Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 59 minutes
Director: Ari Aster
Quick Impressions:
What a movie! We’d only been watching about ten minutes. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) had just lost his keys and was on the phone with his mom. Suddenly, he asked, “Mom?” Then with a loud scritch, the screen went dark, and the lights came up. The booming of the thunder sounded like it was inside the theater.
For a few minutes, nothing happened. Then, though the screen remained dark, the sound returned, and we all got to hear Joaquin Phoenix brushing his teeth. It was so trippy. We were warned by an usher that the film might resume but lightning might strike again, and “if it happens too many times, you’ll all get a raincheck.” Finally the film resumed, re-starting at the sequence just before Beau loses his keys.
This was all very exciting, the perfect augmentation for this particular film. I recommend that everyone watches it this way. Thunder kept rumbling at irregular intervals throughout the movie. We weren’t completely sure that it was coming from outside the theater. It sounded like it was part of the movie soundtrack, and sometimes it showcased certain moments with almost eerie perfection. (As we walked out, we heard other people saying the same thing. But the thunder was definitely outside. Lightning was cracking the entire sky apart the whole way home.)
I’ve been excited for Beau Is Afraid because I like Ari Aster movies for some reason. (I say “for some reason” because often large portions of them make me horrifically uncomfortable, and yet I find his work so alluring. I’d rather be uncomfortable than bored.) My husband is less of an Ari Aster fan. Hereditary was too hard for him (as a loving father) to watch. It’s the scene where she’s leaning out the car window. He never wants to see that again. I was concerned when I saw Hereditary because I frequently found it screamingly funny. Then I discovered online that lots of other people were watching it as a comedy, and I thought, “Oh thank God! I’m not just evil or something!” Although I have major problems with the opening of Midsommar, I still found that movie so fun to watch. (I watched that one the wrong way, too, with no sympathy for the insufferable grad students and mild curiosity about the cult. I was ready to subscribe to their newsletter.) (Plus, I just love the end of that movie, and I know my daughter would, too, but I still think she’s a bit too young for so much full-frontal male nudity, and I really don’t want any of my kids to see a movie where the bipolar person murders the entire family in their sleep. That might make it hard for them to sleep. And then how will I get my writing done?)
My husband has decided Beau Is Afraid is his favorite of the three Ari Aster films we have seen because he finds it the most palatable. (I like Aster’s work way more than he does.) For sure there’s not as much blunt force trauma. There isn’t as much graphic, disturbing violence here as in Aster’s other films. The worst thing you have to worry about here is why we see Beau’s balls so often.
“Then there turns out to be a reason for it,” my husband said after the film, conveying his massive relief. (Thank God! I mean, if we have to see Joaquin Phoenix’s balls all the time, it had better be for a narrative-driven reason! Otherwise, it’s just a waste of balls.)
I’m reading the book Hitchcock/Truffaut right now, so Alfred Hitchcock’s on my mind more than usual. Some of Ari Aster’s descriptions of this movie ring so Hitchcockian to me. Aster saying Beau Is Afraid is a “nightmare comedy” and a “Jewish Lord of the Rings,” reminds me so much of Hitchcock gleefully announcing of Marnie, “It’s a sex mystery.” Sure, it is. Of course.
(I’m not really expressing skepticism, just admiring the showmanship in the flourish of these convenient sub-genres. Marnie is a sex mystery, and Beau Is Afraid is a nightmare comedy. I won’t argue. Describing them so tantalizingly is clearly the mark of an auteur who is also a showman.)
Honestly, in our screening, I was fairly impressed by the audience’s clear admiration for Aster. The place was packed, and no matter how weird anything got, everyone was sitting there in rapt silence eating it all up. Most people stayed through the entire closing credits (which is very rare. We always do, and usually we’re the last ones out, unless we’re at a Marvel movie).
While we were only hearing the film’s soundtrack, the guy sitting next to me was explaining to his date that this movie is based on Ari Aster’s short film Beau. Later on, he was talking about differences in the endings, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying, and I thought it would be perhaps a bit rude to suggest, “Hey want to make a double date and finish this discussion over dinner?” (Just kidding. I hate going to dinner with random people, but I did want to know what he was saying.) I’ll have to watch the short film Beau (or else find that guy on Tinder).
The Good:
As we left the theater, the first thing I said to my husband was, “I am so baffled. I did not understand that movie at all, and it was so bizarre. And yet, at several moments, I pointedly thought, ‘This is just like my life. I relate to this so strongly and deeply.’ So which is it, Sarah? How can both those things be true?”
With some relief, my husband then revealed the same two things were true for him. He also did not understand the movie and found it bizarre. And he, too, thought pointedly, ‘This is just like Sarah’s life.’ Actually, what he said was that some things the character experiences remind him of the agonizing thoughts I share with him.
It’s especially eerie because it’s so meta. There’s one moment fairly late in the film when Beau watches a play that announces he’ll watch a play and the protagonist will be this character who is just like him, and I could really relate to all the themes in that segment. And I thought, “What is happening? How is this totally disorientingly alienating and at the same time reverberating within me so strongly?”
Our daughter would love this movie. She adores unreliable narrators, and Beau is either delusional, or whatever intelligence is shaping the movie is like, “Hahaha! This is just like a surrealist play!”
Our older son on the other hand would be driven mad with rage. If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s inconclusive endings that resolve nothing. In this case, the whole movie is like that.
This past fall, I wrote a novel that was half brutally self-excoriating (true) memoir where I talked about mental illness and worked through grief for my mother and half wildly absurd (fictional) suspense comedy murder mystery. And tonally, I’m not sure that worked. I really wanted it to. The thing is, writing through the dark, intense, tortured true parts was so cathartic, that then I felt better and the whole thing started becoming increasingly hilarious in an almost unhinged way.
But before I reached that cathartic place, I felt trapped in negative thought loops that were a lot like Beau’s adventures. I got so far gone that I stopped recognizing my depression. Then I recognized it but still couldn’t make it stop. I tried to write about myself as honestly as I could, and my sister read the first chapter and decided the character was so unlikeable that nobody could possibly like her. She added, “I would keep reading because I was intrigued by the creepy murder mansion. Why are they so obsessed with the murder mansion? Why do they keep wanting to go back there?” It’s definitely mysterious.
A close friend read the whole thing—which was awfully nice of her, though I suppose she had a vested interest because she’s one of the characters in the true parts—and decided, “She doesn’t sound evil, but she does sound crazy.” Then she pointed out, “But Sarah, you’re not actually like this.” She was also like, “You don’t have to put yourself on trial for everything you’ve ever done in your entire life.”
I was like, “Yes, I have to!”
She was like, “Why?”
So I’m tabling that for a bit. But the point is, at some random time last year, I abruptly decided I was furious at my mother for stuff that happened over twenty years ago. Why? When she died we were on excellent terms. Then as I wrote, I started to realize I was just pretending to be angry at her because I wanted her to come back and answer all these charges so that when she did, I could be like, “Now, that I’ve got you here, don’t be dead, okay?” And suddenly this book that I worried was tearing my poor mother apart actually became a paean to my mother. (The creepy murder party turned out to be fun, too. And just because that thing twenty years ago wasn’t my mother’s fault, it wasn’t mine either. It really was the fault of the person who did it. Mystery solved. Happy ending!) It’s the weirdest book, but what I’m saying is, I could really relate to all of Beau’s issues with his mother.
Ari Aster and I clearly have mommy issues that are weirdly in sync. I remember relating so much to the figure of the mom reaching out for the baby in Hereditary. (Is she trying to breastfeed her? I’m trying to remember. As a new mother, I remember being weirdly concerned that my mom was trying to steal my baby, just because she’d say things like, “This is the best baby I’ve ever had.” I’d be like, “This is my baby!” I was a little over-sensitive post-partum.)
My husband was like, “This movie really requires…analysis.”
I was like, “Yes, analysis is the perfect word. It’s so over-the-top Freudian,” intentionally, in a humorous way. (I remember last year looking at a list of Freudian defense mechanisms and being like, “Oh my God! I’m doing all of these! Simultaneously! This is so concerning!”)
I worried for a while that I had schizophrenia. Beau might. I’m nowhere near his level of delusion and hallucination. (At least, that’s what appears to be occurring with him. Either that or reality is just whimsical, and this film is exposing it for what it is.)
One thing I loved about the film was that my take on it kept shifting. I kept thinking, “Oh, so this is broadly realistic,” then, “Oh, so this is not reality. He must be delusional.” Then I’d think, “Well, maybe there is an explanation.” Then I’d think, “No, this has gone on far too long. There’s no way we’ll ever get an explanation.” Then, “Oh my God! There is going to be a real explanation, after all!” Then, “Oh I guess not…” So I was constantly in suspense, a very unusual kind of suspense that I was not expecting because movies don’t build suspense in this precise way.
I liked all the performances, especially Parker Posey (partially just because I like thinking her name Adam Sandler does in “The Chanukah Song.”) For me, Ari Aster’s films always have moments that stand out. I’m never as captivated by the whole movie as I am by certain standout moments. The sex scene with Posey is just the best.
I also like Patti Lupone as his mother. What a mother! I’m not averse to co-sleeping. I think it can have many benefits. But the way she does it, it looks co-sleeping with benefits. Zoe Lister-Jones actually plays the younger version of his mother in those scenes.
The section of the film featuring Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, and Kylie Rogers could be a movie of its own. Weirdly it seems so much more realistic than everything else that happens because the scenario is so familiar from other creepy movies.
I was happy to see Richard Kind turn up near the end, too.
Best Scene:
That sex scene with Parker Posey is amazing. That is my favorite part of the whole movie. It reminds me of the moment Toni Collette throws the book into the fireplace in Hereditary. It’s also runner-up greatest Ari Aster sex scene (losing that honor to the one near the end of Midsommar). I got excited watching it because I was thinking of Alfred Hitchcock. (That sounds kind of funny. “I got so excited watching that sex scene, thinking of Alfred Hitchcock.” That makes me sound unhinged.) What I mean is, I love watching all of Hitchcock’s films to pick out similarities in them, tropes he often uses. This scene made me pretty sure that Ari Aster is on the same type of trajectory as a filmmaker. I just feel like his work is so obviously his. I can’t wait to see future movies to see more scenes that remind me of these scenes.
Best Scene Visually:
I love the part with the remote control. The minute he started using it, I started thinking, Now do this! And then he did that, and I was like, “Gasp!” I was so thrilled. See now, that little flourish reminds me of the way night flips to day outside the house in Hereditary.
Best Action Sequence:
I love the paint scene, particularly the impassioned exchange when Toni tells him not to call her Toni.
He’s like, “I thought that was your name,” and she responds, “It’s my name!”
I just feel like my social interactions go like this a lot. I’m panicking and being weird and apologetic, and the other person is getting more and more exasperated with me, and then suddenly somebody’s doing what Toni does, and I’m freaking out like, “Oh my God! I swear! I didn’t mean any harm!” (I somehow always do the worst thing, too!)
The Negatives:
I’m not a fan of the part in the attic because at first it’s so promisingly creepy, and it’s just like, “Really?” It seems kind of anticlimactic. Like, “Oh there must be something really bad up there.” And then it’s just kind of like, “Oh I see.” I mean…
You know in Hereditary, there is something evil up in the treehouse (unless you read it as the family has hereditary insanity and none of the demon stuff is real, which is the reading I prefer, but not the one I believe Aster intends.) And here, it’s just like a big…I don’t know. It’s boring.
I think I would have liked it just a little shorter. But I don’t know what I would cut (probably the thing in the attic).
I also didn’t like the play in the woods, but (in a phenomenon I can’t explain) I simultaneously loved it and felt like it was speaking right to me. So that’s confusing. (Maybe I’m just really susceptible to the power of suggestion because it does directly say that it’s about you. I felt like Mr. Burns watching that play the elementary school puts on for him.)
In general, I wanted more resolution, but I’m torn because I also appreciate the movie for what it is and would love to watch it a second time. My daughter is now complaining that she wants to go to a movie with me. She decided The Pope’s Exorcist looks good, and I’m like, “Are you sure you can’t hold out for Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?” Maybe I should take her to this, so she appreciates what a nice mother she has. I know I would get a lot out of a second viewing. There’s a lot to take in with this movie.
It’s pretty hard to be sure what’s hallucination, what’s dream, what’s fantasy, what’s horror world. For a while I was convinced that Beau has schizophrenia, but that many of the other characters are quite disturbed, too.
Overall:
Beau Is Afraid is my husband’s new favorite Ari Aster movie. But that’s not the highest praise since he doesn’t really like Ari Aster’s other movies and will never watch them again. I desperately want to show my daughter Midsommar because the last twenty minutes are just so…unforgettable. But that doesn’t seem like great parenting since she’s only fourteen. I enjoyed Beau Is Afraid and might actually get to watch it again someday since my husband is less sickened by it than the others and my daughter is getting older.