179 min | R | April 14, 2023 | A24
Beau is a paralyzed neurotic who needs to fly home to see his mother. Everything between his apartment and her front door wants to destroy him. Ari Aster spends three hours inside one man’s panic and dares you to find the exit with him.
Beau Wassermann is a middle-aged man drowning in dread. He lives in a city that functions as a hellscape of stabbings, addicts, and screaming strangers. He needs to travel home to visit his mother. A series of escalating catastrophes turns a simple trip into a surreal nightmare that bends time, memory, and reality. This is not a story about a journey. It is a feature-length anxiety attack about guilt, maternal control, and a man who never learns to want anything for himself.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau as a quivering vessel of apology. He flinches, he stammers, he absorbs abuse without resistance. Phoenix commits to the helplessness so fully that Beau becomes hard to watch and impossible to dismiss. Patti LuPone plays his mother Mona with terrifying force in scenes that reframe everything before them. Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan play Roger and Grace, suburban hosts whose hospitality curdles into menace. Parker Posey plays Elaine Bray as the ghost of a tenderness Beau was never allowed to claim.
Ari Aster writes and directs with total command of tone and zero interest in restraint. He builds the film as a sequence of self-contained set pieces, each one a different style and a different kind of dread. The opening city sequence stacks background horrors into the edges of the frame until the chaos reads as Beau’s own nervous system. An animated forest interlude breaks the film open into a storybook fantasy that explains his fear better than any dialogue could. Aster makes every choice deliberate. He also makes too many of them.
This is a filmmaker emptying his entire psyche onto the screen and trusting that the spectacle justifies the indulgence. The individual sequences are inventive and the imagery sticks. The problem is accumulation. Aster keeps adding chapters when the point lands early, and the picture sprawls past its own ideas. Beau Is Afraid is a startling act of nerve and a test of patience in equal measure.