Poignant and fantastical, it blends the stage with film, creating a story-within-a-story that takes its surrealist endeavours to greater heights. The most gorgeous sequence of the film starts with a play in the woods, which eventually seeps its way into Beau's consciousness as he imagines another life, one where his mother has no hold over him, and he has the chance to start his own family. If you look past the narrative (the term used here very loosely), the film is, however, a masterpiece of technique and creativity, a cinephile's heaven of metaphor and craftsmanship. With a three-hour runtime, Beau is Afraid is a marathon through Wonderland, although not the Disney kind, and you're going to need your wits about you if you're gonna get through it unscathed. A surgeon keeping a patient in his home, a troupe of actors staging a play in the woods, a deep fake for a young Joaquin Phoenix - and then there are the truly bizarre scenes that might make you switch off if you were streaming from home. While it starts off in an oddly realistic setting, the uncanny is never far off. It dives into a dark side of motherhood when love is smothering and toxic, yet Beau is rarely given a chance to give his side of the story. Beau's relationship with his mother lies at the heart of his phobias, and Aster twists these fairly normal mother-son dynamics into a horror show that has the audience writhing in their seats.

Think Big Fish on meth, sugarcoated with the bizarro of Mother!, and you might have a slight inkling of what's in store for you with this cinematic experience.Īt its core, the fever dream of a film explores the machinations of fear and how its tendrils weave into our lives and catch us off-guard. While I'm still quite unsure what the film is really about, on the surface the film, is about the titular character and his paranoia-driven helter-skelter journey to his mother's funeral. The audience is forced to untangle a web of nonsensical mystery where you'll never truly know what's real or not and, as a critic, whether the film is actually good. From the mind that terrified you with Midsommar and Hereditary, Ari Aster takes a surrealist turn into the horror of the psyche and the paranoia that could consume one's life. Some films will make you cry and break your heart.Īnd then you have Beau is Afraid - the kind of film that will crack your brain trying to understand it and make you question the sanity of its filmmaker. Sometimes a film will take its audience on a winding journey of deep introspection and self-discovery, and sometimes film aims to entertain and make you laugh until your insides hurt.

Truth in the dark by amy lane