28/04/2023 - Joaquin Phoenix is the perennially anxious mama’s boy in Ari Aster’s grim, often hilarious follow-up to Midsommar and Hereditary

If I had filed my Beau Is Afraid [+see also:
trailer
film profile] review only several hours after concluding my screening, it would be couched in mild disappointment, although chased with gratitude for its intermittent passages of wonder. Half a week on, the temptation is to be more generous; like the experimental pharmaceuticals that our hero Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) gulps throughout its loping runtime, its overall effect and significance requires patience, and maybe tapping your foot for a while, for it to kick in. Always read the fine print on the label.  

This 179-minute “zonky nightmare comedy” — as described by its creator Ari Aster (late of recent horror canon entries Hereditary and Midsommar) — beguiles, repulses and underwhelms, these three descriptors often corresponding to the sequential episodes of the plot. There’s twee cardboard cut-out animation, gigantic genitalia sight gags, all concluding with a computer-generated environment incarnating a literal “uncanny valley.” Reported as the highest-budgeted production to date by upstart US distributor A24 (whose industry cred was consolidated by its Best Picture Oscar triumphs for Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once), it comes to several European territories today as a co-production with Canada and the Finnish venture capital fund IPR.VC (see our reporting). 

The Sopranos showed how depicting classical Freudian psychoanalysis on screen could make for enhanced dramatic shading, rather than an annotation to baldly explain subtext. Beau Is Afraid is akin to an epically feature-length Sopranos dream sequence, bookended by duologues with Beau’s own shrink (Stephen McKinley Henderson), with all Oedipal anxieties and creatures from the id splayed out onto the outer world, literalising the concept of projection. Beau, a paunchy middle-aged schlub, under the nub of his elite business magnate mother Mona (Broadway stalwart and irregular screen actress Patti LuPone), lives in a depressive stupor in a bedsit above a sex shop (called “Ejectus Erectus” — in case there was any doubt Aster’s inner 12-year-old should take a co-director credit). 

There are no geographic markers, but we can assume we’re observing urban, non-coastal America, where an endless forest lies in wait across the highway that connects the leafy suburbs to a  dilapidated city centre, itself strewn with homicidal vagrants, who will stab you, glare at you whilst mouthing wordlessly, and kick you out of your home so they can hold a chaotic all-night rave. But the plot trajectory is set in motion by Mona symbolically liberating Beau from this morass, as mother and son are set to reunite at his childhood home on the anniversary of his father’s mysterious death.

Further exposition of this backstory provides one of the greater disappointments of this film in relation to Hereditary, which played the theme of a cursed familial lineage in a far more persuasive manner. In a sad sense, Aster has regurgitated a family history many critics have assumed to be refracted autobiography, first in Hereditary as tragedy, and here as farce. The concluding sequence of the former film, embossed by composer Colin Stetson’s rib-quaking brass sounds, was awesomely powerful, thrumming with occult significance; here, Aster offers a more bathetic send-off, but the deceptive power of Beau’s odyssey back to the symbolic womb slowly dawns. 

Beau Is Afraid is a production of the United States, Canada and Finland, staged by A24, Access Entertainment, IPR.VC and Square Peg. A24 hold world rights.