Movie Review Beau is Afraid

Beau is Afraid (2023) 

Directed by Ari Aster

Written by Ari Aster 

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Amy Ryan, Patti Lupone 

Release Date April 21st, 2023 

Published April 21st, 2023 

What if what Beau sees as the world around is really his internal life, externalized? This is the kind of question that toys with you when you watch a film from the remarkable, ungodly talented writer-director Ari Aster. The director of the twin masterworks Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster is a masterfully detailed and thorough director with a tone for tone and atmosphere that may just be unmatched in modern cinema. The thesis statement for my claim is Beau is Afraid, a film where atmosphere and tone stand in for just about anything you might find familiar as a film narrative. 

Beau is Afraid stars Joaquin Phoenix as Beau, a stunted, edgy, angst-riddled mess of a human being. Beau inhabits a universe where a criminal known as Stab-Man wanders the streets nude and stabbing people while building an astonishing body count. The streets are littered with filthy oddballs and just plain corpses strewn here and there by a society of haves and have nots we will only ever get a minor sense of. The point is not to make a direct comment about man's inhumanity to man, but to offer you the sight and let you make up your own mind about what is presented. 

Besides, the corpses in the street and Stab-Man aren't really things that Beau is interested, unless he's leaping over a corpse to escape the Stab-Man, and then, suddenly, these things really, really matter. The story kicks off when Beau's mother, played by the legendary Patti Lupone, is expecting Beau to get on a plane to come and see her. We've learned that Beau is not high on the prospect of seeing his mother. He tells his therapist, Dr. Jeremy, that though he loves his mother, the visit fills him with the kind of anxiety that must be treated by a high end drug that MUST be taken with water. 

You don't want to know what might happen if you take these pills without water. Regardless, as Beau is getting ready to leave his apartment, his bags and keys are stolen. Being a spineless simp for his mother's withheld affections, Beau tells Mom that he will still try and make his plane, even as he no longer has a bag or keys to his apartment, or his boarding pass, and she feigns telling him that its fine if he doesn't come, with the strong subtext being that he doesn't love her because he's not coming. 

Beau is a character to whom life happens. Beau doesn't have experiences, he has experiences inflicted upon him by an uncompromising world bent on making him do things he doesn't want to do. It's all related to his strange upbringing, the weird and uncompromising relationship with his mother, the absence of his father, and a bizarre relationship to women with deep oedipal roots and a self-loathing based fear that is not expressed but that Beau wears like a second skin. 

The trip to see his mother is the beginning of a journey for Beau that will somehow combine elements of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Homer's Odyssey. If that combination elements, shot through the incredibly prismatic mind of Ari Aster, appeals to you, Beau is Afraid is a must see movie. If however, you are not completely on board for some of the weirdest, most shocking, and distressing moments ever brought to the big screen, then, perhaps, this not the movie for you. 

Find my complete review at Geeks.Media 

Column The Best Sequence in Hereditary

Hereditary (2018) 

Directed by Ari Aster 

Written by Ari Aster 

The Best Sequence in Hereditary 

The big death scene in Hereditary is the best scene in any movie in 2018. This article is about to go into great detail about this scene so if you have not seen Hereditary, which I feel is the best movie of 2018, you should stop reading after this introductory paragraph and come back after you have watched Ari Aster’s remarkable, debut masterpiece. This article will openly reveal a pivotal and shocking death of one of the main characters in Hereditary. 

A primer: Hereditary stars Toni Collette as Annie, an artist and stay at home mother. Annie crafts elaborate models of daily scenes from her home life, from the seemingly mundane, to the funeral of her recently deceased mother. Annie’s mother has recently died as the story begins but Annie is strangely lacking in profound emotion. Annie’s husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), is dutiful and supportive. While Annie and Steve’s son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is a typically aloof and above it all teenager. 

Daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), however, appears to take her grandmother’s passing far harder than anyone else. Her emotion is not outward, per se, Charlie is a special needs child though the film is vague on her exact condition. Charlie expresses her grief in odd behaviors that include a disturbing fascination with a dead bird which she finds at school and brings home. What she does with the bird from there you can discover in the film. It’s a terrifying visual detail that pays off in terrific horror. 

Our scene is set when Peter wants to go to a party and his mother instructs him to take Charlie to the party with him. While Peter is off getting high at the party, Charlie has a piece of cake, unaware that the cake has nuts and she has an allergic reaction. As a paranoid and terrified Peter rushes Charlie to the hospital, Charlie struggles to breath and eventually leans her head out of the car window to get more air. 

An out of control Peter nearly crashes the car into a telephone pole but as he swerves to miss it, Charlie’s head strikes the pole and is taken completely off. Director Ari Aster never shows us what happened to Charlie. There is no outward gore in the scene. Instead, in a masterful, and far more terrifying move, Aster keeps the camera on Peter as the tragedy that has just taken place slowly dawns on him. 

A shocked Peter stays in the car, afraid to look behind him and confirm what has taken place. He lingers for some time before finally putting the car in gear and beginning to slowly drive away from the scene, a lonely, empty, highway not far from his family home but far enough from any city to remain empty for some time. Peter drives home and the only time Aster leaves Alex Wolff’s stunned face is to establish as Peter pulls into the family driveway, gets out of the car as if lost in a fugue state and wanders inside. 

We return to Peter’s incomprehensibly stunned face as he climbs into bed and lies there for hours unable to sleep and unable to remain awake to the terror that has befallen him. We sit with Alex as the night passes into morning. We stay on Alex’s face as the house comes alive with the sound of Alex’s parents rising and beginning their day. The camera never cuts away from Alex, the terror that is about to unfold is mostly in sound design and scraps of mundane dialogue. 

Annie and Steve call out for Charlie and Peter to come to breakfast. Annie begins to worry where Charlie is. She calls for her. She begins to go to the door, we hear only her footsteps and the sound of the front door opening, we’re still on Alex’s profoundly horrified and paralyzed face. The door opens, we hear the crunch of Annie’s footsteps on the rocks in the driveway, we hear her approach the car and finally, we hear a blood curdling scream before we finally cut away. 

Great directing is about choices and the choices that Ari Aster makes in this moment to stick closely to the face of actor Alex Wolff is a daring and ingenious choice. The horror of the moment can hardly match the horror of what we assume this moment looks like in reality. Our imagination fills in the horror and because we care for Peter, our horror is magnified by a deep and stomach churning empathy. 

This, for me, is among the finest pieces of direction I have ever seen in a horror or genre movie and really, among any kind of movie. It’s a relatively simple manipulation of our collective imagination and yet many directors would ruin it by trying to shock us with horror visuals. Aster knows that our imagination of this moment is more powerful than mere gore. Besides, the rest of the movie has plenty of gore to satisfy that part of our genre hunger.