‘Beau Is Afraid’ review: Joaquin Phoenix goes to hell in Ari Aster’s horrifying, hilarious Freudian odyssey

The first time a mother and son are separated from each other is painful yet inevitable. While childbirth is frequently considered a violent experience for the mother, it’s rare to imagine what birth feels like from the baby’s perspective. Complete darkness is followed by blinding, bright light, as muffled sounds of the outside world are drowned out by water and amniotic fluid. They enter the world in fear and confusion only to start the lifelong process of moving away from their mother, yet still feeling attached. So begins Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster’s brilliant new Freudian odyssey through hell. It’s a smart way to open a film about the separation of mothers and sons and the mysterious connection between them that brings about guilt, shame, disappointment, and a litany of unexplainable emotions. Throughout its audacious 179-minute runtime, Aster shows the audience that the titular Beau (a terrified, committed Joaquin Phoenix), a now middle-aged, over-medicated man, is effectively still a baby being pulled away from his mother. He’s been afraid since birth. 

Aster skips right over any positive moments that young Beau and his mother may have shared and jumps to the present day, where the adult Beau speaks with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson). He has an impending visit to see his mother, causing him to be very agitated. His therapist prescribes something new, instructing Beau to “always take with water.” This isn’t the last time water is mentioned in the film. For Aster, water illustrates a symbolic connection to motherhood and Beau’s fears, laying out an ingenious thread to follow throughout the film. When Beau leaves his therapist’s office to return home before his upcoming flight, he walks through his apocalyptic, comically dangerous neighborhood. Everything here is a heightened parody and projection of Beau’s worst fears. His apartment is surrounded by crime and lawlessness but has hilarious sight gags on par with an episode of The Simpsons. The pornographic graffiti, phallic illustrations, and crude business names (Erectus Ejectus is a personal favorite) feel like they were lifted from a 7th-grade boy’s notebook. Fiona Crombie’s flawlessly detailed modern production design is incredible. The design of Beau’s neighborhood block and dilapidated apartment with crackling electricity and dysfunctional appliances is insanely fun to take in as a moviegoer, but its purpose is much more profound. This environment acts as a manifestation of Beau’s inability to take care of himself and his deep-seated fears of sex. 

Aster is an indie darling of 21st-century horror, so a film about a central character succumbing to their worst fears seems like a natural next step. While it still has some thematic ties to his first two films (mothers!), Beau Is Afraid is unlike anything Aster has created. It’s a mammoth miracle of a movie that he could only make after the success of his first two films. His first feature, Hereditary, rattled audiences with its uncompromising central performance, shocking decapitations, and camera tricks that felt like nightmares transposed on screen. Still, Hereditary sometimes felt like a riff on Rosemary’s Baby, where any fan of the 1968 masterpiece could see that Ann Dowd was Ruth Gordon’s Minnie Castavets transported to Utah to trick another unsuspecting woman into giving her child over to a greater demonic purpose. Similarly, Midsommar played like Wicker Man for millennials. Its gorgeous cinematography, raw lead performance, and incredibly cathartic ending earned its cult following, but it still felt like an ode to an existing horror film. Beau Is Afraid is a horror-adventure-comedy that sees the daring filmmaker venturing into personal, uncharted territory. Aster’s influences are still clear to be sure, but they feel secondary to his new visceral, visual language. The film feels inspired by everything from Kafka to Albert Brooks to Charlie Kaufman’s postmodern masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York, but never derivative. It’s an entirely original expression of what happens when learned fears about sex, death, and everything in between compound over time and what would happen if the most horrifying intrusive thoughts actually came to fruition. 

At first, Beau’s fears feel entirely within the scope of what would be realistic and relatable to the audience. Who among us hasn’t had travel anxiety when going back to visit our family members? When his suitcase and keys are stolen, causing him to miss his flight, it feels like a massive stroke of bad luck, but not out of the realm of possibility. The unexplained robbery feels less frightening than the call he has to make to his mother, Mona (a showstopping Patti LuPone), to explain that he won’t be able to make the trip. LuPone is absolutely terrifying in this film. She’s a towering mogul of a mother whose son exists to disappoint her. LuPone’s presence and brilliant choices as an actress make everything Beau is experiencing click into place. Beau’s fears and the bad luck that befalls him grow to feel even more outlandish and comical, but Phoenix’s performance makes them feel real and grounded in this utterly chaotic world. He’s astonishing in this role as a man who is both physically and emotionally naked. 

After that phone call, things descend into utter chaos as Beau’s water is shut off, his credit card is declined, and his apartment is inhabited by derelicts. Aster strikes a delicate balance in making these scenes not just insanely stressful but also some of the funniest moments in film this year. In a rather tense moment, Aster and his longtime collaborator, director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski, show Beau looking out the peephole of his apartment door. It’s a glorious reference to the shot in Psycho when Norman Bates spies on Marion Crane. For Beau, though, there is no one on the other side. However, the shot calls to mind one of cinema history’s most uncomfortable, complicated mother-son relationships. Even when Beau’s mother isn’t onscreen, she’s always there in the back of the mind and a key to unlocking why Beau is so afraid. When Beau does call his mother back, a UPS delivery man answers her phone and tells Beau that his mother was killed in an accident when a chandelier fell and decapitated her head. Aster has a penchant for skull-crushing freak accidents, and this feels like a little wink to fans of his previous two films. Now, Beau has no choice but to see his mother. They won’t bury her until he arrives.

Aster describes Beau Is Afraid as a “Jewish Lord of The Rings,” a film that “takes us inside the experience of being a loser.” That precise but painfully accurate comparison becomes more apparent as Beau’s journey home to his mother’s funeral is anything but easy. After a bath goes awry and he’s mistaken for the local naked serial killer, Beau is hit by a car. He wakes up to the sparkling crystal light of a chandelier in what seems to be a teenager’s bedroom, with pink walls covered with posters of fictional K-pop bands. While the chandelier above him recalls his mother’s accidental death, Beau is now under another mother’s care. Grace (Amy Ryan) was driving the car that accidentally struck him, and now Beau is a patient of her and her husband Roger (a delightfully comic Nathan Lane). Grace and Roger are overly kind to Beau, perhaps the type of parents he never had, but they also gently hold him hostage to fill the void of their son Nathan who was killed in action. Aster’s knack for depicting unsettling family dynamics makes Grace and Roger’s home feel like a poisonous picture of American suburbia. Everything is monogrammed, from their personalized silk pajamas to their coffee mugs with their initials. Grace and Roger speak in a bizarre blend of sitcom quips and positive therapy-speak while their rude teenage daughter Toni pops pills like candy. They’ve kidnapped Beau, and he is desperate to leave. But he’s still injured from the car accident and far from self-sufficient enough to leave without help, increasing the tension. Aster hones in on the awful but relatable feeling of being trapped somewhere when you’re desperate to leave. What makes matters worse is that people are waiting on Beau to bury his mother. He’s still disappointing her even when she’s dead. 

Aster also incorporates flashbacks to reveal a vacation Beau and his mother took when he was a teenager. Armen Nahapetian captures Phoenix’s mannerisms perfectly and in such an uncanny way that audiences have already been fooled into thinking that young Beau was created by de-aging technology. Clearly, Beau is still anxious as a young person, but it’s somewhat heartbreaking to see how much less afraid he was then than in adulthood as his intrusive thoughts grow more extreme. When Beau meets Elaine (Julia Antonelli), a teenage girl on the cruise, there is an innocent curiosity that the two have for each other. They share a first kiss, but their relationship is cut short when their mothers pull the two apart. “I’ll wait for you,” he says like a character from a romantic drama. Beau’s relationship with his mother (Zoe Lister-Jones in the flashbacks) during his formative years was quite odd. Lister-Jones captures the strange connection between the mother and son, telling Beau, “I’m so sorry for what your daddy passed down to you,” with a cadence frighteningly similar to Piper Laurie’s portrayal of Margaret White in Carrie. The lessons Beau’s mother taught him about sex are not out of step with how Margaret put the fear of God in her daughter on similar topics. I won’t spoil Beau’s father’s cause of death and will just share that it is one of many dick jokes in Aster’s script. There is a purpose, however, to the absurdity of this specific gag. The script smartly plays with the humor and anxiety surrounding sex at a young age. It then dives deeper to show how Beau hasn’t grown out of that, as his mother’s influence and intrusive thoughts have affected his ability to have sex. For Beau, these fears were learned at a formative age, making sex and death inextricably connected.

As Beau’s fear-ridden journey continues, he stumbles across a pregnant woman and her theatre troupe in the woods. She is an entirely different depiction of the mothers portrayed earlier in the film, but she still shows just how dependent Beau is on the care of women. In the most beautiful sequence of Aster’s career, Chilean filmmakers Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña (The Wolf House) craft an animated, oneiric odyssey detailing Beau’s journey through time, from childhood until he’s an elderly man. The sequence has the feel of a folktale or fairy tale, a shared story that, for a moment, makes Beau’s fears feel a bit more universal. He journeys alone, still searching for family, but people are there to listen. It’s a stunning achievement that shows Aster’s bizarre, uncompromising vision and the promise of his future collaborations. 

Beau’s hellish pilgrimage all amounts to an intense, no-holds-barred final act that sees his earlier fears come full circle. While the third act is not as sharp or clean as the first two acts nor as effective in its dread, it conjures inevitable chaos for Beau as he faces his greatest fears: sex and his mother. Beau even reunites with Elaine (Parker Posey) in one of the year’s funniest cringe-inducing scenes. The casting of Posey is brilliant here, and it’s exciting to see her collaborate with a new indie auteur like Aster. She’s incredibly committed, showing exactly why her character has had a hold over Beau for decades. The film’s final stretch features images far too unsettling and surprising to spoil here. It must be shared, though, that Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” is used in a scene that’s the most effective form of cinematic birth control since David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. 

If the magical realism, difficult emotions, and detailed symbols feel a bit intense, that’s entirely warranted. Beau Is Afraid is an exhausting experience with too many details to take in in one sitting alone, but that’s also the point. Aster does not just force you to experience things from Beau’s perspective. Instead, he convinces the viewer that they exist deep in Beau’s insides for every part of his miserable existence, never to emerge the same. Throughout the runtime of Beau Is Afraid, everything is cyclical. As he finds his way back to his mother only to continue disappointing her, it becomes clear that for Beau, everything must end as it began in birth, surrounded by water, still afraid.

Grade: A-

A24 will release Beau Is Afraid in theaters, including select IMAX screens, on April 21.