Beau Is Afraid (2023) – Creepy and Kooky

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 20th April
Seen: 27th August

Ari Aster is one of the most fascinating filmmakers in the horror genre today, one of the people who rode the wave of the recent trend of “Elevate horror” with his fascinating films Hereditary and Midsommar. His films are known for being strange, dark, twisted nightmares with leading performances that get horrifically snubbed whenever award season comes around (The fact that Toni Collette didn’t get an Oscar for Hereditary is a crime that will be dealt with by the Hague when the time comes). With two hit films under his belt and being somewhat of a darling at A24, it stands to reason that Ari has built up more than enough clout to get away with a film that would normally never get made because it was too weird, even for A24. Ari seems to have used that clout to get Beau Is Afraid made and no matter what you might think about it, the fact it got made at all is something special.

Beau Is Afraid follows the perpetual loser and perpetually anxious person Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) who lives in the worst apartment imaginable in a town that’s seemingly overrun by vagrants and murderers who just wait for their chance to attack anyone who might come out of one of the buildings. Beau is planning on going home to visit his mother, Mona Wasserman (Patti Lupone) to be there to honour the anniversary of his father’s death but when his suitcase, keys and ticket get stolen he has to slightly postpone the trip.

Naturally, this delay means he isn’t there when a chandelier falls on Mona’s head and decapitates her, so now he must ensure that he gets home as soon as possible in order to ensure her burial. On the way he will have to deal with the vagrants/murderers outside, a strange couple and their perpetually angry daughter, a roving band of performers who have a commune in the forest and, of course, his own crippling neuroses that make his every waking minute an absolute hell on earth. 

Beau is Afraid is certainly a big change from Ari Aster’s previous feature films in terms of tone, but still very much fits in with his unique style (which I believe can best be described as “I’m going to fuck with the audience every chance I can get”). Leaning more towards comedy than horror, though still firmly using several horror tropes, Beau has a habit of taking everything up to an 11 whenever it has the opportunity and does it without really caring if anyone is coming along for the ride. Every performance is dialed up as extreme as it can go, every shot is so meticulous that it becomes unrealistic and the dialogue feels like it’s been pulled out of a hat and arranged in random order just to mess with the viewer. This is definitely a film that could only be made by a guy who got known by his association with A24 and the phrase ‘Elevated Horror”… aka it feels like it was meant to appeal to people who have 4000 films on their letterboxd and can quote every David Lynch film backwards.

Beau is kind of the ultimate tragic figure, a Charlie Brown on steroids who can’t even get the simple act of falling asleep in a quiet apartment right without somehow aggravating someone else. The entire runtime of Beau Is Afraid is basically just a series of assorted characters finding reasons to hate Beau and wish him harm for no real reason. This is a ‘joke’ that can sometimes work wonderfully, largely whenever Mona is the one delivering the put-downs or in some of the stranger interactions that feel so surreal that they loop around to being funny (such as him trying to pay for a bottle of water and being told that the cops will be called on him while he’s still paying). A lot of the time though the joke just feels mean spirited, It’s not even a joke at times but just blind cruelty to one guy and it’s hard to tell if we’re meant to laugh at Beau or at the people irrationally hating him and it’s hard to do either.

The actual film itself is wildly indulgent, running three hours long it makes sure to stuff everything it possibly can into that runtime no matter how relevant it is. Scenes that most people would maybe get over and done with in about 30 seconds take 5 minutes here for seemingly no other reason than because the director wants you to just sit and stew in the awkwardness. Obviously, this is a valid choice and it does kind of work with this material, it’s meant to be strange and off-putting and make you feel a bit messed up by the end of it but it also leaves the problem of occasionally just feeling slow and a little irritating… let’s just say that hearing a teenager scream for 10 minutes about absolutely nothing is never fun, no matter what weird shit you do to that teenager after they’re done screaming. Sure, it could probably be cut down considerably but it almost feels like the excessiveness is part of the point which is fine but it makes a film that’s just not a great time to watch.

When Beau is Afraid works though, god damn it works well. The stranger moments of the film, particularly in the opening scenes, are so weird that it’s amazing that someone even thought this stuff up. It’s all so unrealistic and yet everyone is so committed to the strangeness that you buy into it; they believe this stuff so the audience goes along with most of it and it makes for a hell of a ride at times. Again, it can be so overindulgent that it loses the audience (The entire section in the forest with the performing troupe goes on for so much longer than it has any reason to) but the performers are giving their all and creating something truly amazing.

Every moment of Beau is Afraid naturally leans on Beau seeming perpetually afraid (duh!) and damn if Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t give himself over to this messed up character who seems to just be constantly on everyone’s bad side. There’s an intense innocence in his eyes that never leaves, like he has no malice anywhere in his body and yet somehow always feels like he must have done something wrong to upset someone, it’s a sublime performance that somehow makes you want to stick around even when the rest of the film is dragging on. 

The real star of this thing, and she only really has one scene near the end to claim that title but she does it with ease, is Patti Lupone as Beau’s mother. Her presence somehow fills Beau Is Afraid through just a few voicemails and the idea of her, right up until we finally get a scene with her on screen and oh god damn it if she doesn’t just pick the entire film up and run away with it like it was meant for her. There’s just a special something that she exudes that makes the film work right at the end when it was, admittedly, starting to lose it. She alone is worth the two and a half hours of film that happens before her big moment and it should be enough to get people to cast her in more deliciously evil film roles.

Honestly, the entire supporting cast is pretty good, they manage to make everything feel like it belongs in the same film even with the insane tone but it’s that insane tone that is going to be the barrier for many people. This isn’t just a normal slightly weird film where levels of taste are tested and strange images are put on screen, this is a film made by someone who has no one holding them back and is just indulging themselves as much as possible. This can create fascinating ideas, it can also make pretentious works of art that are a lot for people to take in.

Beau is Afraid might be the least accessible of the Ari Aster movies for a good reason, but it’s one that has such a specific tone that it feels like it’s trying to aim for cult status. If you like weird overlong films full of subtext about the idea of familial guilt with performances by several legendary Broadway icons and a hyper-controlled visual art style then this will absolutely hit the spot for you. Of course, if any part of that description made you roll your eyes even a little then you might want to avoid this, it’s a very specific kind of film that will probably not even work for people who enjoyed Ari Aster’s other films, but if you happen to be the right audience for it then it might become your new favourite… but by god, it’s pretentious as fuck sometimes.