Review of Beau Is Afraid (2023) by Hnestlyonthesly — 22 May 2023

Beau is Afraid had all the indications of being something that I should’ve skipped to spend time with my family or play poker or whatever: Joaquin Phoenix, coming off of his Oscar for Best Actor chose this film by the darling indie director Ari Aster, whose work has been documented faithfully at HOTS over the years. What could go wrong? feels like more of a dare than a question when talking about this movie. To call it a character study is to excuse the fact that there is only the loosest of plots, in the sense that Aristotle tells us all action must flow from necessity and there was no need for really any of this movie to have happened. The entirety of my experience in theater was thinking about how the fact that four people had excused themselves from my invite hadn’t given me enough of an indication of how much of a commitment this would be. I went in patting myself on the back for abandoning Wife and Creature at home at the blushing age of 7PM expecting to be back at 9:30, maybe 10 at the latest. I had groceries to pick up, maybe even a cheeky radler to toast the new week, and it was only about two and a half hours in when I started to wonder idly how they were going to tie up all of the loose ends that I took my phone out to ask Wife if maybe I had booked myself for a double feature without realizing it, which is when she texted back, “I’m so sorry it’s not close to being done.”.

As someone who has sat through Babylon and Avatar: The Way of the Water somewhat recently, I am no stranger to longish movies that people accidentally find themselves and then sheepishly exit around the 120 minute mark. I’m sure the sense of alienation and ennui I felt in the final third of this movie has a lot to do with having to experience it alone, without a fellow victim. That’s not to say there weren’t lots of other people there. One woman who sat in front of me laughed loud enough to make up for the rest of our stunned silence, one of those aggressive laughs that feels like it’s trying to cow the rest of us into submission, persuade us of the genre of Ari Aster’s lack of self-restraint. The last time I felt like I needed persuasion of whether something was funny or not was The Dead Don’t Die, and the last time I felt like I was the person breaking out into uncontrollable awkward laughter (maybe for the wrong reasons?) was Jon Stewart’s Rosewater. I wasn’t inclined to leave, but thinking back on it, I wonder if my night would’ve been dramatically improved if I had shouted FIRE FIRE FIRE and evacuated the theater, if the cost of never being allowed into that movie theater again would be equaled by the exquisite pleasure of not knowing how Beau is Afraid ends. I’m still not sure.

Justin Chang at NPR communicated all of the disappointment and perplexity that one need mention about Beau is Afraid. He, in his infinite wisdom, is able to see four distinct acts: the apartment, the recovery, the forest, and the childhood home. That’s kind of him, because the alternative was my dark and stormy assessment of the film on my drive home, shouting at the shadows in my car and cursing the fact that I might never encounter another soul who regarded his time so worthless that he had seen to the end of Beau. I think in some ways this movie hasn’t just spoiled itself for me, but it has retroactively reached into the past and stolen other movies by the same author, the same actor and made me reassess whether they were enjoyable as well.