Movie Review: Beau is Afraid

If you’ve followed me over the last few years, you know I am a big fan of director Ari Aster. His directorial debut, Hereditary, was my favorite movie of 2018 and one of my ten favorite movies of the decade. His second film, Midsommar, landed in my top ten of 2019. With just those two films, Aster became a director I immediately connected with and a director whose next films I would eagerly await.

Beau is Afraid is Aster’s newest film and finds the director at his biggest and most ambitious. Beau is a sprawling epic that takes us inside the mind of a pathetic, terrified man who just wants to make it home. It is an uncomfortable, shocking, bizarre, oddly funny odyssey about grief, guilt, parenting, trying to understand past traumas, and the fear of living in the modern world.

Aster is a truly original voice of modern cinema. He has established a style and way of storytelling that keeps his films unpredictable and surprising. With an Ari Aster movie, there is no point in trying to figure out what is going to happen or where the movie is going to end up. You just have to let the movie come to you and absorb the events that take place.

Beau is Afraid exemplifies Aster’s originality more than any of his other films, which is crazy to think about considering the events of Midsommar. Explaining the plot and everything that happens in Beau is Afraid is too complicated of a task for just one review. The simplest plot synopsis is that Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely man suffering from crippling anxiety, is trying to make it home to visit his mother. But through a series of unfortunate events, Beau has his luggage and the keys to his apartment stolen and has missed his flight to his mother’s. Feeling guilty about this, Beau sets out to get to his mother as soon as possible, especially when he gets word about a tragic accident.

That’s the general plot of Beau is Afraid, but it’s far more complicated than that. Aster dives deep into the mind of Beau, showing us all of his insecurities and his fears. Seeing the world Beau lives in through Beau’s eyes is surreal and terrifying. Beau lives in an unnamed city that is run rampant by all things bad: violence, sex, drugs, guns, homelessness, you name it, it’s there. But when he embarks on his journey to his mother, everything gets even wilder and arguably worse for Beau. As a viewer, we never know what is real and what is Beau’s imagination. But to Beau, this is only what he sees and what he feels and it’s a visceral, hypnotic adventure.

Traveling with Beau on his journey is an experience unlike anything I’ve ever experienced and it wouldn’t have been as successful if not for the performance of Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix does a brilliant job guiding us along on this wild ride. He’s an actor who has the ability to take a scene or performance to extreme heights but in Beau, he balances big, loud emotional bursts with quieter, more internalized looks and reactions. This is a delicate performance that could have easily gone wrong, but Phoenix keeps everything on track.

Beau is Afraid finds Aster working with his biggest budget to date (almost double his first two films combined), a three-hour runtime, and working on new levels of storytelling and characters, but there are still several motives and themes that we have seen before in Aster movies that are also in Beau. It’s masterfully made and Aster’s most visually impressive movie to date. It’s a movie that looks at characters handling and moving on from tragedy. And it looks at familial guilt and the character’s relationship with their mother, arguably the movie’s biggest theme and one that might have you worried about the relationship between Aster and his own mother, especially when you pair this film with Hereditary.

It’s almost impossible to fully grasp and understand Beau is Afraid after one viewing. There are so many layers and everything happening in the movie thematically and visually, you can’t pick up on everything right away. But it is a movie experience that grabs you and doesn’t let go until the credits begin to roll. You won’t find a film quite like it in 2023, a time in movies dominated by sequels, franchises, and multiverses. Beau is Afraid is an original journey and another stunning achievement from Ari Aster.

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