Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Kylie Rogers
Distributor: Roadshow Films
Runtime: 179 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2023
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This Canadian-American horror film spans the past and the present in surrealist mode. It tells the story of an anxious man returning home after his mother dies, and how the journey forces him to try to confront his fears.
Beau Wassermann (Phoenix) suffers from extreme anxiety and has a highly conflicted relationship with his mother (LuPone), who is autocratic, possessive, conflicted and manipulative. Beau was raised as a child who never knew his father. In this film, his mother dies, and he embarks on a trip back home that poses psychological and supernatural threats to his sanity.
The film spans multiple decades. Beau suffers from clinical paranoia, which is a severe mental illness. He is riddled with anxiety and fears that someone, or something, is stalking him. Even before he leaves home, he thinks someone is trying to break into his apartment to harm him. A predominant symptom of paranoia is delusory thinking, which Beau shows.
Beau’s attempts to return home are severely affected by the disordered features of his psychotic illness. His anxiety is acute. His sense of isolation become so intense, that he hallucinates creatures who are pursuing him, and the images of their stalking him are terrifying. The movie uses Freudian imagery that reflects a severely disturbed relationship between mother and son.
The movie builds to a conclusion with Beau trying to protect himself mentally from facing disturbing and repressed truths about his mother.
Under the direction of director-writer Aster, the film introduces us to different versions of Beau that show what he is feeling now, as well as how his mental illness has developed over time. Each version of Beau hides something that we, the viewers, need to know. The film evocatively and intensely portrays dreamlike stages of Beau’s life over time.
This is an absorbing and traumatic film that creatively captures the salient features of genuine horror, and sometimes Aster gives his horror a dark comic touch. The film has a restricted R (Adults Only) rating and such a classification signals that Beau’s journey is a dark one. The plot is ambiguous enough to imply that what we are viewing are Beau’s paranoid delusions that offer clues to the trauma he has experienced. Beau’s trauma, and why ‘Beau is afraid’ (the film’s title), is related to the acute stress of deeply personal family experiences.
The film has shocking images that reveal the nature of Beau’s intense pain, and our understanding about what is happening is firmly affected by the director’s intentional uncertainty as to whose perspective the story is being told from. The film shifts in narrative format from the reports of an old man to those of a growing boy, and back again, and Aster structures ‘narrative’ to blur the dividing line between reality, illusion and delusion. The film reveals the legacy of grief in ‘fantasy’ style, and traumatic imagery is the means by which we see a family torn apart.
It takes a special kind of actor to intelligently navigate the line that separates reality from illusion and from delusion, without undermining or negating the features that characterise all three perspectives, and what divides them psychologically from each other. Phoenix is such an actor. Here, he expertly treads the lines of division, as he did so well in Her (2013) – a brilliant science-fiction movie by Spike Jonze, in which Theodore Twombly (Phoenix) interacts with a disembodied voice (Scarlett Johansson) on a computer, to build a surreal presence of a woman he desperately wants to love him. Arguably, Her was the best film of 2013.
Beau is Afraid searingly explores family dynamics. It takes viewers threateningly across a range of fantasy landscapes in surreal fashion that is totally unnerving. This is a long, unsettling movie in which imagery is evoked hauntingly, and the images linger intensely after the film has ended.
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