Beau is scared, the most recent A24 film from director Ari Aster, is a black comedy and surreal Oedipal drama that seems like it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for how commonplace it has become for TV shows and movies to tell stories about people living with the kind of anxiety that makes it hard to function. Through its brilliant direction and imaginative set design, Beau is scaredis able to tell a fascinating story that makes you feel deeply how horrible it can be to live in a perpetual state of fight or flight.
But unlike many other recent on-screen depictions of anxiety disorders: The Fabelmans, Puss in Boots: The Last Wishand HBO Max Velma all come to mind Beau is scared he is not at all interested in making them seem manageable or like obstacles that one simply overcomes through the power of love and conventional cinema.
Set in a reality not very different from ours, where big cities are presented as examples of how society collapses, Beau is scared is an account of the life of Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), a scared and deeply neurotic man who struggles to cope with an unspecified order of anxiety. For Beau, each day is a new opportunity to marvel and cower at the outside world from the safety of his small apartment, the only place where he feels truly safe. Although Beau knows that other people have no problem leaving their homes and leading productive lives, every time he chances a glance outside his window, all he can see is Mad Max-like scenes of apocalyptic anarchy, and it’s enough to convince you to stay inside.
How much of the horror Beau witnesses—streets filled with violent, deranged people killing each other and sometimes waving their genitals around for the fun of it—is actually real rather than it all being a disturbed man’s waking nightmare? It is a question. Beau is scared poses from the beginning. Rather than provide a definitive answer, Beau is scared it keeps open the possibility that his heightened reality is some kind of fantasy, or at least a collection of Beau’s paranoid delusions impressively performed by the film’s background cast and production design by Fiona Crombie.
Phoenix plays Beau relatively straightforward and as a man who’s really just trying to mind his own business. But everything about the world around Beau, from the swearing store signs to the go-go dancers dancing in front of his apartment building, creates a stressful and uncomfortable atmosphere that makes it easy to understand why he’s so afraid. often, even if the danger might be on your head.
Many of the things that scare Beau may be imaginary, but there’s never any doubt about how real and always present in his life Beau’s passive-aggressive mother, Mona (Patti Lupone), even though she lives across the country. and is largely unseen. Beau is scared when the film focuses on the present. Even more so than strangers on the street or news reports of a murderer on the loose with a knife, Mona, a self-made entrepreneur who built her business empire as a young single mother (played in flashbacks by Zoe Lister-Jones ) – fills Beau with a crippling anxiety that he is only comfortable talking about with his anonymous therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson).
Through his sessions, Beau’s therapist has gotten him to a point where he can at least talk about the haunting and traumatic birth dreams that begin to haunt him in preparation for Beau embarking on a journey to see his mother. his mother. But all that progress (and then some) comes crashing down when, on the day Beau is due to catch his flight, both his house keys and his luggage mysteriously disappear just as he is about to leave, an inexplicable turn of events that is only the beginning. of Beau being forced out of his comfort zone.
Just like Aster’s 2011 short film Prince Starring Billy Mayo as a nervous man terrorized on the phone by a key-collecting demon, there is a stark simplicity in Beau is scaredBeau’s story despite all the fantastical turns it takes as he sets out to get to his mother’s house. All Beau really wants is a ride to the airport and to feel like he’s not letting Mona down once again like she constantly did when he was a skittish teenager (played by Armen Nahapetian). But the complex emotions that underlie those desires—fear that his home will be invaded unlocked, or that he will be murdered, or that no woman will love him like Mona—makes Beau is scared a frantic sense of urgency that makes everything in the film seem almost The cellA deep dive in the style of one man’s psychological neuroses.
As intermittently dark, twisted, and grotesque as the film gets, it’s also Aster’s most comedic project to date in that it’s liberally peppered with moments meant to remove at least some of the dread that comes with being like that in the head of anyone. Beau. But even with its lightness and feel like a change away from the more horror-focused way audiences may know Aster by, Beau is scared focuses on many of the same themes present in Aster’s earlier works, such as munchausen and The strange thing about the Johnsonswhich makes the movie play like a sharp expansion of ideas that seem to haunt him.
Beau is scared it’s so different from the other Aster movies and ends on such a bewildering note that it’s more than likely going to throw some people for loops they weren’t expecting. But even as it spirals into its final moments, raising more questions than he ever cares to answer, there’s a fascinating, captivating quality to it all that makes it hard not to get sucked into the strangeness of Aster’s vision. .
Beau is scared It also stars Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Kylie Rogers, Denis Ménochet, Parker Posey, Julia Antonelli, Richard Kind, Hayley Squires, and Michael Gandolfini. The film hits theaters on April 21.
