Ari Aster’s latest A24 release, ‘Beau Is Afraid,’ is a daunting, challenging horror-comedy that sends Joaquin Phoenix through a three-hour surrealistic nightmare—as original as filmmaking gets.
cartoon, Aster’s saga soon thrusts its main character out of the urban and into the suburban, courtesy of a vehicular accident that lands him in the care of a couple, Grace and Roger , who nurse him back to health. That they do this in the K-Pop-decorated bedroom of their resentful daughter Toni would be strange in any other context; here, however, it’s part and parcel of a story that takes only extreme right turns.
With Roger calling Beau things like “My brutha” and “pal-eo,” and he and Grace simultaneously caring for Jeeves , a rampaging PTSD-afflicted comrade of their deceased Air Force veteran son, the injured Beau finds himself falling further and further down a rabbit hole of loss, grief, sorrow, shame, and lunacy. Throughout, Aster affixes us to the man’s spiraling POV.
Traumatic flashbacks to childhood incidents with his mom, a bathtub, and an attic, as well as a cruise ship romance with teen Elaine — during which Beau is played by Armen Nahapetian—underscore the origins of this schlub’s twisted Freudian hang-ups.
Aster’s directorial gifts are imposing, and so too is the lead performance delivered by Phoenix, who embodies Beau as a preternaturally dazed and confused man-child incapable of disentangling himself from his mom.
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