Beau is Afraid

 

Writer / director Ari Aster does not bury cheerful optimism within the dark depths of his feature-length films like some moviemakers. Both Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) were unrelentingly grim and bloody but, also, artfully captivating.

Aster's latest, Beau is Afraid, surpasses those pictures in nightmarish gruesomeness and in length, clocking in just short of three hours.

I can't say if audiences will feel all of those challenging minutes, but they will most assuredly connect with the title character's Kafkaesque escapades through a psycho-sexual dystopia that, though visually outlandish, feels amazingly true to life.

Joaquin Phoenix's remarkable performance as the doughy man-child Beau Wasserman is a mix of twitchy agoraphobic and strangling Mama's boy. Beau, who speaks as if he's always out of breath, lives in a spare and dingy apartment on a street crowded with wanderers and wastrels, exterior and interior walls covered with scatological vulgarity. Beau's greatest fears seem to be intrusion and contamination.

Beau plans to travel to his family home to see his corporate executive mother (a viperous Patti LuPone) on the anniversary of his father's death -- which viewers learn is also the anniversary of Beau's conception. The plans are disrupted by mysterious events that Aster leaves open for interpretation as either reality or Beau's repression.

Much of the film's running time is committed to Beau's odyssey, which includes sojourns in the home of a surgeon (Nathan Lane), his wife (Amy Ryan) and their randy, pill-popping daughter (Kylie Rogers), after Beau is hit by their car while running from a naked knife-wielding assailant.

Beau then finds himself with a theater troupe in a woodland commune that is staging a play bearing astounding similarity to the life he's known.

In Beau is Afraid, Aster leaves no kink untapped, and the cast, led by the tireless Phoenix, is up to the task of capturing the young auteur's signature madness.