Beau Is Afraid (2023)

It is easy to see why some would despise Beau Is Afraid. Not only is it an indulgent and very odd film, it also has a vein of humour running throughout that many people won’t find funny.

Written and directed by Ari Aster, what you have here is essentially an anxiety nightmare that shows us the journey of the titular Beau (mainly played by Joaquin Phoenix) as he leaves his home to visit his mother. Whether that visit is a good idea or not . . . well, it’s nothing compared to the trip that Beau is taking through his own psyche. And you could easily argue that what we see is entirely within Beau’s psyche. Basically, feel free to read this review as coming from someone who is trying to keep all interpretations available to other people who have yet to experience the film.

Although I wasn’t as immediately impressed with Aster’s earlier works as many others were, he is impossible to dismiss due to his commitment to a particular brand of stylish visuals bolted to a sense of growing dread, helped along once again by a score from Bobby Klric AKA The Haxan Cloak. I loved Midsommar (despite it so unabashedly riffing on a legendary horror genre title) and I went into this with cautious optimism. Although very different from his previous film, this is a dark comedy that fits perfectly in his filmography. No surprise really, especially when you consider that it is an expansion of a short film he made years ago.

Phoenix is as superb as you would expect in the central role, always taking his anxiety and awkwardness as far as he can, and the film easily rests on his shoulders for most of the runtime. It’s not a solo show though, and he’s given great support from Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Patti LuPone and Zoe Lister-Jones (playing two incarnations of one character), Parker Posey, and, as a younger Beau, Armen Nahapetian. Picking out one highlight is impossible, and there are other notable names here that I am failing to mention, but everyone is pitch-perfect and in line with Aster’s vision, even as it stumbles from sharp humour to outright horror, and from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The best thing about the film, however, is the truth at the heart of it. There are laughs and scares here that many of us have experienced at least once in life, pulsating cysts that grew from unattended childhood wounds, and Aster successfully grounds those identifiable elements in a moving collage of guilt, remorse, and extreme self-loathing, the kind that makes you see your own reflection as a grotesque puppet hung from the strings of every one of your perceived inadequacies.

Much like the central character, this is hard to love. But much like a parent of a child I have irreparably damaged with my own projected angst and insecurities, I still managed to love it anyway. 

8/10

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