Beau is Afraid (Spoiler) Review: An Insane Visual Journey that Almost Defies Description

★★★★☆

Ari Aster, director of Beau Is Afraid, is a relatively new director on the scene, but he has already developed a penchant for producing, for want of a better term, some seriously f***ed up films. Primarily a horror director by trade, Aster is the mastermind behind two of my favourite horror films, not just of the last decade, but of all time. If you haven’t seen 2018’s Hereditary, or 2019’s Midsommar, then I would thoroughly recommend checking them out; both films are frightening, creepy, and impeccably crafted from front to back. So, does Beau is Afraid maintain this positive momentum, or does the director finally falter at the third time of asking?

Beau is Afraid is probably my least favourite of the three movies overall. However, it’s also one of the most bat-shit insane, unexpectedly funny, and unabashedly weird films I’ve ever seen at the cinema. It straddles a multitude of different genres, keeping Aster’s roots in horror, while adding elements of a Black Comedy, Psychological Thriller, Fantasy, and even a classic Adventure film. As I’ve come to expect when seeing an Ari Aster movie, pretty much everything from the acting, to the cinematography, is fire. You have a predictably powerhouse exhibition of acting from Joaquin Phoenix, who is arguably the best actor working today, and the rest of the supporting cast do a stellar job too. The only thing that really holds the movie back for me personally is the pacing, particularly towards the third act.

But what is Beau is Afraid actually about? To be frank; I don’t know. I could give you a long-winded, semi-pretentious breakdown of what I think the film is saying, or attempting to say (which I’ll have a stab at later), but genuinely even trying to break down the canonical events of the plot is a bit iffy. We are introduced to the titular Beau Wassermann, played by Phoenix, an anxiety-ridden recluse living in a crime-ridden city that could give Batman’s Gotham a run for its money. The film opens with Beau talking to his therapist about an upcoming trip to visit his mother, a scene which subtly hints towards their relationship not being the most healthy or normal one going. We later learn that Beau’s father actually died while conceiving him due to a heart murmur, and this, combined with his mother’s abusive, clingy, and passive aggressive parenting style, has given Beau a deathly fear of nearly everything, especially sex. Beau’s therapist prescribes him some fancy new pills to help settle his nerves for the trip; they must always be taken with water to avoid crippling side effects, and Beau is then sent on his way.

Returning to his apartment home is in itself a daunting prospect for Beau, who has to (almost comically) slalom his way through crackheads, muggers, and gangs just to get back to his front door. It is suggested through contextual clues that his neighbourhood isn’t quite as scary as is presented to us, but rather we are seeing the world as Beau sees it; which is a very scary place indeed! Beau’s anxieties kick into another gear while he tries to sleep, and disaster strikes the following day when his luggage and house keys are stolen from the corridor just outside his front door. Another bizarre chain of events sees Beau locked out of his flat (which is promptly invaded by all of the mentals living in his neighbourhood), informed over the phone by a UPS delivery man that his mum has just been found crushed to death by a chandelier, before being chased by a naked man with a knife and hit by a truck (yes, really). This is where I lose confidence in describing the plot. The events that spiral on from here can essentially be summarised as a kind of lucid, waking nightmare for Beau, careening from set-piece to set-piece on an anxiety-fuelled mission to attend his mother’s funeral. That is, perhaps unsatisfactorily, the gist of the film.

In case it wasn’t already clear, Beau is Afraid is a fairly surrealist piece of media, and one that I think, for the most part, greatly succeeds at everything it is trying to pull off. While not as unrelentingly “scary” as something like Hereditary, it functions very well as an unsettling, slow-burn psychological thriller. This is in large part down to the quality of the acting on display, with Joaquin Phoenix’s confused, weak, and bumbling performance anchoring a film that could very easily have devolved into a confused mush of ideas. He is simply phenomenal in the film. I’d go as far as saying that every single actor in the film does a flawless job; with the film moving very often from distinct moods, settings, and tones. Each new side character brings something interesting to their part in the film, which not only keeps the film vibrant and exciting, but also helps build this sense of scale and odyssey to the journey that Beau is going through here.

I interpreted this film as being an almost entirely (or at the very least, thematically) inward journey into Beau’s subconscious, one that delves into all of his fears and anxieties. Chief among these are his relationships with his mother, sex, masculinity, and fear. Ari Aster’s direction is masterful in the sense of portraying the logistics, emotion, and tone of such a journey. Everything from the visual language, to the sound design, to the intricacies and details of the production design, is immaculate, and takes the viewer with Beau on this physical and emotional journey. And on top of all this, Beau is Afraid is strangely hilarious! The first 45 minutes in particular are a masterclass in dark comedy, watching Beau fumbling about and being terrorised by every possible aspect of his life was genuinely very, very funny, and Phoenix executes this all perfectly with his performance.

Beau is Afraid has consistently, colloquially, been summarised as “Mommy Issues: The Movie”, and to be fair this is pretty much spot on. The film can almost be considered the inverse of something like Jordan Peele’s Nope (which I have also reviewed, check out my review of Nope here), which had a very standard, point A to point B plot structure with a very complex, foundational subtext of contextual themes. Beau is Afraid, on the other hand, has some fairly simple motifs propping it up, that are explored through the approach one might take to a Jackson Pollock painting; a chaotic, free-form smashing together of different visual ideas, set-pieces, and plot machinations.

The lynchpin of this movie is without a doubt Beau’s relationship with his mother, who in the universe of this film is the CEO of a huge business conglomerate. I don’t think there’s ever been such a viscerally-effective examination of this type of mother-son relationship in film; Aster ruthlessly skewers and brings to life the abusive subtleties of a smothering, passive-aggressive and manipulative mother. The film is almost presented like some kind of murder-mystery whodunnit, except the crime in the crosshairs is understanding why Beau is such an absolute wet noodle of a man. The more we unravel and understand this noodle, the more we can appreciate why he is the way he is. In this respect, the film is particularly engaging and engrossing as both a character study of an abused and vulnerable person, and as an exploration of what the journey to becoming this way looks like. Again, it does such a good job at portraying an abusive mother, and a lot of the most unsettling and lingering scenes come from this idea.

With all these ideas considered, what this film excels at the most is showcasing Beau as a character, both in the portrayal by Phoenix, and in the journey that he goes on throughout the film. My favourite interpretation of the film is definitely the idea of it being an almost entirely inward journey of self-reflection on Beau’s part, fuelled by those pesky pills that he took without water at the very start of the film. I believe that the core event of the film, his mother’s surprise death, doesn’t actually happen, and that the subsequent events of the film are visual manifestations of Beau’s relationship with his mother, how he feels about this relationship, and his guilt at secretly wishing for his mother to actually be dead. One of the first significant lines of dialogue in the film even hints at this, with Beau’s therapist asking him if he wishes his mother was dead. It’s quite a probing thing to ask someone as bumbling and nervous as Beau, but I think the answer, deep in his subconscious, is an emphatic yes!

In terms of what actually happens, I believe that Beau does indeed visit his therapist, get locked out of his apartment, and get hit by a car. Everything else, from the characters to the set-pieces, I think are at best delusions brought on by the drugs he took and the physical and emotional trauma he’s gone through thus far. Not only this, but I think the various set-pieces and acts of the film are carefully constructed to show us the journey of Beau realising that he hates his mother, but is ultimately a prisoner of her abuse.

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I’m going to attempt to go into the plot in a bit more detail to fully explore this point; we can separate Beau is Afraid into distinct chapters. Chapter 1 sees Beau living his pretty wretched life at home, scared witless of his surroundings, dealing with crippling paranoia, and the fear of disappointing his mother. This chapter is probably the least surreal overall (which is saying something, as it ends with him being chased by a naked mugger and hit by a truck). Chapter 2 sees Beau recuperating in the home of Grace and Roger, the people who inadvertently ran him over, their BPD daughter Toni, and a giant of a man suffering PTSD called Jeeves (who is also being looked after by the couple). Their “home”, I’m 99% sure, is actually just some kind of medical facility for the mentally unwell. This chapter sees Beau daydreaming of an encounter in his childhood on a cruise holiday with a girl called Elaine, being blamed for the accidental death of Toni by Grace, who sends Jeeves after him into the woods with a vengeance once Beau flees the scene.

Chapter 3 is by far the most abstract and surreal, seeing Beau stumbling into a giant, disorganised theatre troupe performing in the woods, befriending a young pregnant woman there, and meeting a strange man who claims that Beau’s father is still alive. He watches the actors performing their play, which devolves into a bonkers, partially animated fever dream of a sequence which sees Beau begin to truly question and resent his life up until this point, and question what he wants from his future. Jeeves from Chapter 2 then crashes the party and shoots up the place, leading to Beau fleeing once again. Chapter 4 sees Beau hitching a ride to his mother’s place, where he is revealed to have just missed the funeral. He bumps into Elaine, has sex with her, she dies during the climax (just as his father supposedly did). And then, Beau’s mother steps out of the shadows to reveal that she was never really dead, that she’s been spying on him this whole time, that his therapist is under her employ, that Beau has a twin brother that she keeps locked in the attic, and that Beau’s father is actually a giant penis monster. No further comment required. Chapter 5 is the emotional climax, seeing Beau finally stand up for himself and lash out at his mother, nearly choking her to death. He flees the scene by boat, before finding himself in a kind of subterranean cavern surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. He is essentially put on trial by his mother here for “being a bad son”, succumbs to the crowd, and seemingly drowns when the boat he’s on capsizes.

And breath. There’s a whole lot of nonsense to take in there, but what I find so brilliant about his film is the journey we go on with Beau. In Chapter 1, we meet Beau as he is, a strange, isolated figure crippled by his fears and anxieties - which are all basically a result of his mother’s abuse. Chapter 2 sees him, in my opinion, re-experience the manipulation and trauma of his mother through the surrogate mother of Grace, the woman who ran him over. She encourages all of Beau’s worst paranoias and insecurities, blames and traumatises him for something which he had no control over, and then uses the character of Jeeves to “hunt” him down (Jeeves, I think, exists to represent his mother’s abuse here). Chapter 3 sees Beau finally coming to terms with this abuse and beginning to question his life, and Chapter 4 sees him rebel against his mother by having sex with Elaine and standing up for himself. He meets his “father”, which is not literally a penis monster, but the ultimate representation of Beau’s fear of sex and masculinity, as fostered in him by his mother. We can even see that the "twin brother" in the attic is a perfect copy of the older Beau that we see in the play during Chapter 3; this is essentially the older, wiser, more life-experienced version of Beau that we never got to meet, chained by his fears and insecurities.

Chapter 5 is tragic, because we are shown that Beau is incapable of rising above his trauma or his fear. He is figuratively put on trial, and fails to make a case for himself. We are shown that he will quite literally die with his current worldview; that he is a bad son, a good-for-nothing waste of space. Beau is Afraid, and he always will be. Thematically, it is a stunning climax to a winding, emotional journey that will stay with you long after the credits roll.

The reason I wanted to go into greater detail about the plot of Beau is Afraid, is also to highlight my biggest issue with it. I think that the film loses a whole lot of its charm and quality if you treat the events of the film objectively, and instead becomes something rather silly and meandering. In fact, the more you believe the film, the worse it gets. It becomes this strange, lumpy conspiracy where an elderly woman fakes her death, a giant soldier murders a theatre troupe, and a giant penis monster lives in said woman’s attic next to the main characters chained-up twin. It’s genuinely quite stupid when divorced from what I believe to be the subtext and the themes. I can see this film frustrating viewers greatly in its final act for this reason, and also because it does drag on a little by the close of the second hour. We know what the film is trying to say by the halfway mark, but in my opinion the point is beleaguered by the third act, and despite the final scene being a powerful one, I was left weary and a little bored by a lot of the final act. Which sounds strange to say about a film that ends with a giant dick with fangs, but it’s true. The first half of the film has this manic, exciting, tense, and often darkly hilarious energy that the second half never really recaptures, which is a shame. And I think the pacing and the length of this film doesn’t help here.

Nit-picks aside, this is a film that I would thoroughly recommend trying out. Calling Beau is Afraid an insane visual journey is something of a misnomer; it’s not “insane” so much as it is controlled chaos, an incredibly measured, well-plotted and engaging depiction of mental illness, guilt, and fear, from a horror director well on top of his game. It is insane, however, in the sense that it will absolutely freak you the f*** out. It’s not perfect, and it has some flaws, but if you’re the type of person that enjoys these kinds of mind-bending, abstract, and weird films, then you should 100% give Beau is Afraid a shot if you haven’t already. It’s a wild ride that you won’t forget in a hurry!