Beau Is Afraid
A man-child embarks on a nightmare quest.
Ari Aster’s latest film is “a true American original,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Prematurely hailed as a visionary when he made the horror dramas Hereditary and Midsommar, the young director “convincingly earns that moniker” with this “electrifyingly idiosyncratic” horror-comedy. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a paranoid shut-in who endures a cascade of nightmarish events as he attempts a journey to visit his scornful, smothering mother. Across the film’s three-hour run time, Beau is chased, robbed, shot at, hit by a car, abducted, drugged, framed for murder, and repeatedly humiliated, “eliciting laughs of an astonished sort.” The overall results are “mostly just tedious,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. It’s grimly amusing when feckless Beau oversleeps, loses his keys, misses his flight, sees his credit card denied, and watches as murderous crazies flood his apartment. But as the settings shift and the nightmare continues for the writer-director’s stand-in, it all starts to feel like oversharing. “Guilt, shame, Freudian mom issues—you name it, Aster slaps it up there on the screen.” Beau Is Afraid is “manifestly not for everyone,” said Alissa Wilkinson in Vox. But I loved it. This “wickedly funny” movie turns the classic hero’s journey inside out, and “what makes it great” is the way that journey disintegrates, tragicomically, into sometimes inscrutable chaos. “It’s entertainment that respects my ability to be confused and uncomfortable and also have a blast.” (In theaters only)