150 Word Review: 'Beau Is Afraid' (2023)
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I was afraid Beau Is Afraid would never end. And that is not Beau’s fault. Played by a fragile Joaquin Phoenix, Beau is a neurotic middle-aged man with mommy issues who lives in a hideous alternate reality populated by predators. Things are so bad he has to sprint from his therapist’s office to his run-down apartment to avoid a lawless mob, including a murderous tattooed madman.
Beau is Afraid is filmmaker Ari Aster pushing himself out of his comfort zone with mixed results. Instead of another high-brow horror fantasia, the director of pop masterpieces Hereditary and Midsommar decided to write and direct a hallucinatory three-hour-long dark comedy that aspires to Kaufmanesque surrealism but fails. Kaufman is naturally humane; Aster is not.
At its best, Beau Is Afraid is an ambitious experiment starring an extraordinarily vulnerable actor that takes sixty minutes to fizzle out. At worst, you’ll beg for a Xanax.