It's little wonder "Beau Is Afraid" since his life is hell. You might even say he lives in Hell and the demons in his life are determined he won't get out. When Ari Aster's magnificent mess of a new movie opens Beau is due to travel home to visit his mom on the anniversary of his father's death but those demons and circumstances in general contrive to keep him in his hell-hole of an apartment in his unnamed city where street violence is a given 24/7. It takes a car hitting him at speed just to get him away from the apartment he seemed fearful of leaving in the first place.
Beau is played by Joaquin Phoenix, never off the screen in this three hour movie and giving us yet another tour-de-force performance and that car is driven by Amy Ryan who, rather than take him to a hospital, brings him to her home where her husband Nathan Lane is a doctor. It looks like they want to 'adopt' this sad, depressed and fearful middle-aged man but Beau is determined to make it 'home' to mother, (Patti LuPone when she finally does appear and not the kind of mom anyone would want to spend time with).
His journey there is a Kafkaesque nightmare that culminates in a Kafkaesque trial with Beau the hapless prisoner in the dock. Like "Hereditary" and "Midsommar" before it, "Beau is Afraid" is a horror movie that exists in its own Asteresque fantasy world and yes, like any good horror film it's deeply unsettling while at the same time being very funny but at three hours it also goes way beyond its point of tolerance. There are sequences here, spread throughout that epic running time, as good as anything you will see this year and yet at other times there are scenes that either seem to miss the point or just drag on too long. The word that seems to be missing from Aster's vocabulary is 'cut'; knock forty minutes or so off the 179 minute running time and this might have been a really great film. As it stands it may be a bit of a mess but it also confirms Aster as one of the most exciting people making movies today. Personally I can't wait to see what he does next.
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