Beau Is Afraid

The first segment in the apartment / on the street / in the store is congenially filmed paranoia. With goosebumps and my mouth hanging open, I witnessed the beginning of the film of the year, a film that I had been waiting decades for, a film that would put me in a cinephilic trance with every shot, every cut, every expression and every move that Joaquin Phoenix made. The second, laid-back and more comical segment still held the bar high and aroused my curiosity as to what would happen next. But with the segment in the forest, the film began to lose everything from the plot that had won me over and became an incoherent muddle of motifs and metaphors that don’t make sense in the psychological study of the main character. And if they’re supposed to makes sense, the viewer has long since lost interest in figuring them out. (10/23/2023)

"I really thought I was gonna die, my whole life…" 2023: A Neurotic Odyssey? The author himself views it as a “nightmare comedy” or, if you will, a Jewish Lord of the Rings (the burden carried to Mount Doom is evident). For me, it was something like The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. A surreal return home bringing insights, this time amidst waves of guilt, crushing fears, and consequences not just of birth trauma. Beau, you poor anxious boy, how I understood you… Ari Aster has chosen to continue polarizing the reception of his work, and it seems he couldn’t care less. Let’s just hope he doesn’t implode on us like Aronofsky… (07/03/2023)

Ari Aster and his excessive auteur onanism. The first three-quarters of an hour and a few good moments later in the film cannot redeem the unjustifiable three-hour running time, in which, despite the exaggeration and craziness of all the events, the plot flows as if it was stagnant – extending a seven-minute short into three hours is not easy feat. With its most expensive film to date, studio A24 had the luxury of slapping the filmmaker on the wrist at times and thrusting a pair of scissors at him. It’s impossible that this film will earn back half its budget, impossible. (05/18/2023)

Ari Aster and his Midsommar and Hereditary, as well as the entire A24 studio, have always blown me away and I left their films excited, and that feeling remained with me even weeks later. With Beau Is Afraid, however, I left embarrassed because it is definitely not what I expected. Subconsciously, I kind of understand what Aster is translating to the screen and I have to appreciate Joaquin Phoenix's performance and the overall idea, the bizarre storytelling style and the boldness and creativity, but 180 minutes is just a hell of a lot of time and to sit through this was too much even for me. The whole film feels like a set of random scenes where nothing makes sense and everything seems ridiculous, but you actually get the basic point. It's just that the ending and the feeling of the film just isn't as intense as I would have liked and expected. (04/25/2023)

I'm not gonna lie, I wish Aster had stayed on the ground and his new film was more connected to reality. Beau Is Afraid is a bizarre mindfuck, but, on the other hand, I appreciate that it is the kind of mindfuck that you SOMEHOW understand intuitively without having to read a lot of scholarly treatises about it. The beginning is brilliant, the second quarter is very good, in the third quarter the pace drops a bit, and the final quarter is downright confusing. Hereditary and Midsommar struck me as perfectly coherent works, where each piece fits into the puzzle, but I don't have that feeling with Beau is Afraid. On the contrary, I can imagine that certain sequences could have been missing altogether, the final quarter could have been replaced by something completely different, without fundamentally changing the tone or the impression of the work as a whole. Still, a film like no other that has to be seen. (04/21/2023)