Beau Is Afraid Review: Ari Aster’s Wildly Inventive Exorcism of Personal Demons

Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar both use a family tragedy as a catalyst for terror. With Beau Is Afraid, his third and easily most ambitious feature to date, Aster now traces, to more cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.

The film opens in total darkness, with the muffled sounds of screaming and tense, overlapping conversations filling the soundtrack. As slivers of light pierce through the middle of the screen, it becomes apparent that we’re in a birth canal as seen from the perspective of a child about to be born, who’s soon dropped, spanked, and overwhelmed by the swirling chaos of the hospital delivery room. It’s a fitting introduction to a man, Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), whose anxiety and paranoia are paralyzing and all-consuming and who experiences the world as a series of worst-case scenarios that follow one another as inevitably as an echo in a canyon.

Following this brief prologue, Aster whisks us away to the present—not our present, but also not not our present, as evidenced by an outdoor market that includes a stand selling automatic rifles, among other darkly comic visual gags. We find the nebbish, ever-worrying Beau in his apartment, in a city so horrifying that it seems like it sprang unfiltered from the worst nightmares of your average Newsmax viewer. The grimy streets are filled with a wild assortment of suspicious characters, with various forms of brutal violence playing out on every corner. Also, a naked serial killer, fond of stabbing strangers in the neck, is on the loose.

Is this the city as it really is or as Beau—whose controlling, overpowering mother (Patti LuPone) filled him with an unhealthy fear of practically everything—experiences it? It’s never made clear, but as Beau readies himself to visit his mother for the first time in over six months, things quickly go even more awry. A neighbor repeatedly slips aggressive notes under Beau’s door, mistaking his apartment for that of the neighbors who blast their music at all hours of the night. He then leaves his keys in the door for only a few seconds, only to return to find them stolen. And after sprinting across the street against scattered gunfire to get a bottle of water, he watches helplessly as dozens of homeless people wander into his building and take over his apartment.

This stretch of Beau Is Afraid is an insanely surreal depiction of a man’s somewhat reasonable fears coming to fruition. But when Beau explains to his mother the circumstances that led him to miss his flight, he’s met with a disappointed sigh and excruciatingly awkward silences that are as disconcerting and difficult to sit through as anything in Aster’s prior films. To her, his rationales are delay tactics—more signs that he doesn’t love her—and the moment results in more guilt, shame, and humiliation being piled on him. A sign outside his window reads, in large, bold letters, “Jesus Sees Your Abominations,” but neither God nor the devil inspires primal fear in Beau like his mother, an authoritative figure who knows and sees all.

It’s in her shadow that Beau perpetually walks, his hunched posture and meek voice betraying the existential dread that clings to him as he makes his way through a threatening, accusatory world like Josef K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. After getting news that his mother’s head was eviscerated by a chandelier, Beau kicks his attempts to get home, now for the funeral, into full gear. And it’s as he’s finally making his way out of town that the film morphs from a wild inner-city symphony of despair to an epically scaled odyssey through time and space.

Flashbacks to Beau as a teenager (played by Armen Nahapetian) give us glimpses into his nascent neuroses and the burgeoning sexuality that’s stifled by his needy, overbearing mother. In a scene that’s as funny as it is distressing—a blend of registers that’s the film’s m.o.—Beau’s mother tucks her son into bed. And as the colorful lights of a spinning lamp crisscross over her face, she tells her son that his father died right after he orgasmed for the first time in his life. This was the moment of Beau’s conception, and it suggests the inciting incident of Beau’s adult life, explaining his deep-seated fears of sex and, more jokingly, why he has unusually massive testicles. It also informs, after Beau reunites with the childhood flame he met on vacation, Elaine (played as an adult by Parker Posey), into the funniest sex scene since MacGruber, which includes a particularly inspired use of Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby.”

Amid these assorted peeks into the mind of the younger Beau, Aster’s absurdist comedy plunges us deeper and deeper into the adult Beau’s subconscious across the film’s present timeline. We not only continue to witness his worst fears coming to life in delirious fashion, but in a majestic and extraordinarily meta centerpiece set in the middle of a forest, we see a play about a lonely man separated from his family and who spends the rest of his life trying to reunite with them.

Across this unforgettable centerpiece, the events of the play begin to subtly mirror Beau’s own life as well as some of his mostly suppressed hopes and dreams in a rare stretch of wish fulfillment for the long-suffering sadsack. And Aster’s stylistic flourishes, which blend animation, heavy makeup effects, and cardboard cutouts to enhance the artifice of Beau Is Afraid’s presentation, are awe-inspiring while also highlighting how disconnected Beau has become from his own life. For as much as this segment plays like a fairy tale, its somber tone ultimately underscores the isolation and alienation that his neuroses have left him plagued with.

Beau’s epic journey also involves a number of other digressions, including a delightfully bizarre stay with a married couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) that smiles through the insanity of his interference in their lives. There isn’t a moment here that doesn’t feel leftfield, but then the surrealistic trial sequence that closes Beau Is Afraid spectacularly pulls its loose threads together. If much of Beau Is Afraid has been about anxiety’s potent ability to overpower one’s imagination, and that imagination’s power to project our internalized fears in ways that feel all too real, this finale is the ultimate culmination of those smaller nightmares. It’s as deeply personal and unsettling a vision as we’ve seen from an American filmmaker in some time—the capstone of an exhausting, wildly inventive cinematic exorcism of personal demons.