Beau is Afraid: Always Be My Baby

Movies are hard to make and very expensive, so it seems obvious that most filmmakers want the audience to like their product. But every once in a blue moon, a movie comes along that simply does not seem to give a flying donut about being liked. The most recent example I can think of is Darren Aronovsky’s audience-bludgeoning mother!

Ari Aster’s third film, Beau Is Afraid, is one of those movies, seemingly tailor-made to piss off boomer critics who complain that movies just aren’t good anymore. But even the most 2023-end-times-jaded cineaste might find themselves struck off-balance by this three-hour study of weaponized neurosis.  

Described as a “nightmare comedy,” the film opens with a black screen, distant screams, rapidly oncoming chaos, MORE SCREAMS – then we realize this is a point-of-view birth sequence. The chaotic sound design continues throughout the first act, in which some kind of violent havoc is always echoing just out of frame.  

Cut to Joaquin Phoenix as the adult Beau Wasserman, shambling into his therapist’s office with the weight of the world bearing down on his hunched shoulders. Beau has mommy issues—nothing seems to satisfy her unending need for love and adulation from her bumbling only child. The casting of actual human teddy bear Stephen McKinley Henderson as the therapist is a stroke of genius, as he seems to be hiding some inscrutable malice you can’t quite put your finger on.

That sense of unseen dread bursts into reality as Beau goes home after picking up his new meds. He has to run to his apartment door at full tilt to avoid being accosted by black-eyeballed maniacs or shanked by the neighborhood serial killer, Birthday Boy Stab Man. Beau’s environment is an outrageous Fox News vision of urban squalor, stylized with equal parts Jacques Tati choreography and Gaspar Noé ultra-violence. Who wouldn’t need drugs?

This section is weirdly spectacular and easily the best part of the movie. I would have been happy to explore more of this slapstick surrealist hell-world; alas, Beau has an odyssey to undertake, and that’s where the plot slows to a crawl. Bill Hader’s voice-only cameo is a perfect example—as the random guy who delivers the bad news that sets our hero’s quest in motion, Hader is on the phone with Beau for a full three slackly paced minutes. By the time Beau finally makes it to mom’s house, we are well past an average movie runtime, and by that point he and the audience have both run out of steam.  

Without spoiling too much, we learn that the late Mrs. Wasserman founded a huge company that makes, well, everything, from the microwave dinners Beau lives on to the pharmaceuticals that manage his brain chemicals. Is this Aster’s thesis on how billionaires view society—as an unwashed mass of ungrateful dependents, non-job-creators?  If so, it’s an idea tucked into the far edges of the frame.

Aster once again proves his unerring ability to create sounds and images that seem to have come from deep inside cinema’s collective unconscious. But the story’s emotionally draining nihilism doesn’t really count as a theme, a point. A lot of the comedy hits the puerile adolescent desire to laugh at suffering.  There is a magnificently timed puke gag and a seriously dumb CGI penis monster. A post-cringe sex scene is scored with a feathery Mariah Carey song. Beau is forced to smoke the most sinister doink in film history.

Joaquin Phoenix does his thing; he makes the character work. But Beau has no arc whatsoever. He doesn’t grow as a person or learn anything about himself, beyond the awful truths foisted on him like so much emotional manure. No one is ever really on his side—he suffers in abject mental isolation from fade-in to fade-out and that’s pretty much it. Whether the audience learns anything about themselves will depend on what they take away from the strange world/prison Aster has built around his protagonist.   

The film ends with a towering middle finger to the audience. To Aster’s credit, he “commits to the bit,” even if the only response seems to be to shrug and exit the theater as if nothing of consequence transpired over its epic runtime. Kudos to A24’s marketing department for selling Beau Is Afraid as a whimsical Michel Gondry-style romp. This movie seems explicitly designed to leave the viewer deflated and a little pissed off, and it succeeds admirably.