Beau is Afraid: Ari Aster’s overblown fantasia

In Ari Aster’s films, love is a trap, and an unsurvivable one at that. His first two features offered versions of our society’s most frequently celebrated bonds – the nuclear family in Hereditary (2018), friends and partners in Midsommar (2019) – as, at best, pathetically insufficient and, at worst, conspiracies of murderous violence and radical depersonalisation. You squirmed at these films’ brutality – torn flesh, crunched bones, cadaver-based folk art – but what really disturbed was the sense of their protagonists’ very selfhood being undone. Maybe, you realised, they were never really people at all, in the sense of truly individuated subjects with genuine agency, but simply pawns or devices in nefarious schemes beyond their ken. (‘Characters’, you might say.)

These stories built to breathtaking climaxes in which the utter unravelling of the central characters’ personal identities and intimate bonds were also moments of ecstatic triumph for the conspiratorial collectives in fact driving the action – execution as coronation, coronation as execution. These collectives were in both cases matriarchal, built around maternal figures whose apparent provision of care proved to be the wielding of harmful power. The uncanny dramatic irony of the narratives was underscored by exquisitely detailed production design, full of winks and nudges gesturing at what was ‘really’ going on. They also showed a penchant for geometrically striking architecture and the framing of older people’s naked bodies as frightful and grotesque.

Versions of all these elements recur in Aster’s third feature, Beau Is Afraid. Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is a middle-aged sad sack living in a shabby apartment in a death-trap building in a broken-down part of an American city. The accidental scuppering of plans to visit his overbearing mother sets him off on a picaresque ordeal across a pseudo-surreal, dystopian version of the United States. From the feral urban free-for-all on his doorstep, he moves through a creepy suburban family milieu and a discombobulating arty woodland enclave before homing in on the most disturbing environment of all: his mom’s place. There are hobo home invasions, terrifying teens, perplexing plays, weeping wounds, secrets from the past and intimations of the future. Various moments recall Kafka, Twain, the Book of Job and Charlie Kaufman. It’s less a story about human beings in human situations than a trippy gamut of threats and feelings. It’s a lot.

The source of horror in Hereditary and Midsommar was a realisation that the characters’ choices didn’t matter and the apparently comfortable worlds they inhabited were elaborate cages. Reality grew nightmarish, dream-logic momentum granting barely enough time for peripheral anxieties to become understandings of persecution before helplessness set in. Beau, however, is an infantilised inadequate fearfully inhabiting an unaccountable hellscape, lacking even rudimentary human bonds because his monstrous mother did such a number on him. He’s sympathetic – poor bastard – but hardly identifiable. Nor is there much sense of story momentum in his hapless, increasingly bloodied wanderings. Hereditary was long, Midsommar longer, but both felt propulsive. This is even longer and its episodic structure and haywire fantasia setting make it feel longer still. It’s hard to thrill to the turn of the screw when the wheels have already come off.

The characters don’t deliver in psychologically naturalistic terms either – though, taken as types, there’s much to enjoy in Phoenix’s almost cartoonishly unremitting guilt, fear and confusion, and the icy magnetism that Patti LuPone and (in flashbacks) Zoe Lister-Jones bring to Beau’s mother Mona and Nathan Lane’s garrulous suburban paterfamilias. The dreamlike tone is helped by Fiona Crombie’s richly weird production design, garnished with outlandish storefronts, posters and magazines. And the film leans harder into comedy than Aster’s others, from deadpan absurdism and gonzo slapstick to the running gag of people constantly telling each other how sorry they are, in a world without empathy or care.

Random violence and public humiliation notwithstanding, sex might top the long list of things Beau is afraid of, thanks to maternal conditioning by way of Freud and the brothers Grimm. This overdetermined gamut smothering ultimately brings the film’s overblown fantasia right back home, insisting that there’s most to fear from those who should care the most. Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. And, in an Ari Aster film, they will.

 ► Beau is Afraid is in UK cinemas from 19 May.