Benjamin Linder

Ari Aster’s newest tale of uncanny horror follows a terrified and dependent Beau Wassermann in his mission to return to his mother’s home from a city apartment in a tale of Odyssean proportions, and peculiar singularity.

It takes minutes of the audience knowing Beau to realize that he has a knack for attracting the anxiety inducing. He lives in an apartment in the city. It could be New York or Los Angeles, any city where people are liable to scream at a stranger passing by. In the first minutes the audience watches a man jump from the top of a building to the encouragement of onlookers. A young boy buys an assault rifle from a table on the street. A tattooed man chases Beau into his apartment building, where he has resided alone for who knows how long. But the apartment is bare, Beau has few possessions of his own. We know Beau is polite. He’s concerned about the man about to jump. Beau always tries to do the right thing.

Beau is trying to get home as soon as he can. He’s delayed when his key are stolen and his apartment is taken over and destroyed by the people normally occupying the street, when he can finally re-enter, he tries to call his mom and finds out she’s dead. He then has to flee following a surprise naked wrestling match (which truly rivals that of Viggo Mortensen’s in “Eastern Promises”), before he’s held at gunpoint by a psychotic policeman, and hit by a car. All of this is how he’s spun into an adventure that only grows more violent and stranger from there.

Tonally “Beau Is Afraid” has the logic and texture of a dream. When he looks at the ticket to the plane he’s going to miss, the abbreviation for his state of destination is CR, which is not a state in the US. It has the characteristics of a dream, without the relief of everything being rendered inconsequential. Meaning that there’s no moment when Beau wakes up and shows the audience, it’s alright, the strangeness and the terror and the heartbreak didn’t matter because it was all in his head. Instead, Aster created a world around Beau which acts like a world of his creation, built by him but over which he has no power. He can only try to navigate its incoherence and nonsensical but somehow unified position towards him.

Beau is a fascinating character for his suffering because he’s very alone. That much is abundantly clear. But he’s not exactly suffering in his loneliness. His life is small, very small, almost, as it says in the movie, “the life of a ghost.” But he never exhibits an unachieved yearning for connection or companionship, a deep shame for his aloneness. Instead his suffering is entirely how against him the world is, simultaneously rejecting him and feeding his fear of it, making the audience feel grateful for the rejection. Few actors pull off the lone troubled man (but OK being alone) as well as Joaquin Phoenix. His performance here reminded me a lot of his performance in “Inherent Vice” as well as in “You Were Never Really Here.” Comedy-tragedy-wise, “Beau Is Afraid” runs somewhere in the middle, just as a side note. If there was a graph of genre with the y-axis as tragedy to comedy and the x axis as horror to drama, “Beau Is Afraid” would be a perfect circle connecting the ends of the axes, blotting out the graph entirely.

Joaquin Phoenix is not alone in delivering a perfect performance, which is entirely believable except for he’s really fast? What? He’s living alone eating the worst microwave meals imaginable but also doing sprints on the weekends? Anyway. Patti LuPone, Broadway acting legend, is brilliant as Beau’s overbearing mother, Mona Wassermann, as is her younger version, Zoe Lister-Jones. For anyone who has only knows Lister-Jones as Fawn Moscatto from “New Girl” she has depth and range that she hasn’t had the occasion to display. Her performance was deeply unsettling in the best way.

Aster’s camera and style remain terrific. The camera is at once intimately connected with the main character and profoundly uninterested in him. This is communicated through consistently framing the adult Beau off center, as if the camera wants to look at something, anything else, and suddenly jerking away from showing the audience something Beau himself wants to shield himself from. The writing, where it needs to be, is poetry. And the mood swings along an axis of whether or not it’s going to be OK, as some of the moments that would be unsettling don’t terrify because the elements are so absurd as to be harmless until they prove themselves otherwise, almost always teetering between making the audience laugh and making them jump. And it is funny, letting you chuckle along, winning you over before showing you just how scary absurdity can be.

After seeing the trailer and the movie’s runtime I asked if it needed to be three hours long. The movie in my head resembled a three hour soliloquy about loneliness and death where an adult, lost in their life, seeks the help of their omniscient younger self, and has a vision of themselves as an old man, when it’s too late, resulting in a sort of predictable time-is-a-flat-circle-and-we-live-as-we-dream-alone kind of movie. “Beau Is Afraid” is not at all the film I thought I was going to see. It’s not three hours because it takes three hours to tell that story. But it’s an epic poem of a movie. It’s the type of story that epic poems exist to tell. It’s the story of returning home, of reconciling one’s entire life with the forces that have been controlling it, the story of dealing with the fears that have been present in every moment of one’s life. And even though it’s slow, in parts, it manages to never feel boring. It reserves the right to be as long as it is because it manages to be consistently engaging for all three hours.

Almost no one I know has seen this movie and it has 70 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. I think the trailer is largely responsible for that. The movie has a plot, but one has the impression that the trailer was so worried about giving anything away that they gave us no sense of what we were about to watch. Secondly is the core conflict. “Hereditary” explored difficult family dynamics, especially failing one’s family. “Midsommar” explored lonely relationships. For those of us who have felt difficulty with our family or lonely in our relationships, it was easy for us to place ourselves in the conflict, either as victim or perpetrator. But “Beau Is Afraid” feels like it’s about a difficult mother, not difficult mothers or difficult parents. Moreover, it feels it’s about a difficult mother-son relationship, where the stakes and consequences and symbols are rendered along gender lines. Because of this, the core terror of the movie – the existential horror of meaningless tragedy – is too broad for an audience to really connect with, and the character-driven conflict is too specific to connect with. Everyone can see the genius at work in the film, and can appreciate it for that, but it lacks the emotional core that Ari Aster is so capable of building in the first act, which tragically keeps it from meaning very much to an audience outside an artistic perspective.