Rating: R | Runtime: 179 minutes
Release Date: April 21st, 2023 (USA)
Studio: A24
Director(s): Ari Aster
Writer(s): Ari Aster

I really thought I was gonna die my whole life.

Ambition can only get you so far when the product of that ambition is a circuitously insufferable journey through reductive neuroses and paranoia that make light of true psychological hardships to satirize a Freudian break with reality born from a gaslighting and manipulative matriarch who takes “don’t masturbate or you’ll go blind” to newly depraved heights.

I wish Ari Aster was able to make Beau Is Afraid his first movie as he planned because his knock on that first draft being more cartoonish than “emotional” (laughably, that’s what he says this version is) might have been exactly what this thing needed to succeed. Because it does hew closer to his early shorts in tone and absurdity than Hereditary and Midsommar. It just also feels like an overstuffed attempt to put all the short ideas he never made into one self-serious package that suffers greatly as a result.

It looks fantastic, though. And the middle hour’s craft is impeccable despite proving to be the same idea over and over and over again with shoehorned action (I hope Denis Ménochet got a nice paycheck) and infantile pseudo intellectual metaphor that hits us over the head with a brick to the point where my disinterest became my own fault because I stuck with it expecting something meaningful to somehow surface.

I also wanted to finally see Patti LuPone as more than an image or quick cut via flashbacks melting time together. It takes two hours and twenty minutes of Joaquin Phoenix’s unadulterated exasperation, but she does finally arrive to unsurprisingly be the best part of the whole even if her character is the catalyst for why it’s all been so gosh darn boring.

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(L-R) Joaquin Phoenix as Beau in A24’s BEAU IS AFRAID; photo by Takashi Seida.