Beau is Afraid

Ohhhhh, the humanity! I try not to pile on a film, especially if the people behind it mean well, and sure, everyone's entitled to a 5 nil drubbing now and then, but this one severely tested my patience. I haven't seen Hereditary or Midsommar, writer/director Ari Aster's previous two features, so I didn't know what to expect. Beau is Afraid is based on one of the director's shorts, Beau, from 2011, and how he went from a 7 minute runtime to an eyeball-burning 180 (or near enough) is pretty astounding.

Possibly the most egregious issue is that it starts so well. The first quarter (and a smidge) of the film is darkly funny, clever and brutally promising. At the natural break point between the first and second acts, a thought popped into my noggin *There's nowhere to go from here* and I was unfortunately bang on. Oddly, it looks like there are four acts in the film, each one exponentially decreasing in quality.

Joaquin Phoenix does his best with the material but he's asked to wander, sometimes stagger, occasionally bolt through the film in a state of panic, and after three hours, even this fine actor begins to wear thin. The film sets up Beau (Phoenix) as an anxiety-riddled, doughy bloke, who lives in an absolute shithole, with nutters filling every frame - the journey from his therapist's office to his grubby apartment is one of the rare highlights. The story centres on him trying to get to his mother's house and how events, real or imagined (it's anyone's guess), stymie his attempts. 

Now, I'll admit, when a film bores me to near insensibility, analysing it seems moot, so it's very possible that I've missed a lot of the 'meaning' behind all the garbage that infests this film. There are elements of Barton Fink, Misery, The Truman Show, Hard to Be a God, Kafka and Orwell perhaps, I even felt a bit of Aphex Twin or The Jesus and Mary Chain with the musical disturbances enacted by composer, The Haxan Cloak (Bobby Krlic). That mess of a list I've just mentioned has a some quality on it (Fink reigns supreme) and this film had a chance to be something more than a disparate collection of bits patched together in a psychiatric motley. Sadly, it looks like hubris or pretentiousness or just a lack of judgement has won the battle in the edit suite of Aster's brain.

Beau is Afraid opens on April 20 at Luna and Palace cinemas.

See also (or instead):

Phoenix is possibly the best American actor going around, as his turn in Lynne Ramsey's fantastic You Were Never Really Here (2017) illustrates. Spike Jonze dealt with a pair of Nic Cages, one suffering almost Beau-level anxiety in Adaptation (2002).