In the Flesh: Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster’s two preceding films — Hereditary, which is good, and Midsommar, which is not — feel very much like horror for the perpetually frightened. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Paranoia is a rich source of cinematic tension, animating classic horror and suspense films across the decades. Where such films can trip up is in neglecting to think through the imagery, actions, and archetypes used to manufacture that sense of anxiety. Consider the naked, elderly cultists in Hereditary, or the nebulously consensual mating scene in Midsommar — what’s at the root of those fears? What does a fear response toward those onscreen happenings say about the filmmaker, the viewer, and the broader cultural context in which the film came to be? With Beau Is Afraid, Aster finally digs into the rich terroir of his visual and thematic preoccupations. Overbearing mothers, inadequacy, grief, the meticulous translation of real-world pain into symbolic simulacra. It’s all here, framed with a panicky, absurdist self-awareness somewhere between Looney Tunes and Natural Born Killers.

“Excuse me,” Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) asks a maintenance worker in his building. “My key and bag were just here a second ago.” The maintenance worker doesn’t even pause. “You’re fucked, buddy,” he chuckles, and scampers away into another apartment as Beau asks plaintively why he’d say such a thing. No one’s fair to Beau. No one shows him any mercy or understanding. No one believes what he says or respects his wishes. He’s a hapless little lump in oversized clothes, a deflated football being kicked around for fun, a receptacle for the garbage emotions of the world around him. When he finds himself suddenly thrust into a kind of Defending Your Life scenario, his defense attorney is positioned so far away we can hardly see or hear him, and the first time he makes anything approaching a coherent objection he’s thrown to his death by faceless security personnel while the prosecution (Richard Kind) continues to list examples of filial ungratefulness from Beau toward his mother Mona (Patti LuPone).

To say Aster’s film is Freudian is to rate water “pretty wet”. Even before we see the monstrous Starship Troopers-esque penis monster kept hidden away in Mona’s attic or listen to her regale a young Beau with the bizarre and apparently invented story of his father’s death by cardiac event at the moment of Beau’s conception, even before Mona shrieks that he embarrassed her by not breastfeeding, the whole thing is so soaked in incestuous funk it would make that infamous Folger’s ad blush. The film opens with Mona screaming hysterically at her attending physician and nurses as she gives birth to Beau, berating them for mishandling him, inventing maladies and injuries left and right. Every inch of Beau Is Afraid shows us a piece of the mosaic of repression, passivity, and conditioned terror that is Beau himself, a human being defined in toto by his anxieties and so catatonically withdrawn as a result that the people around him seem almost inspired to new heights of cruelty by his evident weakness.

Not every part of Beau works as smoothly. The lengthy digression into immersive theater as Beau struggles to envision himself as a full human being only to crash repeatedly into the strange lies and phobias that form the boundaries of his existence is an unappealing mixture of high concept and didactic, for example. It’s conceptually funny to watch a man try and fail to contextualize his own existence, but the pacing isn’t quite right, and the narrative mechanisms getting us there are on the clunky side. But watching Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan wax nostalgic about their dead son while cheerfully torturing his surviving squadmate (and potentially his killer) and periodically declaring, “the man’s a hero” as he punches through windows and screams in the background is more than ample compensation. Parker Posey’s unbelievable ass, a fully nude serial knife murderer named the Birthday Boy Killer who stabs his victims in their “necks and guts” per a news report Beau watches in bewildered terror — it’s like watching The Shining climb out of a Tim and Eric sketch. You aren’t going to see that anywhere else.