Joaquin Phoenix in a scene from “Beau is Afraid”
Beau may be afraid but Ari Aster certainly isn’t.
Of the many words used to describe the writer-director’s previous two films — “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” — timidity was never of them. This is a filmmaker who has sent Toni Collette skittering across the ceiling and intricately arranged mutilated bodies the way some people make bouquets.
But if any doubts remained about just how far Aster is willing to go, “Beau Is Afraid” should pacify them. Not because of the degree of terror within it; by Aster’s high standards, “Beau Is Afraid” is notably less ghastly than his first two outings. But it’s even more audaciously grotesque, more self-evidently pulled from its director’s psyche, more a work of a filmmaker’s unfiltered, runaway imagination.
Rather than slotting in as a “horror” film, it can be categorized a little less neatly as a surreal three-hour Homeric odyssey about Jewish guilt, Oedipal angst and somebody named “Birthday Boy Stab Man.” And this, remember, constitutes a sunnier register for Aster.
What has made Aster such a potent filmmaker, I think, is the lack of relief he offers audiences. His movies are nightmares without any possibility of waking. And just as much as one might spend “Midsommar” looking for an escapeway, the urge to open a window for just one breath of fresh air in “Beau Is Afraid” is considerable.
That’s both a compliment and a complaint for Aster’s film, a rigorously wearisome experience propelled by a monstrous current of anxiety and dread. Aster’s cinema is that of a bad trip: a surreal and comic journey through dark corners of consciousness, vividly rendered in caricature and detail. (“Midsommar,” if you remember, began with mind-altering mushrooms.) It’s not an easy ride to recommend taking. But, just the same, there’s never any doubt that you are, most definitely, traveling somewhere else.
“Beau Is Afraid,” which A24 releases in theaters nationwide Friday, opens not with psychedelics but the pangs of child birth. After some muffled screams and flashes of light, we, as Beau, emerge directly out of the womb. His mother Mona (played at different times by Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti LuPone) screams because her baby is oddly silent. Flashing forward several decades, the grown but still whimpering Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) is sitting with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson, a boon to any movie). It doesn’t take long for his mother to come up in their session. “Do you ever wish she was dead?” the therapist asks. Beau, protesting a little too much, quickly shouts “No!”
Back near his New York apartment, the city streets are are an over-the-top hellscape, draped in garbage and graffiti, with mean-looking faces everywhere, including that loose maniac, Birthday Boy Stab Man, along with roaming hordes of vandals. We’re less in the real world than some bonkers, not-funhouse-mirrors manifestation of Beau’s fears. His anxiety might called cripplingly extreme if it didn’t appear to be well-founded by the state of things around him.
Beau is to travel the next day to visit his mother. But after a neighbor harasses him through the night and his apartment keys and bag are stolen…
Aster, whose first film also dug into the frightful side of what we inherit, is clearly and intensely channeling something deep within. And as captivating as it can be to see a filmmaker out on the ledge like this this, the sense that characters are being moved around like pawns in an elaborate design — an aspect of Aster’s previous films, too — never quite dissipates. The one exception: Parker Posey. She walks into the movie late, as a long-ago encounter of Beau’s, and instantly changes the movie’s chemistry. She’s the one breath of fresh air in “Beau Is Afraid,” but, boy, does Aster snuff it out quick. JAKE COYLE, MDT/AP Film Writer
“Beau Is Afraid,” an A24 release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language. Running time: 179 minutes. 
