“ ‘Beau Is Afraid’ gave me the unsettling feeling that, owing to some administrative error, I had stumbled upon an extended therapy session instead of a movie,” Anthony Lane writes.
Rumor had it that “Beau Is Afraid” would be three hours long. Not so. It is one whole minute shorter than that. Rejoice! Much has changed since 1942, when Val Lewton started work as a producer at R.K.O. and received specific orders: no film was to cost more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or to last more than seventy-five minutes. From those tough restrictions came a bunch of enduring frighteners, including “Cat People” and “The Seventh Victim” .
Immediately after Beau’s birth, for example, we are spirited to the consulting room of his shrink —a logical leap of which Mel Brooks would be proud. Beau, balding and pasty, is now in the slough of middle age, though he looks older still. He says that he will visit his mother on the morrow. “Do you ever wish that she was dead?” the shrink inquires. The blatancy of this exchange veers close to a spoof, and, indeed, the film has all the ingredients of a delicious black comedy.
If all this nervous wreckage seems too much, that’s the point. Aster likes to decorate every inch of his nightmare, down to the foulness of the graffiti, and nothing is lightly touched upon or left to chance. It’s not enough that the shrink prescribes anti-anxiety medication for Beau, instructing him to take it with water; we also get those instructions repeated in voice-over, and a closeup of the bottle of pills, plus the sight of Beau Googling the meds on his computer.
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