‘Beau Is Afraid’: Review

Dir/scr: Ari Aster. US. 2023. 179 mins

Ari Aster’s audacious third feature mixes unsettling tension, absurdist humour and crushing pathos to create a nightmarish modern world in which to trap its insecure main character. A stunning exploration of one man’s profound mother issues, Beau Is Afraid is yet another superb platform for Joaquin Phoenix as the sympathetic anchor for the story of a son on a metaphorical journey in the wake of the death of his complicated mother. While this psychodrama satirises our tendency to scapegoat our parents for our own failings, Aster is even more searing when he takes Beau’s trauma seriously, resulting in a film with meticulously executed tonal command and emotional nuance.

Beau Is Afraid has its share of terrors, although labelling this film as horror wouldn’t quite do justice to the script’s idiosyncratic approach.

Opening in the US on April 21, with a UK rollout planned for May 19, Beau Is Afraid operates on a much broader canvas — and with a bigger budget — than the writer-director’s previous two A24 films, Hereditary ($83 million worldwide) and Midsommar ($48 million). Phoenix will bolster the picture’s profile, but at three hours, the challenging Beau may prove to be a tougher commercial proposition. Still, adventurous audiences will rush to the theatre, with the more obsessive perhaps going multiple times in order to try to unravel the script’s teasing mysteries.

Phoenix plays Beau, a balding, mild-mannered, middle-aged depressive who is on medication, sees a therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and is planning to visit his disapproving, domineering mother. He misses his flight as a direct result of his anxious demeanour and general ineffectualness, and by the time he composes himself to book another ticket, she has died. 

In a more traditional film, Beau would simply attend his mother’s funeral, but Aster instead hurls his protagonist into a series of misadventures, each of them forcing Beau to confront strange individuals who are obstacles along his path. Among them are a disturbingly banal suburban couple named Grace and Roger (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane), who care for Beau after he is involved in a devastating accident, their deceptively cheery surface belying a quiet menace underneath. Beau Is Afraid has been constructed like a quirky epic odyssey, with Beau’s interactions sparking surreal memories that offer hints of how his mother (played by Zoe Lister-Jones in the flashbacks) may or may not have stunted her son’s emotional development.

Production designer Fiona Crombie gives each new realm its own vivid look, starting with the rundown city where Beau resides in a frighteningly drab apartment. Whether it’s an urban sprawl’s post-apocalyptic tenor or the chillingly antiseptic perfection of Grace and Roger’s home, Beau Is Afraid never lets Beau feel safe in his surroundings, a sense of lingering unease amplified by Bobby Krlic’s moaning score. Aster places us in seemingly familiar settings, but there’s often something slightly off, echoing Beau’s fragile mental state as he processes his mother’s death and the impact she had on him. As we’ll learn, he never knew his father, and the film slowly fills in the blanks of this fraught mother-son relationship, with Lister-Jones hauntingly ephemeral as an unreachable figure whom young Beau both loved and feared.

As with the writer-director’s earlier pictures, Beau Is Afraid has its share of terrors, although labelling this film as horror wouldn’t quite do justice to the script’s idiosyncratic approach. While there are certainly visual shocks, the scares are often mixed with dark comedy as Beau is tormented by everything from mean teenage girls to an unstable war veteran played by a feral Denis Menochet. Aster repeatedly flirts with the bizarre, but even his most outrageous flights of fancy — which recall the dyspeptic oddity of Charlie Kaufman’s films — are tied to an emotional groundedness attuned to Beau’s soulful searching.  

In pictures such as The Master and You Were Never Really Here, Phoenix portrayed characters on the brink of unravelling, desperately trying to beat back the demons threatening to destroy them. Beau isn’t quite as volcanic, which allows the Oscar-winning actor to deliver a performance that’s both withdrawn and intense. As the film’s title suggests, the character is bowed by life, his myriad issues encompassing guilt, grief, shame, sexual hang-ups, fear of abandonment and chronic loneliness. It’s risky playing such a passive individual — Beau’s crippling meekness is another of his shortcomings — and yet Phoenix does a remarkable job in making him a compelling presence. The further Beau travels along his strange journey, the darker and more twisted the path becomes, the destination as much about returning home as it is about Beau discovering some sort of fundamental truth about himself. Beau may be afraid, but Aster and Phoenix’s bracing character study is fearless.