For four years we have been waiting for what Ari Aster will film after the fantastic horror films “Hereditary” and “Midsommar”. The wait is over, and the result is a hard-to-describe surrealist fantasy, psychological drama, twisted and sick black comedy, even horror. “Beau is Afraid” is a film that is not only impossible to pigeonhole, but is a completely unconvincing deranged, insane odyssey of a man in his late forties who is afraid of life. For his third film, Aster received the largest budget to date, one of the best actors in the world, namely Joaquin Phoenix for the lead role and complete creative freedom.
The latter may have led to the fact that Aster played too much this time and made a film that lasts for three hours and at certain moments it seems that it is going nowhere. But in some parts, “Beau is Afraid” is a brilliant, hilarious, completely wild fantasy that is almost impossible to compare with anything I’ve seen before, and a movie where it’s hard to tell what’s reality and what’s fantasy, what’s a dream, and what’s real. what java The almost unrecognizable, gray and balding Phoenix is Beau, a middle-aged frail and mentally unstable guy who suffers from severe depression.
In the first scene, we see him at the psychotherapist whom he has obviously been visiting for a long time, and when he leaves the office, he enters a completely disturbed, disgusting half-world. Into a crazy post-apocalyptic dystopia where people kill each other in the streets and cars run over decomposed corpses, and when Beau somehow manages to crawl to his building and escape a guy with tattoos all over his face, the situation becomes even more absurd. Throughout the night, one of the neighbors pushes messages under the door to his apartment to shut up and turn down the music, even though it’s quiet at his place. Nothing is normal here, and Beau’s anxiety and fear intensify as he prepares to visit his mother the next day, who is clearly afraid.
But the situation will unravel so that he will fall asleep and be late for the flight to his mother, only after that will follow an unimaginably bizarre series of events. Everything seems to conspire against Beau and his planned visit to his mother, and all that we will see in these three hours is simply indescribable. People around his age will try to adopt him, they’ll be stuck in a forest where some kind of renegade live and put on a show that will remind Beau of an alternate version of his life, or what his life might have been like if he hadn’t been instilled with such fear. There’s also a deranged guy chasing him, at one point he’ll end up in the attic with a monster in the shape of a huge dick, and Beau himself has gigantic balls because of the unfucking and fear his mother instilled in him.
We also have flashbacks to Beau’s childhood and learn some details of his relationship with his mother who told him a bizarre story about his father dying on top of her when they first made love and convinced him that it would happen to him too. And although all this sounds completely abnormal and disturbed, it is only the tip of the iceberg of complete insanity that Aster designed and with which he once again confirmed that he is not only a visionary, but also an extremely skilled director. The film is visually extremely striking and it’s a shame that we didn’t have the chance to see “Beu is afraid” in our cinemas, and all this can be seen as a metaphor for a man who doesn’t dare to face life and fears.
By the end, we will understand that Beau is actually most afraid of his mom and that he suffers from some bizarre type of Oedipus complex. At times it is a crazy, absurdist black comedy, in some parts it seemed to me like a psychological drama about existentialist rage, restlessness, anxiety, fear, what the Germans would call Angst. At times it seemed that it wasn’t going anywhere and that Aster had completely killed himself in mannerisms and pretentiousness, but at the same time it was an incredibly fun, wild, crazy odyssey, although weaker than the previous two films, but still original, inspired, which leaves a lot to be desired. reflection.