BeauisAfraid is a purposefully annoying, overlong comedy from Hereditary director Ari Aster.
Beau Is Afraid Score Details “Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster's latest film, Beau is Afraid, is a shockingly bad epic that will leave you wishing you could get the three hours it cost you back.” Pros Cons There are some filmmakers who relish in the spontaneity of life and whose films feel alive and unpredictable. Ari Aster is not one of those filmmakers. Aster is a director who doesn’t just demand control, but who constantly communicates it.
With its multilayered story and mean-spirited sense of humor, there are moments when the film feels like the Frankensteinian result of a creative marriage between the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman. Unfortunately, Aster lacks the wry cleverness of the former and the heartbroken humanity of the latter. He isn’t interested in exploring the themes of his films so much as he is in repeatedly beating his characters with them until they inevitably succumb to madness, death, or both.
The latter scene feels like Aster wrote it in film school on a dare. That is to say that it is, on the one hand, rebellious and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and on the other, dumber and more juvenile than you could possibly imagine. The same can, unfortunately, be said for much of Beau is Afraid. It’s the rare film that proves that “unique” isn’t always a compliment, and neither is “shocking.” Make no mistake: Beau is Afraid is a shocking film.
The snide quality of the sequence’s conclusion just makes Aster’s clear allusions to the work of singular artists like Don Hertzfeldt, Michel Gondry, and Charlie Kaufman feel all the more unearned. Beyond that, it’s one of several sections in the film that has the potential to broaden the thematic and emotional territory of Beau is Afraid, but is nonetheless made perfunctory by a last-minute joke on the part of Aster.
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