Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+

I suppose, given enough time. every great director disappoints us eventually. Does Ari Aster getting there with unusual swiftness—on his third feature film, only five years after his first—pull him back out of that designation? I would say no; at least not until we see what he brings us next. Hopefully with a shorter runtime than fully three hours. And less wild self-indulgence.

I’m coming on strong right out of the gate here, and I don’t want to mislead: the biggest thing that makes Beau is Afraid a disappointment is in comparison to Aster’s previous, far superior works, Hereditary (2018) and MidSommar (2019). I didn’t hate Beau Is Afraid, although I cannot think of one person I would recommend it to.

Which is to say, I didn’t love it either. I’d say it’s a mixed bag, except that’s not even the experience of it in the moment. One thing Ari Aster remains consistent with is maintaining a particular tone, and for lack of a better phrase, this film’s tone can best be described as “panic attack.” For three hours, I feel compelled to remind you.

Beau is Afraid is constructed entirely from the title character’s perspective, as played by Joaquin Phoenix (as a pretty dumpy looking, middle-aged man), all of it as though we exist inside his perpetual state of panic. There is no detour into naturalism or realism here; it’s all pretty surreal—from the very start, which must be the first birthing sequence I have ever seen filmed from the perspective of the baby, what he sees, inside the womb and then out. From then on, every single sequence—ultimately going on a journey from surprising place to surprising place, in the broad form of The Odyssey—is a depiction of what Beau fears is going to happen.

Eventually we get clues into where these fears come from, with a few detours into flashback from his childhood, usually in one of multiple states of unconsciousness between locations. Memory is definitively unreliable, which Beau Is Afraid never explicitly states but seems to know, and god knows any vision borne of fear has no root in reality. And this is all we ever see. With that in mind, it should be noted that Beau’s wildly guilt-tripping mother (Patti LuPone) may be less a classic cinema cliché than a simple exaggeration of Beau’s own mind—as is, presumably, absolutely every single thing we see onscreen. But to what degree are audiences considering this?

I kept waiting for a hard cut to reality that never came. Unless: maybe the first scene with Beau at his therapist’s office is the only thing that actually happens? Aster pointedly cuts to the therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) picking up his notebook and writing the word guilty. Everything we see after that is a panicked manifestation of that, from the chaotic dangers of city streets outside his derelict apartment building, to the couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who hit him with their car and then nurse him back to health in the bedroom of their resentful teenage daughter (Kylie Rogers), to the truly wild turn after the long-delayed consummation of a relationship with a childhood quasi-sweetheart (Parker Posey). These are just a few quick examples; I could go on.

The only real tonal shift that occurs is at the performance of an outdoor play in the forest, where Beau suddenly sees himself on the set, and it turns into a surreal animation sequence, featuring voiceover narration as we see him go on a truncated version of basically this same odyssey, to the point where we watch him grow old. This sequence gets into things like the question of how he could wind up in a tearful reunion with three now-grown sons if he was a virgin . . . and this was where Beau Is Afraid really lost me. And, then: the only hard-cut back to where the sequence began: we’re back with Beau in the audience of the play, standing up, bewildered. Much like I was.

Beau Is Afraid is clearly ripe for analysis, and I suspect I would gain deeper and deeper appreciation for it with multiple viewings. But who the hell wants to do that? This is three straight hours of chaos, fear and stress. And it’s admittedly very well executed, particularly the cinematography (Pawel Pogorzelski, who also shot Aster’s two previous feature films) and the acting. Aster is an auteur who quickly made a name for himself, and the famous faces in smaller parts in this film are clear indicators of how many actors want to work with him: others include Richard Kind and Bill Hader. The only thing that makes rational sense to me is that all these actors read the script and then said, “I can’t make heads or tails of this. But whatever, it’s Ari Aster!”

I must admit, there are many moments in Beau Is Afraid that will stick with me for a while. That’s kind of his thing. On the upside, in contrast to his other films which were more clearly within the horror genre, this one has nothing gruesome in it. Although it does eventually feature a giant monster penis.

Once it finally sunk in that the narrative would never revert to any other separate “reality,” I began to wonder if we were meant to believe everything we saw onscreen was actually happening. That may have been by design. But, then there would be characters supposed to have been dispatched one moment, suddenly appearing again the next. We are clearly never meant to trust the narrative in Beau Is Afraid, which is an expression of one man’s waking nightmare, taking all the twists and turns that happen in the mind of anyone who is just perpetually terrified.

For all I know, Beau Is Afraid will resonate more with people who are clinically diagnosed with anxiety, of various types. Does that mean they would like it? That, I imagine, is an entirely different question.

*Everything is as bad as you think or so you think*

Overall: B-