Beau is Afraid (2023 man being afraid film)

[Mister Six]

From Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar, comes a film that's absolutely nothing like them whatsoever, and very little like anything else.

River Phoenix plays Beau, an anxiety-ridden man in an oppressively aggressive and deranged world whose quest to visit his mother on the anniversary of his dad's death becomes a blackly hilarious odyssey of drugs, violence, vision quests and gnawing, ever-present guilt.

I don't want to say too much about it until others have seen it, and it's only on limited release in the US so this thread might be quiet for a bit, but this was my favourite of Aster's three films, and is my favourite flick of the year so far. It certainly looks absolutely stunning throughout, and really ought to get Oscar nominations for best production design and cinematography if nothing else (but it should get a lot else too).

It's a very polarising film, though, and anyone going in expecting something as simple and direct as his first two movies is going to be confused and potentially very angry. It's not a film for people who ask "But WHY is Gregor Samsa an insect now?! How did that happen?! Why didn't he turn back to normal at the end?!"

Go in with no expectations, ideally no knowledge of the film beyond what I've written above, and just let the thing unfold, and I think - well, hope - you'll enjoy it.

Admirably, A24 gave Aster $35 million to make this - their biggest budget ever. Admirably, but not necessarily wisely. I doubt they're going to make that money back. But I'm very glad this film exists.

[Pseudopath]

River Phoenix plays Beau

Crikey. How long has this thing been in production?

Love Aster's work (Midsommar is definitely one of my Top 10 movies) and have been eagerly anticipating this one, but some of the early reviews have been very worrying. Glad you enjoyed it and it sounds like a visual feast even if the story is utter bollocks.

[checkoutgirl]

River Phoenix died in the nineties outside Johnny Depp's nightclub from heroin. Must have used CGI like Peter Cushing.

[Mister Six]

Haha, yes. My brain just revolts at trying to remember how to spell Joaquin.

[Mister Six]

Crikey. How long has this thing been in production?

Love Aster's work (Midsommar is definitely one of my Top 10 movies) and have been eagerly anticipating this one, but some of the early reviews have been very worrying. Glad you enjoyed it and it sounds like a visual feast even if the story is utter bollocks.

I wouldn't say utter bollocks, but best to just view it along the lines of Eraserhead: it's communication an emotion and an outlook more than a traditional story in a rigidly constructed fictional world.

[checkoutgirl]

Haha, yes. My brain just revolts at trying to remember how to spell Joaquin.

His sister is called Leaf and his brother was called River. By rights he should be called Tree or Branch or something.

[Pseudopath]

His sister is called Leaf and his brother was called River. By rights he should be called Tree or Branch or something.

Nah...his sisters are called Rain, Liberty and Summer. Leaf is what Joaquin used to call himself when he was a kid.

[Pseudopath]

His actual surname is Bottom too _(titter).

[C_Larence]

Had an inkling this would be shit ever since I saw Letterboxd flooding with 5 star reviews from people who'd seen a secret April Fool's screening (thinking it was going to be a Midsommar director's cut or something like that). Each review, to a man, was entirely focused on that experience rather than anything about the movie. Now that it's out pretty much everyone I follow that's seen it has given it less than 3 stars.

[Bad Ambassador]

Thought Hereditary was a studio horror with pretensions and Midsommar was a worse remake of The Wicker Man than the actual crap remake. No interest in this, and the summary sounds like Kaufmanesque try-hard drivel.

[Mister Six]

Had an inkling this would be shit

Your inkling was wrong, although I can fully understand why it would piss people off. It's a superbly made film, but it's also basically an arthouse film with a ridiculously big budget for that kind of thing, and mainstream audiences are going to struggle with it.

[Noodle Lizard]

Just saw this myself. Hmmm. I'll have to come back later with more thoughts, but my initial impression was that I admired and hated it.

[Captain Crunch]

I was half tempted because bits of the trailer look like my anxiety dreams, can't get there from here stuff.  Then I saw the running time, oh my god no. 

[Noodle Lizard]

So after a bit more thought, and a bit of reflecting on Ari Aster's career so far, I think I like Aster as a filmmaker but not as a writer. I think Hereditary and Midsommar have individual things in them - choices or performances or visuals - which are excellent and uniquely identifiable as being his. He's one of the more auteurish new filmmakers we've got, in many ways.

With this film especially, he's really managed to make something uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing which sustains that tension for most of its massive runtime, which is quite a feat in and of itself. I don't think I've felt that rough watching a film since Uncut Gems. So if that's what he was setting out to do, then he managed that part of it.

Where he always fails, I think, is in the ideas themselves. The scripts and concepts behind both Hereditary and Midsommar are fairly unremarkable, and Beau Is Afraid is no different in many ways. When you realise what it's actually been leading up to, narratively, all the myriad insanity that we've seen along the way sort of falls flat. It's interesting that @Mister Six invoked Eraserhead, as it's forced me to imagine what I would've thought of that film had its final act had characters basically explaining that it was all about fear of fatherhood.

Aside from that, there's something really nasty about him I think. It's difficult to put my finger on. Obviously I'm not averse to darker subject matter or black comedy or what-have-you, but Aster's films often come off as if they've been made by someone who truly hates people and only sees grotesqueness in them. As much of a misanthrope as I can be, I find that really difficult to connect with. I'm sure I could think of plenty of films or filmmakers I love who could be said to have similarly pessimistic or nihilistic outlooks, but there's something almost sneering and cruel about Aster that bristles with me. I'm sure the venerable @DukeDeMondo is yelling "Todd Solondsz" at his screen, and yeah, that might not be a bad comparison.

Anyway, no need to go too much more into it until its out across-the-pond. I'd agree with @Mister Six that it's wise to go in blind, and I'm curious to see what you all make of it.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I thought that Hereditary was very good, but Midsommar was verging on outright drivel. If nothing else, this looks like an interesting change of tack for him.

[DJ Bob Hoskins]

I think Hereditary is one of the greatest horror films of all time. Up there with the likes of The Exorcist, Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street. I've only seen it once when it came out and it still makes me shudder whenever I think about it.

The 'trick' IMO - as with the above examples - is that the horror plays on the most base of fears: that of a disintegrating family and a helpless mother whose child is in danger. These are films about people, not ghosts or monsters.

I can't recall another directorial debut which I felt was so masterful and so fully-formed, apart from maybe Reservoir Dogs. Midsommar was great fun and contained a similar sense of slowly escalating dread as Hereditary, but for all intents and purposes it was basically just a retooling of The Wicker Man.

Not sure what to make of this new one from the posts above but I'm glad he's going in a different direction this time around and I'm really curious to see what he's come up with. Even if he retired tomorrow he'll still have made one of the most insidiously scary films I've ever seen, plus another solid hallucinatory horror fable. So the kid is  alright in my book.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I thought Hereditary was wank

[Roxy Robinson]

Never seen Hereditary, Midsommar was good but when I thought about buying the 4K I was like, no point, one and done film all day long. I have a long list of films to watch before anything else from him.

[mjwilson]

I think Hereditary is one of the greatest horror films of all time. Up there with the likes of The Exorcist, Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street. I've only seen it once when it came out and it still makes me shudder whenever I think about it.

The 'trick' IMO - as with the above examples - is that the horror plays on the most base of fears: that of a disintegrating family and a helpless mother whose child is in danger. These are films about people, not ghosts or monsters.

I love the first half of Hereditary for exactly those reasons. The second half shits the bed a bit.

[13 schoolyards]

The overwhelming impression I've had from his films is that he's a person who doesn't really like people (or at least, not his characters), and so nothing is off the table when it comes to putting them through the wringer. Which you'd think would work well for horror movies, but after a while the whole "people are just shit, right?" attitude crowds out everything else

[Mister Six]

It's interesting that @Mister Six invoked Eraserhead, as it's forced me to imagine what I would've thought of that film had its final act had characters basically explaining that it was all about fear of fatherhood.

Haha, that's a fair point, but Aster has form for over-explaining at the end. It didn't bother me, in any case. I thought it worked fine, although I can understand why someone who wasn't as engrossed in the film as me might be a bit tired of the false/teased endings -

Spoiler alert

Oh, he's made it to the funeral and missed it; is he going to just collapse and that's the end? No. The love interest turned up and they had sex; is it going to have this happy ending? No. She's dead and the mother's alive. Is it going to end on this dramatic and inexplicable scene? No. The mother was plotting some weird scheme, is it going to end here with him under her thumb? No. Ah, so is it going to end with him being locked in the attic? No. Right, so it's ending with him strangling his mum, then? No. Mm, so he just sails off into the night, facing an uncertain future? No...

[close]

- but again, it didn't bother me.

Aside from that, there's something really nasty about him I think. It's difficult to put my finger on. Obviously I'm not averse to darker subject matter or black comedy or what-have-you, but Aster's films often come off as if they've been made by someone who truly hates people and only sees grotesqueness in them. As much of a misanthrope as I can be, I find that really difficult to connect with. I'm sure I could think of plenty of films or filmmakers I love who could be said to have similarly pessimistic or nihilistic outlooks, but there's something almost sneering and cruel about Aster that bristles with me. I'm sure the venerable @DukeDeMondo is yelling "Todd Solondsz" at his screen, and yeah, that might not be a bad comparison.

It's a funny thing, because you're right and I usually despise works by people like that. I don't get on with Solondsz either, or celebrated comic book author Brian Azzarello, whose major works are all pouty and cynical in a way that I find positively adolescent.

And yet, I've enjoyed all of Aster's works (although Midsommar was the weakest) despite them presenting a world in which everything is malevolent and predatory, and family in particular cannot be trusted at all (even his short films, at least the ones described on Wikipedia, are about fucked up family dynamics).

I think that the horror/fantasy trappings really take the edge off for me. It's a horror movie (or in the case of Beau a fantasy black comedy), so the cruelty of the world is pretty much a given, and the fantastical or larger-than-life aspects of his directorial style add to that. I guess Solondsz has a stylised vision as well, but he tends to favour a lighter palette and atmosphere - and a sort-of-real-life universe - that makes the nastier stuff stand out more.

I don't know anything about Aster, but I'm assuming his family situation as a kid was kind of fucked up. I'm glad he's getting to make these weird personal works, though. Same with Solondsz. I don't want to watch any more of the latter's films, but I'd take them over some bland box-ticking Netflix drama that has no discernable personality behind the camera.

[madhair60]

haven't watched hereditary or midsommar and won't watch this. I saw The Green Knight and that was enough A24 for one lifetime. the MCU for pseuds

[Old Nehamkin]

A24 are just a distributor at the end of the day, aren't they? It always puzzles me a bit when people talk about them as if the films in their catalogue are all part of some contiguous in-house franchise or something. Uncut Gems, First Cow and Joel Coen's Macbeth are all "A24 movies" but I think they're more than creatively disparate enough to not deserve that being their overriding identity.

[Mister Six]

A24 are just a distributor at the end of the day, aren't they? It always puzzles me a bit when people talk about them as if the films in their catalogue are all part of some contiguous in-house franchise or something. Uncut Gems, First Cow and Joel Coen's Macbeth are all "A24 movies" but I think they're more than creatively disparate enough to not deserve that being their overriding identity.

A24 have produced a bunch of films, but mostly they're just a distributor, yeah. Anyone who dismisses all A24 films as being of a particular kind is a dunce, obviously. YES, I MEAN YOU @madhair60.

In fact, here's what A24 have produced: Moonlight, The Lovers, It Comes At Night, Hereditary, Eighth Grade, Mid90s, Native Son, Midsommar, Share, The Death of Dick Long, The Lighthouse, Waves, Uncut Gems, False Positive, Val, The Green Knight, The Humans, The Tragedy of Macbeth, After Yang, X, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Men, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Funny Pages, Pearl, God's Creatures, Causeway, The Inspection, White Noise, The Whale, This Place Rules, When You Finish Saving The World, Sharper, Showing Up, Beau Is Afraid.

Yes, those very similar films Moonight, Midsommar, Uncut Gems, Pearl, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Whale.

Ebola-tier opinion.

[madhair60]

DCEU for centrists

[greenman]

Maybe some argument for "style above substance" although I did think Lowery's Green Knight had more to it than Eggers non A24 Northman.

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

A24, a little like Blumhouse, knows how to market a niche film to the right crowd. They're also good at picking projects when they screen in festivals. That got them some kind of reputation, just like a few music labels had followers at some moment in their life (Elektra, Creation, 4AD, etc.). However, I admit that the online fetish about them is a little irritating. It's basically like buying an album just on the sake on who's done the mastering.

[Mister Six]

A24, a little like Blumhouse, knows how to market a niche film to the right crowd. They're also good at picking projects when they screen in festivals. That got them some kind of reputation, just like a few music labels had followers at some moment in their life (Elektra, Creation, 4AD, etc.). However, I admit that the online fetish about them is a little irritating. It's basically like buying an album just on the sake on who's done the mastering.

Surely it's more like buying an album from a reliable record label that tends to back quality, if niche, bands?

I won't say everything A24 has done has been great (and some of the stuff that is good still isn't to my taste) but on the whole I think their batting average is very high, and I'm more inclined to pay attention to an announcement about a new A24 release than, say, Sony Pictures.

[iamcoop]

I've used my usual system to decide whether to see this, the system being Peter Bradshaw gave it 2/5 which almost always means it'll either be really good or at least definitely worth seeing.

[Timothy]

Is this a horror film? Is it scary?