pushes the nuclear button and turns up his own music to a wall-shaking level.
From here an escalating series of unconnected scenarios, in which Beau is always the victim, some so bizarrely funny they’ll make you spit, others genuinely unsettling, yet others puzzling, kooky, thoughtful. Beau is stabbed, kidnapped, subjected to a home invasion, bullied by a teenager, pursued by a homicidal psychopath, is temporarily rescued by a Mansonesque theatre troupe in a forest, before finally arriving at his mother’s house, where he is too late for her funeral. She has died in a bizarre decapitation-by-chandelier accident.
By far the best bit comes right after Beau has seen his shrink early on, in the neighbourhood where Beau lives. Here Aster paints a hilariously caricatured picture of inner-city awfulness where deviants, weirdos and the criminally insane fill the streets – a psychotically angry man tattooed from head to toe growls, drug whores skank about as if they were catwalk models, two dead bodies just lie about entirely ignored, and a naked serial killer, Birthday Boy Stab Man, stalks the streets. “Police are looking for a circumcised, white…” the news report on the TV burbles before Beau switches it off.
Much, much later, after Aster has spent much of the goodwill he earns with this opener, Parker Posey turns up, as Elaine, the long-lost love of Beau’s young life, now back in middle age and seemingly ready to sleep with him. It’s a horny, funny and tender moment but Elaine’s appearance also holds out a glimmer of hope that Aster is going to give us a breather. Hopes soon dashed. No matter which way Beau turns, his over-active victim mindset conjures a worst possible scenario for him.
It looks fantastic, Aster’s films all do, with little details sweated over – an advertising hoarding in Beau’s neighbourhood reads “Defund Pigs/End Corruption/Share Wealth/Betray Your Mother/Live Forever!” – and Beau’s mother’s house where the finale takes place is a modernist building of coffee-table swishness.
For all the feverish ingenuity on display, eventually it’s not enough. We feel no pity because Beau is inaccesibly passive, in spite of Phoenix’s Herculean efforts. And there is no real throughline to grab a hold of. As a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life or an update on the journey around Dante’s circles of hell – brilliant. But as a movie…?
Beau Is Afraid – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
