This article contains spoilers for Beau is Afraid.
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that I feel compelled to read about endlessly. I might love it, I might hate it, or I might feel conflicted and confused by it. Whether it's a wild success or an ambitious disaster, something about it keeps me reading deep dives into its themes, listening to podcast discussions, watching interviews with the filmmakers, and going deeper than my usual perusal of a review or two.
Last year, Nope was the movie that sent me down this particular kind of research rabbit hole. I watched it twice in theaters, rewatched Jordan Peele’s two 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:previous features, read plenty of writing on it, did some 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:writing of my own, sought out as many interviews with Peele as I could find, watched Shadows, the behind-the-scenes documentary that was on Peacock at the time and now seems to have disappeared from the internet entirely, and generally spent a lot of time thinking about the layers of meaning Peele wove through the film. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Why was the shoe standing up? I still don&♛rsquo;🎶t know, and that’s part of the fun.
This year, the movie that I can’t stop thinking about is Beau is Afraid. Nope is a more successful movie overall, and one that I fully enjoy as a razor sharp piece of filmmaking and a terrific popcorn movie. Beau is Afraid, though, I can’t wholeheartedly endorse. I just can’t work out if it’s good, bad, or some combination of the two. All I know is that I’m listening to every interview with Ari Aster꧑ I can find.
The ꦛmovie follows Beau, played by Joaquin Phoenix as a man with roughly the fortitude of crepe paper, who embarks on an almost entirely passive journey to visit his mother. Beau travels across🧸 the country, journeying from the hellish city where he lives, to a suburb where a too-nice couple puts him up in their daughter’s bedroom after hitting him with their car, to a theatrical forest commune where he participates in a beautifully animated version of an alternate version of his life, before finally ending up at home for a fateful meeting with his mother.
Each step of this ꧙quest naturally follows from the one that preceded it while still feeling impossibly surreal. Is Beau imagining all of this? Is this the way his deep anxiety renders the world through his eyes? Or is this how this world really is? The movie doesn’t offer an answer and resists efforts to “solve” it, so you can only really sit with it (and consider upping the dosage on your anti-anxiety medication) as it desce📖nds further into a Freudian nightmare.
Sometimes, it’s funny. During the opening chapter, a neighbor keeps slipping notes under Beau’s door to ask him to turn his nonexistent music down, and one note slides 20 feet from Beau&rsquo♍;s door to the floor by his bed, where Beau can read its angry message꧟. That got a chuckle out of me.
Sometimes, though, it’s exhausting. When Beau slips into a warm bath only to see that a strange man is clutching the ceiling above him like the comic version of Toni Collette’s Hereditary spider pose, a tense moment passes before he falls onto Beau and they wrest♛le in the tub. When the movie moves on and never returns to give any indication of who this man was or why he was there, it feels a little bit like its absurdism is tipping over into sheer randomness. Which is kind of the point! Beau is right to be stricken with anxious paranoia: the world is out to get him.
Beau is Afraid climaxes with a note so blunt that it will either feel triumphant or sharkjumpingly obvious depending on your mood. And again, I don’t know how to feel about it. I’ve listened to discussions from critics who 🧜love the film, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get 💮there. I’ve seen dismissals from viewers who think it’s one obnoxious note played for three hours, and I can’t entirely agree. There’s something here, and I guess I’ll keep thinking about the movie until I figure out what it is.