'Beau Is Afraid' Review: Ari Aster Trades Suspense And Fear For Prolonged Confusion
Ari Aster, are you okay?
Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid. Courtesy of A24.
In recent years, Ari Aster has become one of the most unique voices in film, tackling grief with 2018’s Hereditary and relationships with 2019’s Midsommar. With his latest feature, Beau Is Afraid, Aster attempts his boldest project yet, covering parental issues and anxiety in a three-hour odyssey. At its core, Beau Is Afraid is about a mother and son and the complicated relationship they have. This topic isn’t hard to understand and is something that may resonate with the film’s audience, but fails to do so because it isn’t fleshed out until the final 30 minutes of the 179-minute runtime. Instead, we start at the literal beginning, with a point-of-view from Beau’s perspective during his birth. This is the first time Aster uses flashing lights and muffled noises to disorient us in hopes of instantly immersing us into this story, a motif that recurs far too often for a story of this caliber. We’re then introduced to the world that Beau lives in — a world in which I’d hate to exist in. We see the utter violence and chaos through the form of “Birthday Boy Stab Man,” a serial stabber who was dressed in, well, his birthday suit. It doesn’t take long for Aster’s attempts to immerse us in Beau’s world to become overdone, acting as more of a distraction from the true plot, which at that point in the film, was severely lacking.
(L-R) Armen Nahapetian & Zoe Lister-Jones in Beau Is Afraid. Courtesy of A24.
The story finally gets moving at a comedic moment — one that feels more significant once the story has been finished — when a pen runs out of ink as Beau attempts to write “love,” on a present for his mom as he prepares to go visit her. The act of including minute details is something Aster has done in previous films and is just as prominent here. While this is the first big example of this motif, Aster previously did it before during our introduction to Beau as a person when his therapist (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson) asks him, “Do you wish [your mother] was dead?” Beau responds by saying no, as one would do, but is that how he feels? The film finally begins its story when, apropos of Beau’s response to the idea of his mother dying, she dies. It’s revealed that a chandelier fell on her, instantly crushing her head. This sends Beau into a downward spiral as his visit to his mother have evolved into a trip to attend her funeral. This should be the film’s turning point, allowing audiences to connect with the main character through the universally shared experience of grief. While Aster slightly leans into this, displaying how news like this can affect a person, it’s almost instantly played off for laughs, setting our dragged-out odyssey in motion.
While Aster’s previous films were more traditional horror films, Beau Is Afraid certainly isn’t. The film aims to lean more toward a comedic genre, with fewer jokes landing than intended, as if the audience Aster had in mind while crafting the film was himself. While this doesn’t create a bad final product, it certainly makes the film less accessible to viewers who don’t find themselves agreeing with every choice the auteur makes. As we venture with Beau on his journey, we don’t actually visit many locations. Generally, a streamlined story isn’t the best thing, as it can create a brisk runtime and keep audiences drawn into the story, but in this case, adding more settings would’ve been a better choice, as it may have forced the pacing to speed up.
Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid. Courtesy of A24.
Speaking of the film’s pacing, the pacing is the primary factor that stops Beau Is Afraid from coming close to greatness, turning a nearly three-hour-long movie into one that feels at least twice the length. Had Beau’s plot been strong enough and added ideas that garnered a story that requires this much time, a runtime of this length would’ve been acceptable. We’ve seen numerous films such as Avatar: The Way of Water, Babylon, and Avengers: Endgame succeed with long runtimes due to the fact that scenes are cut short and have many more sequences compiled into the finished cut, resulting in brisk pacing that propels viewers through a long runtime. The problem, in this case, is that most of the primary (and secondary) sequences in the film overstay their welcomes, hitting a point where they just become buffers to chunks of the plot that come every few minutes. This becomes extremely evident when, at the end of the second act, we’re taken through a 20-minute “animated” sequence detailing a fictionalized version of Beau’s journey that does nothing except act as a filler and more distraction from what the film is truly depicting, which doesn’t get unveiled until the final minutes of the runtime.
Due to the nature of Beau Is Afraid, it’s impossible for the film to succeed without strong performances keeping everything together, which it has in excess. Joaquin Phoenix is marvelous as the anxiety-ridden Beau, easily putting us into Beau’s shoes on this journey, adding to the sense of mystery and confusion surrounding the truth of the events played out on screen. Phoenix is met, and sometimes outshined, by the ever-brilliant Patti LuPone, who steals the screen with every chance given, even though she has minimal time on screen. The thing is that just because Beau Is Afraid has the elements of a good movie — strong performances, a visionary writer/director, excellent production design — it doesn’t make it great. It falls victim to a problem that plagues many films in that the vision outweighs the execution, resulting in a confusing, stretched-out film that could’ve been much stronger had it been given more guide rails. There are points where the film is so self indulgent that it expects us to enjoy it purely because it’s well-made, and that simply isn’t how it works.
Beau Is Afraid is now open in LA/NY, and plays everywhere April 21.
