Beau Is Afraid (2023)

By about the second hour of the mammoth new picture from director and writer Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), I was already uncomfortably remembering the excesses of Mother!, Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 exercise, and thinking of the kind of movies that are sold on the premise of “from the mind of.” Then Beau Is Afraid went seriously deep into its bizarre mother fixations and all I could think of was the comparison. Look, at least I can say Beau Is Afraid is better than Mother! It’s often entertaining, scary, a little thrilling, even though it doesn’t make much sense. But the not making much sense does get to be a problem. From the mind of Ari Aster, and with a pretty impressive cast in tow—Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey (!), Stephen McKinley Henderson, Richard Kind, and Bill Hader, among others—comes a head explosion of a mother and son relationship. It starts in a nightmare dystopia of urban breakdown. Is it all a dream or perhaps a paranoid fantasy of Beau Wasserman (Phoenix)? It might be comedy. Corpses lie in the street unattended while panicked policemen assiduously ignore them and draw down on anyone who approaches for help. Beau is a nervous, high-strung fella in therapy, preparing for a visit home to see his mother, evidently his first in some time. About the first hour is spent on the hellscape of Beau’s life. Scary neighbors blame him for the unexplained loud noises shaking the walls of their apartments. An unlikely home invasion goes down related to Beau’s loss of house keys just before he is set to leave on his trip to see his mother. Then he gets word that his mother has been killed, her face and head crushed by a falling chandelier. Her wishes were that she not be buried until Beau can be there. He’s attacked in the street by a naked serial killer and thus held up due to his serious injuries, waking in the home of a strange professional couple who are caring for him. But all is not as it seems and strange things go on and on and on, connected only by random circumstances. Beau Is Afraid is more entertaining than Mother!, but that’s a low bar to clear. I wish there would have been more story to it and/or that it were just shorter. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is an interesting high point—he really has some range. Still, for me, “from the mind of” is not enough by itself, even if the mind in question is a promising or impressive one. David Lynch and the Coen brothers have both had the sentiment applied to them. I’d say Aster qualifies on the strength of his previous features. But I’m hoping this is just something he needed to get out of his system.