New & now: Beau is Afraid

The mother of all mommy issue movies is weird, uncomfortable & unexpectedly funny.

There have been many movies made about anxious people, where their anxieties are treated as character quirks that mysteriously disappear when the plot no longer requires them. Few movies have depicted anxiety as what it really is: a disorder of the brain that can be crippling, and doesn’t ever really go away entirely. At best, it can be controlled, with therapy and/or medication. At worst, it can turn your life into a surreal nightmare, where no one can be trusted and there’s danger around every corner. Ari Aster manages to capture that to uncomfortable results in Beau is Afraid, a different kind of horror movie.

Joaquin Phoenix is Beau Wassermann, a gracelessly aging man in his late forties. He’s friendless and alone except for his overbearing mother, Mona (Patti LuPone), a world-renowned business magnate with her logo on everything from frozen dinners to prescription medication to real estate. She even owns the dilapidated apartment building Beau lives in, where right next door is a strip club advertising a series of increasingly implausible live sex acts. It’s in an unidentified city that’s a Republican’s idea of what New York City and Chicago are like, a trash-strewn hellhole where there’s constant screaming and gunfire, decaying corpses lie in the street, and just getting into one’s home means having to frantically avoid a nude, blood-smeared man wielding a knife.

Beau has an…oh, let’s call it complicated relationship with Mona, who raised him as a single parent. He never knew his father, who, we eventually learn, not only died the very night Beau was conceived, but during the conception. An upcoming visit with Mona brings him nothing but dread, but simply not going isn’t an option.

After an unsettling late-night encounter with a neighbor he never actually sees, Beau oversleeps, and, during his frantic attempt to leave for the airport on time, his house keys and suitcase are stolen. However, when he calls Mona to tell her that he won’t be able to make his flight, rather than offer sympathy, all she has for Beau is coldness and a passive-aggressive “I trust you to do the right thing.” As many of us with relatives who only communicate in code will know, that means “You better figure out how to do what I want you to do, and do it fast.”

Forced to sleep outside when his now unlocked apartment is ransacked, Beau calls Mona the next day, only to learn that she’s died suddenly, after a chandelier in her home falls and crushes her head¹. When he discovers someone hiding in his bathroom, a naked Beau flees his home, and is hit by a truck. He wakes two days later in the home of a disturbingly cheerful couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), who nurse and treat him as a surrogate son, much to the seething displeasure of their teenage daughter (Kylie Rogers). Beau is informed that Mona had it in her will that her funeral can’t proceed unless he’s present, so, despite his injuries, he has no choice but to make the trip anyway. So starts a treacherous journey to his own personal Mt. Doom: his mother’s home.

This is more plot than I normally like to reveal when talking about a new movie (let alone one that’s still in very limited release), and yet, trust me when I tell you that this barely covers the first quarter of Beau is Afraid. If I broke down everything that happens in it, it would sound like the ravings of a psychopath. Existing in a narrative gray area where it’s impossible to tell what’s real and what’s a product of Beau’s growing panic and disorientation, it works best if you don’t try to figure out what’s happening and instead just go along with it.

Aster’s script offers some tantalizing threads, such as the significance of the new anti-anxiety medication Beau’s therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) prescribes him (let alone the stern warning that he must always take it with water), but pulling them often just leads to more questions. Undoubtedly with a wider release will come the inevitable frame-by-frame breakdowns and speculations as to what everything supposedly means, but I’m not sure how much of it really “means” anything. It’s often difficult to determine what isn’t just Beau either being gaslit, or gaslighting himself.

Just as I didn’t expect the ending to have shades of Pink Floyd’s The Wall (albeit without the music), I didn’t expect Beau is Afraid to be laugh-out-loud funny. But it is, particularly in the first half hour, before Beau leaves town. A scene in which a short walk across the street from his apartment to a bodega turns into a dangerous obstacle course might be the funniest thing I’ve seen so far this year. Even its most uncomfortable moments, like an extended, incredibly awkward sex scene (set to a familiar 90s pop song), have an undercurrent of surreal humor to them. You may find yourself doing a full-body cringe during some scenes, but while nervously giggling at the same time.

Though Beau as a character is weak and helpless to the point of patheticness, Joaquin Phoenix gives him the humanity required to keep the audience on his side. Shambling around like a pile of dirty laundry shaped into the vague form of a man and given life, Phoenix’s voice is often an incoherent mumble, while his eyes express everything from confusion to weariness to rabbit-in-a-snare terror. He’s surrounded by a top-notch cast, but it’s his scenes with an actor I shall not name (because it spoils the third-act twist) that crackle with a dark, intense energy that leaves you holding your breath. The nervous giggles are a relief.

A victim of bad brain chemistry and worse parenting, Beau Wassermann is an only slightly exaggerated version of real-life people who struggle with anxiety and trauma, and maybe you need to as well to appreciate the dark comedy of what he experiences in, as his mother demands he must, trying to do the “right” thing. Of course everything goes to hell. He wouldn’t have expected anything else.

1. Looking forward to a film scholar someday writing about Ari Aster and his recurring theme of mothers with missing heads.