Beau Is Afraid review: irritating and uncomfortable, by design
Joaquin Phoenix is on an existential search for his mother in Ari Aster's insufferable—but occasionally quite good—horror comedy
There’s a certain kind of bad movie that reaches a special threshold of annoying. It’s a bad movie where every few scenes you have to admit that what’s happening right now kinda rules. If it was just bad all the way through, you could easily dismiss the whole enterprise. Instead, you argue with yourself about the part where one character does this and another character does that. “And the set design!” you think. “You gotta give props to that. Okay, this is not a total failure,” you conclude, “but please never make me sit through it again.” Then you come across it one day and say, “I hate this movie, but this bit coming up is great, hold on.”
The newest entry to this ignoble pantheon is Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, an insufferable three-hour slog that would make Terry Gilliam say “reel it in a bit, would ya?” It is juvenile and pointless, loud and abrasive, and not anywhere as clever as it thinks it is. There are, however, individual moments sprinkled throughout that genuinely hum with greatness.
After a short introductory scene where Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix, at his most whiny and affected) has a therapy session with his warm and trustworthy shrink (Stephen McKinley Henderson), we discover that the world of this film is not our reality. Sure, one could say the exaggerated urban hellscape is just this delusional paranoid’s interpretation of city living, but if that’s the case we’re never given that third-person anchor. We’re inside Beau’s head the whole time, and while the over-the-top violence, chaos, and filth is certainly very funny (there are murder-hungry homeless zombies and plagues at every turn), it gets exhausting rather quickly.
Beau is planning a trip to visit his mother (Patti LuPone now, Zoe Lister-Jones in memory), but fate has other plans. When Beau turns his back on his luggage and his keys for three seconds, they’re snatched. Then he learns that Mom has been killed in a freak chandelier accident and he must return for a burial immediately. Every second he delays he is being a bad son.