A few years back, writer/director Ari Aster broke the horror mold with his films Hereditary and Midsommar, his Polanski-inspired sense of dread and interest in psychological nuance bolstering a genre that was subsisting on paranormal scares and torture porn. He employs those familiar tropes in his latest horror-comedy, Beau is Afraid, but instead of utilizing restraint, which is his strength, he flings us down a wormhole of Freudian anxiety, nightmarish surrealism, and extreme hyperbole.
Although Aster’s tireless ambition is on display, his slow-burn style is nowhere to be found in the A24 release. Beau is a long, exhausting pilgrimage through one man’s shortcomings ripped straight out of a Philip Roth novel and filtered through Clive Barker’s imagination. It’s a fairy tale rendering of adult hell.
A four-part episodic journey, the movie opens in a birth canal (yep, get ready) where our hero (sort of) Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) sees the world for the first time and is immediately smacked in the ass by a doctor; an implication that it’s all downhill from there. Four decades later, a plump and balding Beau sits in his therapist’s office (a weirdly mild Stephen McKinley Henderson) as he discusses the prospect of visiting his mother that weekend. Although Beau says he’s looking forward to it, he’s obviously discomforted by the mere thought of seeing her.
Before ending the session, Beau’s therapist reminds him to drink water when taking his pills. Apparently, Beau has a bad habit of impulsively swallowing his meds in fits of anxiety and rage, which makes sense since he lives in the worst neighborhood in America. Every trip home involves a life-calculating sprint past knife-wielding psychopaths, dead bodies, and meth-addled zombies. These sequences are so explosively outlandish and deranged, you’d think the entire story exists in Beau’s head, but since Aster never really frames his narrative in that fashion or anchors his audience to a…
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