‘Beau Is Afraid’ movie review: Ari Aster’s third film feels like a three-hour panic attack
‘Beau Is Afraid’ might impress you with its bewildering Kafkaesque trip and Aster’s signature flourishes, or nerve-rackingly test your patience as an overdrawn anxiety porn exercise to discuss mommy issues; it could be both as well
(Originally published in The Hindu on May 26, 2023)
You simply can’t hate how self-assured Ari Aster feels about his cinematic language — or that’s what you’d have thought after Hereditary and Midsommar. But with Beau Is Afraid, it seems as if A24 threw a fat cheque at Aster to send him to therapy but instead, he made a movie with Joaquin Phoenix. In his third film, Aster attempts to bewitch you with a pixel-perfect rendering of what feels like a three-hour panic attack that worsens every second. The curtain raiser to this world is a long, gruelling stretch where everyday anxieties get heightened that ends with our protagonist being informed of how a chandelier fell on his mother, evaporating her head; in retrospect, this was Aster’s humble attempt at easing you in.
Beau Wassermann (Joaquin), a middle-aged man suffering from depression and acute anxiety, living in a grungy degenerate neighbourhood with a corpse in the middle of the intersection that nobody bothers about, is the one facing a series of extremely panic-inducing mishaps as he tries to catch a flight to his mom. The most plausible of these afflictions is a neighbour who keeps sliding in notes asking the quiet Beau to keep the music down; everything that follows is built with the fabric of a fever dream realised.
Be it how Joaquin embodies a child living in a man’s body or how the seemingly-dystopian setting of the neighbourhood makes you question its seriousness, there’s plenty….
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