Grade: A-
“You will walk many miles. Dozens will become hundreds. Hundreds will become thousands. Your adventures will continue for years and years.” This is something Beau hears in the middle of Beau Is Afraid. They may or may not have been talking to him. It could very well describe the experience of seeing the movie. Even though it’s just a few days in the life of Beau, at one minute shy of 3 hours, you will feel like you were born, grew up, grew old, and died watching it. The film is quite Odyssean in its long series of wanderings, adventures, hardships, fantasies, hallucinations, and the like. It’s a fantastical dreamscape of boundless imagination. You eventually resign yourself to the realization that anything can happen, and no matter what does, you cease to be surprised after a while, and won’t rule out anything.
Writer/director Ari Aster has swung for the fences since his first feature film. I liked Hereditary. I liked Midsommar even more. Beau Is Afraid is at least as good, and I now officially think Aster is one of the greatest directors working today. I’ve seen this billed as a horror comedy, and boy is it 100% of both. I laughed because of how bizarre it got. When summarizing, I don’t know if I should start with the first act, second act, third, or beyond. Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau, who lives alone in an apartment that isn’t one of the best in New York City. He is planning to fly home to visit his mother, when he is hit by a car, and wakes up in a teenage girl’s bedroom, in the care of a kindly suburban couple.
Believe me, I have just given you a rough outline, and what I just told you takes up at least the first hour. Nathan Lane gives one of his best film performances as the husband/father in this home – a respected surgeon. He is a mustachioed Ned Flanders type, always calling Beau things like “m’dude” and “pallio.” I believed that he was well-meaning and didn’t have anything ill up his sleeve for Beau, but we find out the family has its dysfunctions, to say the least.
I won’t get into the unique, specific way Beau hears of a tragedy in his family, which was one of my favorite scenes. Or how he finds himself in the woods, and what he sees there. Or why one of my biggest laughs came from something he found in the attic. Or Parker Posey’s small but memorable role whose part alone will take you on a roller coaster of feelings. Of the other faces I recognized, I have to mention Richard Kind, and if Lane wasn’t enough, we have another Broadway legend here to kill it on the screen: Patti Lupone. The movie sometimes meandered and had setups that never got a payoff, but all in all, this is a movie that will simultaneously wash over you (almost drown you, actually) and get under your skin.
In the end, just when I started to think this was a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing, a theme begins to stick its head out of the gopher hole: pent-up guilt and the trials and tribulations of dealing with it. I wasn’t sure what was real, and what came from Metaphorville and Symbolismland, but I was glad the whole affair grew to a point. Beau Is Afraid is rich with aspects to process, unpack, discuss, and interpret, and the haunting final shot that lingers in the background for every last second of the end credits will give you some time to think about it.
Grade: A-
Film Reviews by Mark 
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