movie reviews for beau is afraid

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors, beau is afraid.

Now streaming on:

Did you ever hear the one about the boy who feared his mother? “Beau Is Afraid” tells this joke for three gobsmacking, sometimes exhausting, always beguiling hours. At the center is a fascinating performance from Joaquin Phoenix , who actualizes what it looks like for a boy to suddenly stop growing up and merely age into a graying body. Phoenix makes his mouth tiny as if he were still suckling, and his voice intensely frail. His eyes, often used to signal a primal nature, have never seen looked so soft. His character will prove to be far too innocent for this world. The story that unfolds is Beau’s nightmare and his destiny.

The film’s writer/director is Ari Aster , who has always been a funny guy. His excellent, trauma-filled dramas “ Hereditary ” and “ Midsommar ” may be packed with the horror of relationships, but it’s the cruel joke underneath that provides their driving force–they are pitch-black comedies about the universal fear of losing free-will, of being screwed from the get-go. “Beau Is Afraid,” an enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues, is about being doomed from birth. It's Aster’s funniest movie yet.

Beau is a quintessential Aster protagonist, barely making it in a hellish landscape that’s lovingly detailed by Aster and production designer Fiona Crombie . The downtown neighborhood where Beau lives is defined by violence and madness: People fight in the middle of the street, they threaten to jump off buildings, and dead bodies lie about. It’s a Busby Berkeley musical, with death and destruction as the choreography. Working with long-time collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski , Aster surveys this sumptuous chaos like Peter Greenaway did long dining tables in “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.” Here, such tracking shots gorgeously capture a sick sad world eating itself alive in broad daylight.

This world-building for Beau is like a furious overture of the towering anxieties we’ll see later in present-time and in flashback: a lack of personal space, the threat of being unable to please others, and the impossibility of rampant bad luck. Embracing his ruthless sense of humor, Aster sucks you in with each absurd, claustrophobic development, like when an angry neighbor keeps sliding him notes to turn the volume down, even though he’s sitting in silence. It’s a punchy, rollicking first act in a laugh-to-keep-from-screaming way, and it establishes a rhythm with dread that the movie is not precious about keeping. Nothing will be as smooth from here on out; inconsistency can prove disorienting.

The most daunting moments in Beau’s life are his phone calls from his mother, Mona Wassermann, her initials stamped on a fancy logo that can be seen on nearly every item in his dilapidated apartment. Played over the phone with exquisite venom by Patti LuPone, the mega-successful Mona creates immense, unsettling tension by making Beau feel even smaller. Aster’s gutting dialogue shines (“I trust you’ll do the right thing,” says Mom). The guilt, shame, and humiliation, it’s all packed into a phone call after he accidentally misses his flight to see her (it’s a long story). He does not have free will but a lived-in need not to disappoint his mother. Phoenix’s best moments in this movie are his long close-ups when he’s on the phone, struggling to keep everything together, especially when he later hears some awful news about his mother.

“Beau Is Afraid” is told in chapters of various length and tone, in which Beau experiences a fluctuating sense of security. After a meltdown that has him screaming and running naked in the streets, Beau finds himself severely injured and under the care of two parents in the suburbs ( Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan ), who cover their own pain with just enough smiles as they care for him and feed him pills. Beau needs to go see his mother, and they’ll help him do that tomorrow. Beau has become a type of replacement son for their departed soldier boy Nathan and finds a new enemy in Toni ( Kylie Rogers ), who is pissed about this weird guy sleeping in her rainbow-colored bedroom. Everyone brings fascinating darkness to the smiling horror of this sequence, but Rogers is a vivid glitch in the chapter’s creepy simulation of a nuclear family. She barrels in and out of each scene, a great force of nature (and there are many of them in this movie) that makes Beau’s odyssey even more bewildering.

Midway through the film, “Beau Is Afraid” makes Phoenix’s character sit down so that it can float into a stop-motion sequence, with striking animation directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (“ The Wolf House ”). It’s a movie-within-a-movie that has “Beau Is Afraid” touching upon sentimental, hallucinatory, poetic pieces of its complicated headspace and complements its other moments of uncanniness. It also adds to the movie’s severely irregular rhythms (like the famous lewd joke “ The Aristocrats ,” “Beau Is Afraid” prefers shapeless tangents for its full horrific effect, which is at times obtuse, and sometimes distancing). The sequence is rounded off by an essential metaphor that becomes important to the rich, pained nature of the movie, of art becoming so lifelike you don’t even realize how much of you is in it.

“Beau Is Afraid” jumps back in time to tell us more about young Beau ( Armen Nahapetian ), which includes a memory on a cruise ship with a young girl who makes his mother feel threatened. The scenes are visually striking, for their artificial sets and how Nahapetian looks like a de-aged Phoenix, but it also reveals a shortcoming to Aster’s expanding maximalist vision. He cannot convey tenderness in a way that feels sincere enough, and some heavy-handed developments here hollow out what is meant to be a heartfelt tragedy.

Zoe Lister-Jones plays Mona in these scenes, and what a colossal performance it is. In depicting Mona’s control and need, Lister-Jones pulls back the curtain on what has made such a monster in Beau’s mind while helping us understand Beau. She has one sequence where red light bathes her face as she lies in darkness with her son, telling him a past memory that will permanently screw Beau up. It is a wholly hypnotic monologue, thanks in part to the space and alarming gentleness with which Lister-Jones gives us each traumatizing revelation, sentence by sentence.

The film’s third act, its specific events not spoiled here, has “Beau Is Afraid” taking its full form as an exploitation film adapted from a therapist’s notepad. It’s full-on Grand Guignol emotional and psychological trauma, with moments of terror, jaw-dropping cartoonish absurdity, and an uneasy blend of past and present accompanied by a perfectly chosen Mariah Carey song. Aster packs in more characters, revelations, and more explosions of the psychological variety. But for all of the power within this feverish work, including its fire-and-brimstone performances, it creates a weariness that does not work in Aster’s favor. The sequence is admirable visually–its disquieting modern architecture setting looms over its characters, and there are laugh-out-loud inserted images to level the tone. But like the intense strings of Bobby Krlic ’s score, its pressing atonal nature at such a high volume becomes numbing; so too does the centerpiece dialogue that makes for an Oedipal screed and the twists that verge on self-parody. In its grand statement, “Beau Is Afraid” risks canceling out its intricate but chaotic arrangement into a simple scream.

The film includes many surprising performances that blossom in the movie’s off-kilter environs, from the likes of Parker Posey , Denis Ménochet , and Stephen McKinley Henderson . But the most important figure in “Beau Is Afraid” is Aster, who is openly wrestling with his work here. No rule says one needs a certain amount of features before reckoning with their authorship. “Beau Is Afraid” is, appropriately, like a fever dream through the museum of Aster's previous creations and fascinations—it’s not just the 2011 original short film “Beau,” but the premise of his short “Munchausen,” the hellish city landscape of “C’est la Vie” (starring Bradley Fisher , the man playing the role here of “Birthday Boy Stab Man”) and Aster’s fixation with head trauma, communes, etc. Part of the movie becomes like a retread of what built “Hereditary,” which is rendered all the more intensely personal by this film’s jarring use of first-person point-of-view shots (a terrified boy nodding to his mother) and its bookending scenes. The first scene of “Beau Is Afraid” is what this movie’s personal nature looks like on the outside. The final scene shows us what it feels like for it all to be entertainment.

This is all, of course, based on my first viewing of the movie. Any admirer of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” knows those movies are better understood with multiple viewings and a closer look at the mechanics each time. Part of Aster’s extraordinary skill as an entertainer, when revealing these plots about horrific relationships, is in playing with how much an audience gets on their first viewing, as opposed to their second or third. I’m curious, most of all, how the emotions within “Beau Is Afraid” will show more intricacy, or collapse under their weight, once all three hours of it feels more familiar. But like Paul Thomas Anderson's own third film " Magnolia " (also three hours), the ambition is the point: it's apparent even more how Aster has never made a feature or short that is lazy or overly assured of itself—he never will. After the dizzying but unforgettable experience of “Beau Is Afraid,” we now know who to thank for that.

Available in select theaters on April 14th and nationwide on April 21st.

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Now playing

Hollywood Black

Robert daniels.

Peyton Robinson

Hundreds of Beavers

Matt zoller seitz.

It Ends with Us

Marya e. gates.

Monica Castillo

Film credits.

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

Rated R for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language.

179 minutes

Joaquin Phoenix as Beau Wassermann

Patti Lupone as Mona Wassermann

Amy Ryan as Grace

Nathan Lane as Roger

Kylie Rogers as Toni

Parker Posey as Elaine Bray

Zoe Lister-Jones as Young Mona

Armen Nahapetian as Teen Beau

Julia Antonelli as Teen Elaine

Stephen McKinley Henderson as Beau's Therapist

Richard Kind as Dr. Cohen

Hayley Squires as Penelope

Bradley Fisher as Birthday Boy Stab Man

Denis Ménochet as Jeeves

Cinematographer

Pawel Pogorzelski
Lucian Johnston
Bobby Krlic

Latest blog posts

A Woman Without Peers: Gena Rowlands (1930-2024)

The Needle Drop Sessions: Pump Up the Volume & Untamed Heart

Locarno Film Festival 2024: Youth (Hard Times), Transamazonia, Moon

Thumbnails 8/15/24: Six Must-Reads You Don’t Want To Miss This Week

Supported by

‘Beau Is Afraid’ Review: A Visit With Mommy Dearest

In Ari Aster’s latest freakout, Joaquin Phoenix plays a sad sack who endures a crucible of suffering to see his monstrous mother. Paging Dr. Freud!

Share full article

By Manohla Dargis

Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid” is a supersized, fitfully amusing, self-important tale of fear and loathing. As the title announces, its protagonist, Beau Wassermann — a terminal sad-sack played by the invariably watchable Joaquin Phoenix — is anxious, well, about everything. He seems to have good reason given the chaos and violence churning outside his apartment. Then again, the tumult may be all in his head. Beau has issues, you soon learn, and he’s an unstable narrative presence, which makes him an ideal vessel for an Ari Aster creep-out.

Outwardly, “Beau Is Afraid” seems to be a departure for Aster, whose first two features center on horrific happenings and some seriously bad relationships. In his first of these, “ Hereditary ,” a family is destroyed (and revived) by its witchy past; in his follow-up, “ Midsommar ,” a young, foolish couple travels with friends to a pastoral corner of Sweden, where they become chew toys for a murderous pagan cult. In both, Aster shrewdly draws on horror-film conventions — his abuse of the human head has become a kind of authorial signature — though the sense of ambiguity that he cooks up in them owes more to the art house than it does to the uncanny.

In “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” Aster meticulously peels back the ostensibly ordinary surface of the world, its patina of normalcy, to reveal the annihilating malevolence beneath it. By contrast, all the icky, nasty stuff is right out in the open in “Beau Is Afraid,” which over three long, eventful hours tracks its protagonist as he struggles to visit his mother, a pop-Freudian gargoyle named Mona (Patti LuPone, ferocious and amusingly outsized). He makes it to her house, though only after a series of adventures that take him from the horrors of the unnamed city where he lives to a suburban asylum and then to a shadowy forest and beyond.

Three people sit around a glass dining table, set with plates of vegetables, in a comfortable home. One man and a woman grasp hands as if in prayer. The third man, sitting center, looks stricken in a hospital robe.

Aster likes wowing viewers as much as he likes scaring them, and he does both with visual polish, a firm grasp on his craft, stories that have ample interpretive leeway and a pitiless attitude toward his characters; you learn to never become attached to anyone in his movies. In “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster changes things up by making Beau difficult to cozy up to. A blur of a man with a soft middle, thinning hair and a bearing that oscillates between panic and resignation, Beau doesn’t resemble the typical American movie hero: He isn’t nice, appealing, attractive or all that engaging, and he lacks apparent interests, ambition and deep purpose.

What Beau is, is apparently friendless and his easiest intimate relationship seems to be with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who he visits soon after the story opens. Everything about the session — the shrink’s benign mien, the room’s soothing blandness, Beau’s casual reference to Mona — seems unexceptional, though the mood and visual style shift when the therapist asks if Beau wished his mother were dead. From his perch on the couch, Beau looks understandably taken aback. With the camera now pointing down at him, the therapist looming in the foreground of the shot, he also looks suddenly smaller than before, childlike. His appearance will continue to change, although little else about him does.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

Want all of The Times? Subscribe .

Tickets & Showtimes
Trending on RT

Beau Is Afraid First Reviews: Ambitious, Uncomfortable, and Just as Funny as it is Terrifying

Critics say ari aster's latest won't be for everyone, but it's a bold, uncompromising odyssey that will make you laugh, recoil, and scratch your head in equal measure..

TAGGED AS: First Reviews , movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Beau Is Afraid :

How does it compare to Ari Aster’s other movies?

Fans of Aster’s feature films are in for a bit of a shock as this is nothing like what he’s done before. – Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

While it still has some thematic ties to his first two films (mothers!), Beau Is Afraid is unlike anything Aster has created. – Sophia Ciminello, AwardsWatch

Like both Hereditary and Midsommar , the film revels in parental issues, strange communities, inexplicable situations, severe head trauma, and scary attics. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

Beau Is Afraid is so distinct from Aster’s other films and ends on such a bewildering note that it’s more than likely to throw quite a few people for loops they aren’t expecting. – Charles Pulliam-Moore, The Verge

Beau Is Afraid is more exciting than Aster’s debut and sophomore features. and not just because it’s more ambitious. – Brianna Zigler, Paste Magazine

[It] might be the most terrifying film he’s made so far. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid (2023)

(Photo by ©A24)

Is it a horror movie?

Beau is not a horror film, [but] there’s plenty of the horrific here to knock us for a loop. Beau is afraid, and you will be, too. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

It’s fueled more by anxiety than terrifying dread, which may temper its appeal to hardcore horror consumers. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The film certainly has its scary moments. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

The horror here isn’t in decapitations, but in the anxiety-inducing saga Aster takes us on. – Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

It’s a different kind of horror, one that will challenge, alienate and push people out of their comfort zones. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

Is it funny?

It’s more of a comedy than a horror film, though its epic sprawl is fretful and unhappy. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

As a “comedy,” Beau is Afraid starts out fine and actually has more than a few amusing moments. – Edward Douglas, The Weekend Warrior

Aster leans all the way into the funny bone he was wont to exhibit in his seemingly ultra-austere first features. – Brianna Zigler, Paste Magazine

Here is a movie that defaults to being tense in the service of being funny, as opposed to being funny in the service of creating tension. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

What makes Beau Is Afraid such a riveting watch is that it’s funny and terrifying in equal measure, often in the same moments. – Siddhant Adlakha, IGN Movies

Horror and comedy are flip sides of the same coin, confronting taboos en route to catharsis, and detail-oriented Aster seems uniquely wired to meld the two disciplines. – Peter Debruge, Variety

The auteur makes horror and humor two sides of the same coin from the jump… [It] innovatively teeters on a razor-sharp edge between fear and cringe-com. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

What can we really expect from the viewing experience?

It’s a hilarious, tense, and all-around transformative experience. – Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

At times, it feels more like a perplexing exercise in stylistic punishment for Aster to understand better how far he can push his audience. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

It’s generally inaccessible and hard to enjoy. – Edward Douglas, The Weekend Warrior

Aster’s past films have their own punishing qualities, but Beau is a new test of patience and endurance. If this film is an act of talk therapy, it’s a scream session. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

Beau Is Afraid is a challenge in that its exploration of terror doesn’t allow you the reprieve typically provided in horror. – Kristy Puchko, Mashable

If you’re not left hyperventilating, you’d better check your pulse to make sure you’re not dead. – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

At points, it’s a stress-watch to rival the Safdie bros’ nerve-shredder Uncut Gems . – Jordan Farley, Total Film

What else can we compare it to?

Beau Is Afraid is like if a Woody Allen protagonist was the Griffin Dunne character in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours . – Brianna Zigler, Paste Magazine

It starts out paying homage to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours before shifting into Charlie Kaufman mode with a liberal splash or two of Cronenbergian grotesquerie. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

The film feels inspired by everything from Kafka to Albert Brooks to Charlie Kaufman’s postmodern masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York . – Sophia Ciminello, AwardsWatch

Like Kaufman, Aster seems preoccupied with fears of mortality and nettled by his tortured relationships with women, all the while cowed by the vast and messy mechanics of the world. Also like Kaufman, Aster can let his free-wheeling ambition get the best of him. – Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

It’s a movie in which Aster has surrendered some of his own originality and distinction for an indulgent, derivative flourish that seems to pastiche Charlie Kaufman or Darren Aronofsky’s crazy Mother! or maybe even Richard Kelly’s much controverted Southland Tales . – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

Aster molds his own iteration of The 40-Year-Old Virgin . – Courtney Howard, Fresh Fiction

Beau Is Afraid is Ari Aster’s answer to The Truman Show . – Kristy Puchko, Mashable

How is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance?

Joaquin Phoenix proves once again why he’s not only one of the best actors of his generation but one of the very best of all time. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

Joaquin Phoenix goes balls to the wall in a performance of astonishing intensity that holds nothing back… a performance as fully, insanely committed as any he’s ever given. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

He anchors this movie like the bulb at the center of a shadow lamp, illuminating the rotating funhouse of different fears that Aster spins around him. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Joaquin Phoenix, coming off an Oscar win in Joker , is in charge of a character that is even more disturbing to spend three hours with, if you can imagine that. – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

Phoenix [is] not tested as an actor in any way, content to coast through the movie like the Joker on Zoloft. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian

This is an intensely demanding performance that thrusts the heralded actor through mind-snapping scenarios, one after another, as well as pushing him physically. – Kristy Puchko, Mashable

Phoenix’s performance is incredibly frustrating, which here is a positive thing. – Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

Is it difficult to understand?

Beau Is Afraid seldom offers clarity as to what’s real or unreal, but it remains in lockstep with the ways birth, sex, aging, and death become scrambled into an anxious continuum in Beau’s mind. – Siddhant Adlakha, IGN Movies

This film rewards moviegoers who have a keen eye for detail and the patience for a jigsaw puzzle of a story. – Julia Glassman, The Mary Sue

This isn’t a movie that is easy to describe, much less digest. – Pete Hammond, Deadline Hollywood Daily

This is a film that begs for conversation and analysis and plenty of pondering. And it’s more accessible than you might think, despite all the lunacy. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

Beau Is Afraid is perhaps one of the best representations of intrusive thoughts I’ve ever seen on screen. – Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

Will it require multiple viewings?

Beau Is Afraid is an exhausting experience with too many details to take in in one sitting alone, but that’s also the point. – Sophia Ciminello, AwardsWatch

There are so many gags that Beau is Afraid all but demands you see it more than once (despite its three-hour runtime) to take them all in. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

How is the length?

At nearly three hours, Beau Is Afraid suffers from an exceedingly long runtime… [and] excruciating pacing. – Matt Neglia, Next Best Picture

You get the feeling that Aster could have made two or three tight, engrossing psychological portraits instead of one bloated one. – Julia Glassman, The Mary Sue

There’s absolutely no reason why Beau is Afraid had to be nearly three hours long. – Edward Douglas, The Weekend Warrior

Three hours doesn’t feel at all reasonable for such an uneven collection of sketches. – Peter Debruge, Variety

It moves at an almost-breakneck pace, so don’t let the three-hour runtime deter you. This film is never ever boring, to the point that it is borderline overwhelming. – Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

We’re never bored — how can we be? The film is so chaotic and relentless that, like Beau, we have no choice but to get carried along. – Chris Evangelista, Slashfilm

Should we just give it a shot?

It’s the kind of movie worth recommending for its ambition alone. – Siddhant Adlakha, IGN Movies

As a journey into outré excess that’s entirely on-brand for A24, it demands to be seen. – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

If you’re willing, take [Aster’s] hand and be transported into a world of pure neurotic imagination. – Mary Beth McAndrews, Dread Central

At a time when safe-bet sequels, franchise extensions, and movies built on brand recognition are more prevalent than ever, the fact that something so singular exists and succeeds on its own terms is something to be celebrated. – Jordan Farley, Total Film

I can’t promise you’ll enjoy Beau is Afraid . I can promise it’ll f**k you up. – Kristy Puchko, Mashable

Beau Is Afraid opens in theaters everywhere on April 21, 2023.

On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News.

Related News

Alien: Romulus First Reviews: The Best in the Franchise Since Aliens

All Alien Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer

All Upcoming Disney Movies: New Disney Live-Action, Animation, Pixar, 20th Century, And Searchlight

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

Movie & TV News

Featured on rt.

James Wan’s Teacup : Premiere Date, Trailer, Cast & More

August 16, 2024

2024 Emmy Awards Ballot: Complete with Tomatometer and Audience Scores

100 Best Netflix Series To Watch Right Now (August 2024)

37 Best Space Horror Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer

August 15, 2024

Top Headlines

All James Cameron Movies Ranked –
Best Horror Movies of 2024 Ranked – New Scary Movies to Watch –
Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now –
100 Best Netflix Series To Watch Right Now (August 2024) –
37 Best Space Horror Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer –
25 Best Jennifer Lawrence Movies Ranked –

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

What's the Tomatometer®?
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening this week
Top box office
Coming soon to theaters
Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most popular streaming movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

81% Alien: Romulus Link to Alien: Romulus
100% Daughters Link to Daughters
78% Cuckoo Link to Cuckoo

New TV Tonight

96% Industry: Season 3
91% Bad Monkey: Season 1
100% Solar Opposites: Season 5
58% Emily in Paris: Season 4
60% Rick and Morty: The Anime: Season 1
-- Bel-Air: Season 3
-- SEAL Team: Season 7
-- RuPaul's Drag Race Global All Stars: Season 1
-- Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures: Season 2
-- Worst Ex Ever: Season 1

Beau Is Afraid Reviews

There is an evident consideration to theme, as is always the case with Aster, but the execution feels like it is having its cake and eating it too.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2024

Alas, at least the first hour of Beau is Afraid is a complete riot, a smorgasbord of black comedy and modern neuroses with a dash of slapstick. The real feat would have been to sustain that pace for the entire movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 13, 2024

“Beau Is Afraid” is a surreal Boots (“Sorry to Bother You”) Riley-esque “The Fabelmans” (2022) meets “The Truman Show” (1998) without being derivative and still delivering quintessential Aster cinema

Full Review | Jun 2, 2024

Aster continuously assaults your patience into something that never once materializes into anything tangible but is so riotously entertaining and absurd that you can’t help but love it.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2024

Our repressed fears and failure to confront our own demons will eventually find a way to reveal themselves. When they do, it can take the form of something positively absurd or darkly horrific.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2024

Beau is Afraid is a sprawling, rambling, picaresque story drenched in neurosis and packed with bizarre characters and encounters, all more or less functioning on an allegorical rather than literal level.

Full Review | Feb 9, 2024

The less you know about Beau is Afraid before going in, the better, because there's no movie as unique or surprising this year.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2024

Surreal expressionism of Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid--another director making a mark on me for the first time with a personal piece obsessed with the peculiarities and perversions of the life of the mind...

Full Review | Jan 4, 2024

Ostensibly Aster’s departure from horror, Beau Is Afraid might be the director’s scariest film yet.

Full Review | Dec 22, 2023

It takes two hours and twenty minutes of Joaquin Phoenix's unadulterated exasperation, but [LuPone] does finally arrive to unsurprisingly be the best part of the whole even if her character is the catalyst for why it's all been so gosh darn boring.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Dec 1, 2023

In his third film, Aster attempts to bewitch you with a pixel-perfect rendering of what feels like a three-hour panic attack that worsens every second.

Full Review | Nov 16, 2023

As a review, I don't know what to say. Outside of being a bit too long, most of the movie is a fever dream that made me giggle as times. I'll give it a B for being something very different.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Nov 13, 2023

It shares DNA with movies like After Hours, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and The Warriors but makes even the darkest moments in those pictures look like outtakes from The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure by comparison.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 25, 2023

[W]hile it is an impressive work from a bona fide auteur ... and a work of art that has blown away some of the smartest people in the industry, I scrawled a pithy note of my own while watching it. "Is this movie. Ever going to end?"

Full Review | Oct 16, 2023

These are not the lives any of us would want to live, or even dream about. But if surreal and absurd cinema has taught us anything, it’s that bad dreams often make good films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 26, 2023

Playing with twisted dimensions and labyrinthine layers, Aster squanders the chance to lead a few good ideas to fruition. The result, much less fascinating than expected, is congested and appalling.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 19, 2023

An almost unclassifiable film, which loves to give its protagonist blow after hard blow. Even the occasional happy moment does not last long—they are all interrupted by moments of violence (physical or psychological) or pure chaos. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 4, 2023

Though this isn't horror, it strives too hard to prove it is art. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 24, 2023

A film I appreciate more for its artistic style & performances over how much I understood it.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

There is a decent amount of commitment to Beau Is Afraid given the length of running time, but it is well worth the watch.

Full Review | Aug 3, 2023

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Movie Reviews

LISTEN & FOLLOW
Apple Podcasts
Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

Horror-comedy 'Beau Is Afraid' is a passion project gone astray

Justin Chang

Joaquin Phoenix's character is attacked, tortured, threatened, knocked unconscious and terrorized in Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid. A24 hide caption

Joaquin Phoenix's character is attacked, tortured, threatened, knocked unconscious and terrorized in Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid.

Thirty-six-year-old writer-director Ari Aster makes deliberately paced, exquisitely crafted chillers about guilt, repression and super-messed-up family dynamics. I've been an admirer of his ever since getting scared out of my wits five years ago by Hereditary , with its mash-up of demonic possession and domestic turmoil. Less scary but no less gripping was his nightmarish travelogue Midsommar , about a relationship that rots under the Scandinavian sun.

Now, after sitting through Aster's latest, the three-hour horror-comedy fantasia Beau Is Afraid , my admiration hasn't dimmed, exactly; it's the kind of freakish jumble only a gifted filmmaker could make. And I'm grateful that a company as adventurous as A24 is willing to give an ambitious director carte blanche to make the unhinged passion project of his dreams. But Beau Is Afraid still strikes me as an audacious misfire. Aster is still flicking at his characters' raw nerves, to say nothing of ours, but for the first time, he seems to be doing it more for effect than anything else.

Beau Wassermann, played by Joaquin Phoenix , is a middle-aged sad sack who, true to the title, is afraid of a lot of things. He's afraid of getting sick and dying. He's afraid of the side effects of the medication prescribed by his therapist. He's afraid to have sex, convinced that it'll kill him. He's afraid to set foot outside his shabby apartment, which is understandable, since he lives in an anonymous urban hellscape full of zombie-movie vibes. Most of all, though, Beau is afraid of his mother (played by the great Patti LuPone), whom he's planning to visit for the first time in ages.

'Midsommar' Shines: A Solstice Nightmare Unfolds In Broad Daylight

But on the day of his intended departure, a bizarre sequence of events causes Beau to miss his flight, which sends him on a long, protracted odyssey that falls into four distinct chapters, each one weirder than the last.

In the first and most suspenseful chapter, Beau tries to leave his apartment, is attacked by a naked serial killer and ultimately gets hit by a car. The second chapter finds him recuperating in the home of a suburban couple — they're played by Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan — who are friendly enough at first, though they seem determined to keep him from leaving.

The third and most beguiling chapter finds Beau lost in a mysterious forest, where he stumbles on a wandering theater troupe. The show they put on for him — Aster makes use of some strikingly beautiful animation here — offers a poignant glimpse of an alternate life path for Beau, one where he's able to find true love and raise a family. But in some ways, this is the cruelest episode of all, since Aster dangles the possibility of happiness mainly so that he can yank it away. The fourth chapter finds Beau returning to his childhood home, where all manner of terrible memories and ugly secrets are waiting for him.

Aster gives all this surreal mayhem a fever-dream intensity, and as always, he leaves us uncertain about whether we should laugh or recoil. There are countless references to earlier movies, including Hitchcock's monstrous-mother classic Psycho and Charlie Kaufman's depressive meta-comedy Synecdoche, New York .

The 86th Annual Academy Awards

Phoenix to self: 'why am i talking about this ... joaquin, shut up'.

Aster also brings in terrific actors, like Parker Posey and Richard Kind, in crucial supporting roles. But what it all adds up to, in the end, is not a whole lot: a bludgeoning Freudian nightmare, in which a gibbering man-child does battle with his domineering mom and his feelings of shame, anxiety and self-loathing. It's not clear whether Aster is parodying or just regurgitating these overworked tropes — or maybe a little of both. It doesn't really matter. After a while, Beau Is Afraid becomes so thuddingly repetitive that it doesn't feel scary or revelatory; it feels like drudgery.

Phoenix is so good at playing damaged souls that he almost feels like too obvious a casting choice. There isn't much to Beau as a character, beneath all his panicky shrieks and strained grimaces. It's easy to feel for him, the way you would feel for anyone you've seen get attacked, tortured, threatened, knocked unconscious and terrorized for three hours. But he's a blank — one that Aster, for all his formidable skill, hasn't been able to fill in.

an image, when javascript is unavailable

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘beau is afraid’ review: joaquin phoenix grapples with mother issues in ari aster’s bonkers freudian freakout.

Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane and Parker Posey also star in this pitch-dark existential horror comedy about an emotional wreck on a painfully conflicted journey home.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Send an Email
Show additional share options
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on Reddit
Share on Tumblr
Share on Whats App
Print the Article
Post a Comment

Playing Beau Wassermann, the character who gives Ari Aster ’s third feature its name, Joaquin Phoenix goes balls to the wall in a performance of astonishing intensity that holds nothing back. Beau lives next door to a peep show emporium called Ejectus Erectus, and at one point is informed by a medic that his abnormally distended testicles are cause for concern, which is just one of many indications that this guy badly needs to — how to put it delicately? — oh heck, shoot a load.

Full credits

Thr newsletters.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Sarajevo film festival: doc lineup explores taboo subjects, both political and emotional, ‘logan’ co-writer felt ‘deadpool & wolverine’ was ‘nothing but complimentary’ to his film’s ending, ‘despicable me’ director on potentially making a live-action minions film: “god, i hope not”, ‘it ends with us’ screenwriter on how she hopes the film “destigmatizes” domestic violence, skydance, ‘jurassic world’ scribe derek connolly tackling sega’s ‘eternal champions’ (exclusive), ‘crossed’ movie in the works from ‘the boys’ creator garth ennis (exclusive).

Movie Review
Beau Is Afraid is an exercise in laughing to keep from screaming

Director Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid amps up the comedic absurdity to tell a haunting story about coping with anxiety.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

A man with healing abrasions on the side of his head standing in silk pajamas.

Beau Is Afraid , A24’s newest film from director Ari Aster, is both a dark comedy and a surreal, oedipal drama that feels like it might not exist were it not for how common it’s become for TV shows and films to tell stories about people living with the kind of anxiety that makes it hard to function. Through its brilliant direction and imaginative set design, Beau Is Afraid ’s able to tell an arresting story that makes you feel quite keenly how horrific living in a perpetual state of fight or flight could be.

But unlike many other recent on-screen depictions of anxiety disorders — The Fabelmans , Puss in Boots: The Last Wish , and HBO Max’s Velma all come to mind — Beau Is Afraid isn’t at all interested in making them seem manageable or like obstacles one simply overcomes through the power of love and conventional filmmaking.

Set in a reality not unlike our own where big cities are held up as examples of how society’s collapsing, Beau Is Afraid is an account of the life of Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), a skittish, deeply neurotic man who struggles to cope with an unspecified anxiety order. For Beau, each day is a new opportunity to marvel at and cower in fear of the outside world from the safety of his small apartment — the only place that feels truly safe to him. Though Beau knows that other people have no trouble leaving their homes and leading productive lives, whenever he chances a glance outside his window, all he can see are Mad Max -like scenes of apocalyptic anarchy, and it’s enough to convince him to stay inside.

How much of the horror Beau witnesses — streets full of violent, deranged people killing one another and sometimes waving their genitals around for fun — is actually real as opposed to it all being the waking nightmare of a disturbed man is a question Beau Is Afraid poses early on. Rather than ever providing a definitive answer, Beau Is Afraid keeps open the possibility of its heightened reality all being a kind of fantasy, or at least a collection of Beau’s paranoid delusions breathtakingly realized by the film’s background cast and production design from Fiona Crombie.

Phoenix plays Beau relatively straight and like a man who’s truly just trying to mind his own business. But everything about the world around Beau — from the expletive-ridden storefront signs to the go-go dancers grooving in front of his apartment building — creates a stressful and uneasy atmosphere that makes it easy to understand why he’s afraid so often, even if the danger might just be in his head.

Many of the things that scare Beau may be imaginary, but there’s never any doubt about how real and ever-present in his life Beau’s passive-aggressive mother Mona (Patti Lupone) is, despite her living across the country and being largely unseen in Beau Is Afraid when the film’s focused on the present. Even more than strangers on the street or news reports of there being a knife-wielding murderer on the loose, Mona — a self-made entrepreneur who built her business empire as a young single mother (played in flashbacks by Zoe Lister-Jones) — fills Beau with a crippling anxiety he only feels comfortable talking about with his unnamed therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson).

Through their sessions, Beau’s therapist has gotten him to a point where he’s at least able to discuss the disturbing, traumatic dreams about being born that begin to plague him in the buildup to Beau embarking on a trip to see his mother. But all of that progress (and then some) comes crashing down when, on the day Beau’s meant to catch his flight, both his house keys and his luggage mysteriously vanish just as he’s about to leave — an inexplicable turn of events that’s just the beginning of Beau being forced well outside of his comfort zone.

Much like Aster’s 2011 short Beau starring Billy Mayo as a nervous man being terrorized over the phone by a key-collecting demon, there’s a marked simplicity to Beau Is Afraid ’s story despite all the fantastical turns it takes as Beau sets out to get to his mom’s house. All Beau really wants is a ride to the airport and to feel like he’s not disappointing Mona yet again the way he constantly did as a skittish teen (portrayed by Armen Nahapetian). But the complex emotions underpinning those desires — fears of his unlocked home being invaded, or that he’ll be murdered, or that no woman will ever love him like Mona — give Beau Is Afraid a frantic sense of urgency that makes everything about the film feel like an almost The Cell -esque deep dive into one man’s psychological neuroses.

As intermittently dark, twisted, and grotesque as the movie becomes, it’s also Aster’s most comedic project to date in the sense that it’s generously peppered with moments meant to cut through at least some of the dread that comes with being so in Beau’s head. But even with its levity and feeling like a shift away from the more horror-focused mode audiences may know Aster for, Beau Is Afraid focuses on many of the same themes present in Aster’s earlier works, like Munchausen and The Strange Thing About the Johnsons , which makes the film play like a sharpened expansion on ideas that seem to haunt him.

Beau Is Afraid is so distinct from Aster’s other films and ends on such a bewildering note that it’s more than likely to throw quite a few people for loops they aren’t expecting. But even as it’s spiraling in its final moments, and raising more questions than it ever feels interested in answering, there’s a mesmerizing, captivating quality to it all that makes it hard not to get drawn into the strangeness of Aster’s vision.

Beau Is Afraid also stars Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Kylie Rogers, Denis Ménochet, Parker Posey, Julia Antonelli, Richard Kind, Hayley Squires, and Michael Gandolfini. The movie hits theaters on April 21st.

What happened to all the temporary air conditioning units at the Olympic Village?

Gemini is taking over google, microsoft is finally removing the fat32 partition size limit in windows 11, at&t and verizon have a beef with t-mobile’s starlink satellite service, microsoft is now in a handheld gaming pc race.

Beau is Afraid is Ari Aster’s Anxious Odyssey — And His Most Audacious Movie Yet

The horror director has officially entered his Charlie Kaufman era.

Beau is Afraid starts at the literal beginning. Our title character emerges from the womb, but just like the rest of Ari Aster’s new disorienting and upsetting film, this is no conventional birthing scene. The film’s first black frame fades into a translucent pinkish-red before suddenly emerging into a sterile-white room full of giant masked men and women rushing to resuscitate the oddly quiet baby whose POV we’ve shockingly become privy to. This is how deeply we’re embedded in the mindset of Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix), a perpetually anxious doormat of a man who embarks on a strange epic journey .

Nothing is certain in Beau is Afraid . Reality might be a dream, your most cherished moments may be a delusion, and one’s deepest, darkest insecurities might actually be a projection of an overbearing mother. The only true certainty in Aster’s freaky, perverse odyssey is that the world is a terrifying place.

When we pick up with Beau as an adult, he’s become a tightly-wound bundle of complexes who can barely step foot outside his apartment. But as Aster’s camera studiously follows Beau from his unhelpful session with an overly placid therapist through the dangerous streets and into his derelict apartment building, it’s clear that Beau’s whole world is a little off .

The streets are littered with trash and dead bodies. Storefront signs advertise boobs, drugs, and death with equal amounts of glee. TV news anchors drolly report the latest casualties of a nude serial killer who terrorizes the town with impunity. And armies of homeless drug addicts casually murder each other in broad daylight. Beau essentially lives in a heightened version of conservative America’s worst nightmare of New York City, which the film treats with cool impartiality and a dash of magical realism.

It’s enough to make the already meek Beau feel especially helpless as he shuffles through his life and attempts to ready himself for his biggest challenge: getting on a plane to visit his mother. But one unfortunate event follows after the other. Beau’s keys are stolen, he misses his plane, and his apartment is invaded and trashed. When he receives a phone call with the worst news of his life, Beau must race back to his mother’s house or face the consequences.

Joaquin Phoenix lends sympathy to a pitiful hero in Beau is Afraid .

Beau is Afraid feels like a warped product of the world’s most anxious mind, in the best way possible. This is Aster’s most audacious and deranged movie yet — a movie so weird it makes Midsommar and Hereditary seem like conventional horror flicks. Deeply disturbed and deeply funny, Beau is Afraid is a three-hour anxiety attack that doubles as a modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, except its hero is just trying to get back to his mother’s house.

While his previous two films are more focused, there’s a gumption to Aster’s “everything but the kitchen sink” approach. The viewer has no choice but to accept every wild tonal shift and surreal twist, or risk feeling perpetually bewildered. That Beau is Afraid was Aster’s first script (written before he made Hereditary ) makes total sense. It feels like a germ of an idea dreamed up by a young man and executed by a less-young man, now with a subconscious littered with ennui, like sticky fly paper that caught onto every stray regret in life. It lends to the scattered odyssey of Beau’s journey, which flickers back and forth between his youth and his adulthood, and between his worst dreams and worser memories. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and yet… Beau is Afraid is a revelation.

Beau is Afraid, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Joaquin Phoenix

Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan give unsettling supporting turns as a surgeon and his wife with ulterior motives.

Aster lays bare his weirdest insecurities with striking beauty and confident vision. The nightmare of Beau’s crime-ridden urban life gives way to even more uncanny locations: a Pepto Bismol-pink suburban house where an overly hospitable surgeon and his wife (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan, both perfectly unsettling) take him in, the eerie woods where he meets a group of fae-like traveling performers, and his mother’s museum-like house full of testaments to her greatness and evidence of his suffocating childhood.

But the most incredible section of the film is a picturebook-like sequence animated by Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña ( Wolf House ) in which Beau imagines another, equally tragic direction his life might have taken. It’s a breathtaking stop-motion scene that turns a pit stop into the cathartic climax of the movie — before Aster rips the rug from right underneath it. Because for Beau and his codependent relationship with his overbearing mother (the younger version given a snappy impatience by Zoe Lister-Jones, the older version played as a tyrannical terror by Patti LuPone), emotional release is the enemy. Eternal shame is the only solution.

A standout sequence takes the audience on an animated adventure.

Joaquin Phoenix is terrific as Beau, making his dazed, spineless Odysseus into a sympathetic, if pitiful, hero — if only in his desperation to reach the end of his journey. Phoenix is one of the great actors of our time, and he’s never felt more relatable than as this terrified ball of anxiety. His younger self is almost too well-cast as Armen Nahapetian (who is not, in fact, a de-aged Phoenix), in a flashback sequence that threatens to tip the film over into surreal nonsense.

And while I can’t say that Aster manages to thread the needle between surreal nonsense and surreal inspiration without a hitch, I can say that there’s no film like Beau is Afraid — at least on this side of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York . It’s a gonzo odyssey for our times, a rejection of mediocre cinema, and a paean for all the perverted weirdos out there. This one’s for you, sickos.

Beau Is Afraid arrives in theaters on April 21.

This article was originally published on April 11, 2023

Science Fiction

Entertainment
<i>Beau Is Afraid</i> Is a Bleak Black Comedy That’s More Tedious Than Hilarious

Beau Is Afraid Is a Bleak Black Comedy That’s More Tedious Than Hilarious

H ow much do you really want to know about horrormeister Ari Aster’s preoccupations and anxieties? That’s a question to consider seriously before subjecting yourself to Beau Is Afraid, a bleak black comedy that’s very occasionally hilarious, though mostly just tedious. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Beau, who’s born into this world in the movie’s opening scene, escorted by his mother’s muffled screams and staticky, ominous-sounding thunder cracks. We can’t, at first, see baby or mother—only mysterious, inky darkness punctuated by blurry red flashes. Initially, the infant isn’t crying, and presumably not breathing; his mother panics, snapping at the doctors. Then we hear a slap and a yowl, and one man’s life begins. Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Beau Is Afraid is three hours of one man’s dark night of the soul, a howl of pain that occasionally twists itself into a guffaw. After clambering out of the birth canal and growing to middle age—Aster skips large portions of that business, thank God—Beau sits in the office of his shrink (Stephen McKinley Henderson), sharing, in halting language, his feelings about his impending long-distance trip to see his mother. He’s OK with it, he thinks. Or maybe not. Meanwhile, his mother calls his cellphone—he doesn’t pick up—and we hear the message she leaves, enthusing about her affection for him and making it clear she’s excited about seeing him the next day. What’s not to love about this mom? Still, he’s going to need help getting through this visit, and Dr. Shrink writes a scrip for a new medicine, with the zippy name Zypnotycril, and warns his patient, more than once, to always take it with water.

Read More: The Artfully Made Hereditary Is the Latest Horror Film to Elevate the Genre

Beau heads home to his apartment in a seedy building in a nightmare version of New York, what tourists imagine the worst of New York to be. The streets are crawling with mentally ill hooligans, many of them naked and dirty, with matted hair—just another day in the nabe. Beau’s flat is dismal but tidy. He nukes a frozen dinner (touted on the package as being “the best of Hawaiian and Irish cuisine”), catches up on the TV news (the city is on the lookout for a violent nutter who’s been nicknamed the Birthday Boy Stab Man) and turns in, needing to be up early for his flight. What follows is a cracked symphony of paranoia, in which a belligerent, unseen neighbor repeatedly interrupts Beau’s insomnia to complain about how much noise he’s making (he is, obviously, making none). He oversleeps and makes a mad dash out the door to make his flight, only to have his luggage and keys snatched away by an invisible thief when he’s not looking. Overwhelmed with anxiety, he downs a Zypnotyrcil, only to realize his water has been turned off. And when he dashes across the street to the local bodega, desperately grabbing a bottle of H2O, his credit card is declined. As he struggles to pay by counting out the chicken feed in his pocket, we see the multitudes of street crazies streaming into his apartment building through the front door, which, keyless, he has propped open. They’re all going to his apartment, naturally, where they’ll engage in a destructive hootenanny of debauchery as he watches, helplessly, from the fire escape outside his window.

Nathan Lane, Joaquin Phoenix, and Amy Ryan in Ari Aster's 'Beau Is Afraid'

That’s not the whole plot of Beau Is Afraid; it’s barely the beginning. This early section is also the most grimly entertaining, if relentless, section of the movie. But it’s all downhill from there. Beau’s adventures include, but are not limited to, a semi-peaceful interlude at the home of a seemingly benign suburban couple played by Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan ; a stretch spent with a hippie theater troupe whose plays, staged in the forest, reveal deep truths about his own life; and a reunion with a lost love (played by the always pleasingly wacky Parker Posey), which offers poor Beau an all too fleeting respite from his misery.

How much manicured craziness can one movie hold? Aster is out to test the limits. Beau Is Afraid is Aster’s third film as a writer-director; it’s both more ambitious and more tiresome than his earlier pictures, the 2018 grief-horror extravaganza Hereditary and the 2019 pagan-nightmare tableau Midsommar . Guilt, shame, paranoia, Freudian mom issues—you name it, Aster slaps it up there on the screen, with Phoenix as our jittery naif, stumbling from one traumatic episode to the next. His performance is like a three-hour-long murmur; with his watery eyes and perpetually slack jaw, his Beau looks a little zonked by it all, as if he can’t believe all of this is happening to him. By the time his haranguing, perpetually disapproving mother appears—she’s played by Patti LuPone, who bites down on every line as if it were a piece of overcooked steak—we see exactly what the problem is. (When in doubt, blame mom.)

Beau Is Afraid is stylish all right—Aster can’t stay away from style. Groovy low-angle shots, dream sequences rendered in wacky point-of-view perspectives, dreamlike vistas of dark water shot in glimmering light: Aster borrows from the best (Martin Scorsese, Ingmar Bergman) and the worst (Gaspar Noé) in this belabored work of slapstick agony. It’s the most magnificent act of oversharing you’ll see all year, a banquet of all the TMI you can eat, just for the price of a ticket. Though when you think about it, shouldn’t Aster be paying us ?

More Must-Reads from TIME

Heman Bekele Is TIME’s 2024 Kid of the Year
The Reintroduction of Kamala Harris
The 7 States That Will Decide the Election
Why China Won’t Allow Single Women to Freeze Their Eggs
Is the U.S. Ready for Psychedelics?
The Rise of a New Kind of Parenting Guru
The 50 Best Romance Novels to Read Right Now
Can Food Really Change Your Hormones?

What the hell is going on in Beau Is Afraid?

The myths, mess, and creepy magic of Ari Aster’s latest nightmare.

by Alissa Wilkinson

A middle-aged man in pajamas stands, looking bewildered. His face is a bit dinged up.

Warning: Spoilers for Beau Is Afraid follow. Lots of spoilers. Proceed at your own risk!

Image reads “spoilers below,” with a triangular sign bearing an exclamation point.

I have this recurring dream — a nightmare, really — where I’m trying to go somewhere, I must be there, I simply must, but people keep making me late, and no matter what I do, I can’t make any progress. It’s terrible. I hate it.

It’s also kind of the plot of Beau Is Afraid , a demented unraveling of the hero’s journey from Ari Aster, the guy who brought you Hereditary , Midsommar , some stuff you can never forget seeing. It is not, properly, a horror movie, though there’s horrifying stuff in it. It’s more of a nightmare movie, in which our main character, Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), is just having a pretty bad time of it. If it’s about anything, it’s about guilt. It’s what would happen if all the stuff you worry about in your therapist’s office — that everyone was mad at you, that you’re a huge disappointment to your parents, that you’ll get accused of doing something wrong and not even know what it is — was true. At every turn, the worst thing happens.

Obviously, it’s great and I love it, and a lot of people won’t. And that’s fine. It’s manifestly not for everyone.

Beau Is Afraid is also, I think, the least scrutable of Aster’s three features. You know what’s happening, but you’re never totally sure why or what’s important to remember. Backtracking over the plot, you can start to see the outlines emerging, some themes, some breadcrumbs scattered throughout. There are little rabbit trails you can trace, jokes to notice in the background (the signs scattered throughout this movie are a rich source of humor), part of why your second viewing of the movie might be more illuminating than the first.

Yet it’s important to remember that Beau Is Afraid, which is out now, is not a puzzle to be solved or a mystery to be unlocked. That’s by design. Sink into it and don’t try to pick it apart, and you’ll get it. Get stuck on the details and you’ll lose the plot. So to speak.

Joaquin Phoenix, in a hospital gown, sitting on a patio chair, with an ordinary suburban house in the background.

If you really want to wrap your head around Beau , though, there are two main things to keep in mind. One is the promise of the title: that this is a movie about a guy named Beau, and he is afraid. And not even afraid of something specific, but afraid in a chaotically multidirectional manner. If it’s out there, Beau is afraid of it.

The other is that this is a funhouse mirror version of the classic hero’s journey story, as codified by Joseph Campbell, sometimes called the “monomyth.” In its normal state, the hero’s journey is a narrative archetype for a particular kind of classic story. Think of, say, Odysseus, or Frodo in The Lord of the Rings : A hero is called out of his familiar life and armed by some supernatural power to embark on an adventure. He crosses the threshold into an unknown world, where he encounters helpers and mentors, challenges and temptations that he must overcome, and ultimately a moment of revelation, where he stares into an abyss and is reborn. Having been transformed, he must atone for himself, and then can return home with a gift. At home, everything is familiar but changed because the hero himself is changed. Now, he has freedom to live.

Aster, being Aster, has turned the whole thing inside out. But you can discern the outlines of the monomyth inside Beau Is Afraid , perhaps in a hilarious reinforcement of Campbell’s sense that the hero’s journey is built into the human heart. The ways it disintegrates into chaos is what makes it comitragical, or tragicomical. It’s funny and messed up, and that’s what makes it great.

Act 1: The Departure

At core, Beau Is Afraid is the tale of a very lost soul named Beau Wasserman, the only son of his mother Mona Wasserman (played at different ages by Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti Lupone), a business maven who raised him on her own in their town of Wasserton. Throughout his childhood, Beau was his mother’s companion; he appeared in her advertisements, absorbed all her attention, was the focus of her life. She presented him with a world of dangers, in which she was his safe guide, and maybe his only safe guide.

Now paunchy and middle-aged, Beau is the saddest of sacks living in the worst neighborhood you could possibly imagine, even if you’ve personally lived in a very bad neighborhood indeed. (It’s called Corrina, in the fictional state of Corrina, but resembles more than anything a Fox News fever dream of what a city is like.) His apartment is over a store called “Erectus Ejectus” (you get it) and the lobby is filled with obscene graffiti. Corpses rot in the streets. One local seems to spend a lot of time trying to dig people’s eyeballs out of their skulls while grinning maniacally.

This is Beau’s familiar starting place — well, rewind. Not quite. The movie actually starts with Beau’s birth, which is presented as a moment of bewilderment from baby Beau’s point of view. It was safe and quiet inside Mona, but bursting into the world is so terrifying that he can’t even cry.

Adult Beau is scared of most things, and his psychiatrist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) does not make a great deal of headway with him, prescribing him a “cool new drug” for anxiety that must be taken with water. Beau’s dismal apartment is loud and dingy, and next to the TV where he watches anxiety-inducing news bulletins is a stack of books with titles like You Don’t Always Have to Live Like This . There are posters on the doors with warnings of a brown recluse spider, concluded, spectacularly, with a Winston Churchill quote: “The price of greatness is responsibility.” The place sucks. The water goes out.

In one of the first hints that this world is not all it seems to be, Beau falls asleep the night before he’s meant to fly home to visit his mother. He wakes to a note slipped under his door courteously asking him to turn down his music, although he not only isn’t playing music (Beau is not really the night-rocking type), but can’t hear music playing at all. Notes appear over the night, increasingly aggressive, till suddenly Beau can hear the music — it still isn’t coming from his place — and just crawls under the covers and plugs his ears, hoping it will all go away.

Of course, he oversleeps.

Joaquin Phoenix, his head pretty beat up now, looks terrified.

This is the pattern of Beau Is Afraid : something kind of weird happens, and instead of dealing with it, Beau just knuckles under, and then ends up paying a worse price for his lack of courage than seems strictly necessary. There are 10 ways every situation could go wrong, but inevitably what happens is some 11th worse thing.

On his rush out the door, Beau goes back to grab a small box of dental floss that he almost packed the night before — we watched him hesitate over it — but elected to leave in his bathroom. Now he needs it; this is a man who has been made to be afraid of terrible things happening, like missing one day of flossing and ending up with gum cancer or something. But when he does this, his keys disappear, as does his bag, and now he’s in a real pickle because of course he can’t leave his door unlocked, “open to the public,” as he thinks of it. Calling home, he discovers his worst fears are true: His mother is immensely disappointed with him. Another nightmare.

The way to watch Beau Is Afraid is to assume that you’re not watching “reality,” in a kind of empirical sense. Instead, whatever’s happening onscreen is the worst thing that Beau can imagine. Those fears start to compound and overlap and make one another worse. And it all gets especially worse when he takes his anti-anxiety meds, only to realize that the water is out in his building and if he doesn’t drink water he’ll die, but oh there’s water in the convenience store across the street, but if he runs out without his keys what if the entire neighborhood of derelicts breaks into his apartment, what then? What will he do!?

He does the only thing he can do to stay alive, and what he expects to happen is exactly what happens, and Beau spends the night trapped on scaffolding outside his apartment, too scared to clear the invaders out. It’s very clear that this particular not-hero (not an antihero, even, just profoundly not a hero) is going to need a boot in the butt to get on his journey to see his mother.

Then, on the phone with a UPS guy at his mother’s house, he discovers his mother is dead. Or at least it looks that way.

Now he’s got a whole other set of problems and is even less inclined to leave his house until forced to by an unexpected tangle with the man hiding in his ceiling. Nude, Beau runs into the street, encounters a cop who’s also shaking with fear and about to shoot him and, almost mercifully, gets slammed by some kind of van driven by Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane).

Beau has crossed the threshold.

Act 2: Initiation

After sleeping for two days straight, Beau wakes up in Grace and Roger’s house, and at this point you might be starting to suspect a little of what’s going to happen. They seem nice enough, but things in their house seem kind of weird. There’s a shrine to their dead son, killed in action in Caracas — a true hero — whose disturbed buddy Jeeves (Denis Menochet), also a hero (as they frequently tell him) lives out back. As if stuck in a ridiculous foil, Beau has been put up in their teenage daughter Toni’s (Kylie Rogers) room, postered with tributes to K-pop boy bands, rather than their son’s empty room. And Toni is pissed about it. Hints she drops suggest that Grace and Roger are trying to adopt Beau, a man who is very obviously not of adoptable age.

A middle-aged man in a bedroom with all kinds of posters on the walls, mostly for pop stars.

Meanwhile, Beau gets a call from his mother’s lawyer (Richard Kind) who bellows at him over the phone that his poor mother, who should have been buried the day she died by Jewish custom, has been stuck unburied because Beau hasn’t bothered to show up yet. Beau’s biggest fear: that his mother will be ashamed and disgraced, and it will be his fault, and he won’t even be able to help it. His protestations that he got into a horrible accident have no effect. The lawyer orders him to come immediately to Wasserton so his mother won’t be further humiliated.

Beau tries. He really tries. Roger promises to take him to Wasserton, then postpones. Grace slips him strange notes about not incriminating himself. It’s as if Beau is being given a series of tests — like a hero would — that, if passed, will teach him valuable lessons. But he just keeps slipping down a hall of mirrors, each stranger than the last.

The big moment, where he might have a profound revelation, comes when Toni and a friend trick him into smoking some kind of joint (he asks what it is; “it’s three things,” they reply, with no further elaboration) and Beau spirals. But no; nothing. The next day, he discovers that there’s some kind of surveillance system in the house.

It comes to a head when Toni drags him into her dead brother’s room, insisting he help her paint — though he knows Grace doesn’t want the room touched — and then screams at him, hysterically, that this is a test. He isn’t passing it, and she drinks paint, and he flees.

A Respite, Gone Wrong

Then there’s an interlude, where you start to wonder if maybe things are looking up for Beau. Having run into the woods, he meets a pregnant young woman (Hayley Squires) who tends to his cuts and brings him to a little commune of players, all of whom are orphans. They travel around putting on plays, and they’re about to put on another.

And of course, the play is the hero’s journey. Beau becomes transfixed, hypnotized, inserting himself into what he’s watching, which starts out like the archetypal tale and then starts to kind of go off the rails. (This is also when the movie spins out into an artfully animated section, with Beau styled as a hero going through an animated world.) Eventually, the tale wraps into reality (well, “reality”), and the hero version of Beau walks into a woods where a play is going on that seems to be about him and his three sons.

Beau, in suspenders and a straw hat, walks into an animated field, with an angel flying in the air.

Pause here to note that Beau has experienced a series of flashbacks and memories throughout the action thus far. There are two main categories. One is a dream he has, in which he sees his mother trying to undress him for the bath, as a boy, as he refuses. She’s livid at him. The dream expands; eventually he sees her shutting someone up in the attic.

The other is definitely a memory: Young Beau (Arman Nahapetian), on a cruise with his mother, meets a girl named Elaine (Julia Antonelli), on whom he develops a crush. His attraction to her is noticeable to his mother, who seems both pleased and a little strange about it. Elaine kisses Beau and then, in a weird twist, is removed from the cruise by her mother. Before she leaves, she gives him a Polaroid he took of her and makes him promise to “wait” for her. He promises.

That’s linked to a third weird thing, which is Beau’s belief — because his mother told him, as a boy — that if he ejaculates, he will die. His father, she tells him, died the night that he was conceived; the same happened to his grandfather and great-grandfather. Beau believes her, without question, and so he claims at his age that he’s never been with anyone, ever.

So how he has three sons is not exactly clear, but the confusion seems to clear his head and he’s back to watching the play. He meets a man in the woods who claims to have known his father, which seems impossible. Or is it? Before he can figure it out, Jeeves comes crashing through the underbrush, and Beau is off running again.

Act III: Return

At last, Beau makes it to his mother’s house. But he is too late. The funeral is over. The house is empty. He walks through it, bereft, examining what his mother’s life was. In the middle of a long gallery of photos of Beau on Mona’s spiral staircase wall, there’s a recent photo of Beau, so recent that we’ve seen it before. Mona’s whole life seems to have been wrapped around Beau.

Then a woman shows up, and it’s Elaine (Parker Posey), and in a moment where you think that maybe Beau is about to receive some hero’s reward, they have sex. He is astonished to discover that he doesn’t die. He is elated. He is grateful. And then, he is horrified to discover that she ... does die. And his mother, apparently not dead, has been watching all this time. And, worse, she’s heard his therapy tapes, in which he routinely talks about her. It’s the kind of dream you are desperate to wake up from.

You can watch Beau Is Afraid very carefully and get near the end and still have a whole lot of questions

What transpires is a final confrontation with his mother (whom Elaine referred to as “the dragon”), a final ordeal he must face, and he simply does not nail it. She excoriates him, and he finds himself inside his very, very worst nightmare: that his mother isn’t just mad at him for missing his flight, but has ascribed myriad slights and ill intent to actions he performed unwittingly, even when he was a boy, even when he was a baby. He is wrong and has been wrong his whole life, a passive lump without a will of his own, so scared of the world that he never does anything at all. She hates him, she says. And he chokes her.

You can watch Beau Is Afraid very carefully and get near the end and still have a whole lot of questions.

For instance: Is that Beau’s father in the attic? And if the answer is yes , what is Beau’s father in the attic: the giant phallus, or the guy who Beau briefly sees before his horror takes over?

Or: Is Beau actually being Truman Show ed by his mother, living in a world that’s totally set up by her? Did she deliberately create for him a world in which he would disappoint her, or did she create a world in which he might succeed, and he disappointed her anyhow? Both seem possible. She’s in cahoots with the therapist; she employs at least Elaine and Roger, and maybe Grace (she knows about the surveillance channel); the housing complex he lives in was advertised by her. Every moment of his life is on her walls, sometimes in the form of advertisements. After Elaine’s untimely demise, Beau seems on the verge of asking whether Elaine was a plant all this time, “from the beginning.” And there’s that photo on the staircase.

Or is that just Beau’s head playing tricks on him? Does it even make sense to ask that question?

There are other little mysteries that lead you down strange pathways. But to get too swept up in them is probably a fool’s errand. Beau Is Afraid is not “about” something, exactly; it’s not a movie with a point to make or a puzzle to unlock. It’s weird and offensive and wickedly funny and confusing as hell. That, for me, is what makes it worthwhile; it’s entertainment that respects my ability to be confused and uncomfortable and also have a blast.

It’s really no wonder that the last section of Beau Is Afraid — the “road back” sequence, in the hero’s journey mythology — goes so horribly wrong. Beau pilots a little boat onto the peaceful night waters he’s seen in his dream, and into a cave, and you think he is maybe about to return home, having learned a lesson. But nope! The lights come on and he’s in a stadium where everyone can judge him, especially his mother and her lawyer. (This scene seems to borrow heavily from Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life , which Aster picked for a series on his Beau influences.) He has a defense lawyer, true, but it’s a limp defense — the phone number emblazoned above the lawyer’s head is 1-800-DEFENCE, presumably because they couldn’t get the S — and the lawyer ends up splattered on a rock in a moment a bit reminiscent of Midsommar .

Defeated, Beau never reaches home. Or maybe this is his home. In his last moments, his eyes, full of sadness, also reach some resignation. Of course this is how things end; of course things will never get better. Beau has confronted the dragon and failed. He’s not transformed. He can’t atone for himself. He’s failed the tests. He’s given away any gift he received. He’s refused to gain courage, refused the help of friends, and discovered that every mentor along the way was a trap. His mother constructed a world so airtight he never actually learned to breathe, and now, faced with a twisted mirror of his life, one in which his main sin is passivity, he is out of chances to act.

Beau will never change. And so, he just combusts.

Which might be one way the movie reclaims the hero’s journey. Now, at any rate, he’s free.

Beau Is Afraid is playing in theaters.

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Culture

How Raygun earned her spot — fair and square — as an Olympics breaker

The truth behind the ongoing controversy over the highly memeable dancer.

The It Ends With Us drama is the new Don’t Worry Darling drama

Is there actually beef between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni?

Does being a gifted kid make for a burned-out adulthood?

How being labeled “gifted” can rearrange your life — for better and for worse.

The fight over Jordan Chiles’s bronze medal is barely about gymnastics

The Olympian was asked to give her medal back — and the racist attacks began.

What George Orwell’s 1984 can teach us about 2024

Orwell prized clear communication, so why are people misusing his name?

Industry is the soapy, sleazy spectacle prestige TV is missing

How is a show about banking more fun than anything else?

'Beau Is Afraid' review: Ari Aster delivers a brilliant, 3-hour-long panic attack

Joaquin Phoenix stars in "Beau is Afraid."

Writer/director Ari Aster has forged his reputation with the double whammy of Hereditary and Midsommar , two films that are both harrowingly horrifying yet slyly funny. Fans who've relished the nightmare-scorching visuals and deeply twisted finales of Aster's work thus far might expect something similar in his latest. Good news for fans: Beau Is Afraid is peppered with jaw-dropping horrors and jokes so dark you might laugh or scream.

Yet, this epic — which Aster describes as a "Jewish Lord of the Rings " — sets its own course, trekking not only far from horror conventions, but from movie conventions as well. The result is a film that is shocking, immersive and so emotionally raw that it's essentially a three-hour-long panic attack as cinema.

Proceed with caution.

What is Beau Is Afraid about?

Joaquin Phoenx in old man make-up for "Beau is Afraid."

In its simplest form, Beau Is Afraid is about a fearful loser trying to make his way to his overbearing mother's house. Of course, Aster complicates this journey with a cascade of what-ifs, chasing down the worst-case scenario at every opportunity. What's the worst that could happen if you lost your keys? If you missed your flight? If you disappointed your mother?

If you've ever been tormented by a similarly relentless internal chorus, you'll relate to Beau's dilemma. He is frozen by the possibilities until fate — like a relentless bully — pushes him not to act, but to react. He is forced to leave the relative safety of his grubby apartment for urban streets that are booming with noise and chaos, littered with a rotting corpse, a half-naked dancer, and a fully nude serial stabber.

Violence will push him farther and farther out of his comfort zone to settings disparate and not always obviously perilous. He'll find himself awash in the eerie comforts of a posh suburban family, amid a wandering theater troupe, adrift in an animated fantasy, all before finding his way to a mansion whose cold architecture warns us that it is — in a sense — a prison. And then Beau Is Afraid goes even farther, chucking audiences into a nightmarish terrain we could never predict. And yet you may find yourself smiling like a madman all the way.

Joaquin Phoenix leads a preposterously incredible cast.

Nathan Lane, Joaquin Phoenix , and Amy Ryan hold hands in "Beau is Afraid."

Academy Award-winner Joaquin Phoenix stars as Beau, portraying the timid man behind a scruffy stubble; wispy, retreating gray hair; and an expression that glides from dumbfounded to aggrieved to horrified in the blink of an eye. This is an intensely demanding performance that thrusts the heralded actor through mind-snapping scenarios, one after another, as well as pushing him physically; a run to the bodega is treated like an obstacle course with life-or-death stakes. Even awkward social interactions might result in an abrupt attack, and so Joaquin plays Beau like a battered animal, eternally skittish. His fear is constant and twitches at contagious, urging the audience to generously share in his anxiety through each hellish turn.

Beau Is Afraid is structured less like a film and more like a novel, with each chapter chucking Beau into a new setting. Production designer Fiona Crombie masterfully distinguishes each world from the next, so that it might seem as if Beau has stumbled out of his movie, which begins in a metropolis gone feral, into something softer and more fantastical. These spaces are occupied by a ridiculous stacking of stars, which bring distinctive and dynamic charges to each chapter.

Paired as plucky parents, Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane bring a brightness so bouncy that simple salutations play as punchlines. As their daughter Toni, Kylie Rogers's growling menace offers a ferocious parody of teen angst. In flashbacks to Beau's childhood, Zoe Lister-Jones plays a younger version of his mother, Mona, with a snarling sharpness, while a wide-eyed Armen Nahapetian captures teen Beau's mix of wonder and terror. Celebrated character actors Stephen McKinley Henderson ( Dune , Fences ) and Richard Kind give wickedly funny performances as a therapist and lawyer, respectively. Parker Posey is perfectly cast for a third-act turn that is darkly, deliriously outrageous, and sure to psychologically scar '90s kids who grew up in awe of her.

Finally, Patti LuPone stars as Beau's awaiting mother. And here I digress to note that Aster has said Beau Is Afraid was first drafted ten years ago —before he made Hereditary and Midsommar . In LuPone's Mona, you can see clear ties to Hereditary's harried mother and the tortured bond she shares with her son. But here, the mother is not the hero or the anti-hero; she is the merciless antagonist.

LuPone, a living legend of the Broadway stage who has defined diva roles again and again, makes a feast of Mona. She stalks into the room like a grand dame of film noir, or perhaps the sultry witch of an erotic '80s midnight movie. She spits accusations and insults and condemnations with such intensity that you might feel compelled to apologize to your own mother for being a damn burden. But most thrilling, LuPone is given a monologue that makes Toni Collette's nerve-shredding "I am your mother" speech feel a tad tame. It's exhilarating to watch this icon sink her teeth into this speech, and it is absolutely spine-chilling to take it all in.

'Beau Is Afraid' exclusive clip takes a deeper look into this bizarre film
'Beau is Afraid' trailer: Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix serve up surrealism
'Midsommar' is a beautiful nightmare that reinvents what horror can be
20 best comedies streaming on Netflix right now
The best Mother's Day gift ideas (for every kind of mum)

Beau Is Afraid is a cinematic dare.

Joaquin Phoenix and Ari Aster are on the set of "Beau is Afraid."

As he has in his first two films, Aster has paired powerful performers with a script that plunges into the surreal and the psychological. His movies feel like a dare, challenging audiences with visuals of beautiful bodies destroyed by self-loathing, audio that creeps under your skin, and plot twists that feel wrong yet oh, so terribly right.

Beau Is Afraid is a challenge in that its exploration of terror doesn't allow you the reprieve typically provided in horror. There are no jump scares to give you the release of a scream. The film instead operates on a wicked sense of whimsy, propelling its protagonist forward without much respite, despite flights of fantasy. So too are we pushed to the brink, wallowing in uncertainty and anxiety, on the edge of our seats over what might come next.

Ultimately, Beau Is Afraid is Ari Aster's answer to The Truman Show , a film in which an everyman fears that everyone around him knows something he doesn't and is out to get him. However, instead of cloaking that horrific scenario in the winsomeness of a 1950s sitcom, Aster propels us into modern landscapes, tweaked to a place of parody but not to the point of unfamiliarity. There are visuals gags, gross and urbane, found in graffiti, band posters, and the promotional art outside a curious strip club. In the final act, there is a music cue at once perfect and utterly absurd, which led surprise audiences to squeal. This is the world we know at its very worst...and at its most chaotically fun.

Still, I can't promise you'll enjoy Beau is Afraid . I can promise it'll fuck you up.

Beau is Afraid opens in NY/LA on April 14, then nationwide on April 21.

Topics Film

Kristy Puchko is the Film Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter, who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers, and had her work published on RogerEbert.com, Vanity Fair, and The Guardian. A member of the Critics Choice Association and GALECA as well as a Top Critic on Rotten Tomatoes, Kristy's primary focus is movies. However, she's also been known to gush over television, podcasts, and board games. You can follow her on Twitter.

Ingrid Torelli, David Dastmalchian, and Laura Gordon in Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes' "Late Night with the Devil."

'Beau Is Afraid' review: Joaquin Phoenix's bonkers hero quest is the mother of all guilt trips

After crafting a demonic family disaster and a bonkers Swedish getaway, writer/director Ari Aster has concocted the mother of all guilt trips.

Not much is clear about his new dark comedy “Beau Is Afraid” (★★★ out of four; rated R; now showing in New York and Los Angeles, in theaters nationwide Friday), seemingly by design, but Aster has traded his horror shows “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” for an oddly relatable and proudly deranged adventure about a middle-aged man ( Joaquin Phoenix in go-for-broke mode) and his quest to return home. That part, if nothing else about this bizarre hero’s journey, makes sense. It’s everything else over the course of three hours – beginning with, yes, the discombobulating experience of childbirth – that challenges the imagination and one’s capacity for cinematic weirdness.

Don’t be afraid to give “Beau” a chance though because there are some meaty matters at play with a smattering of absurd hilarity.

'They all sound stupid': Joaquin Phoenix downplays headlines about his 'Beau Is Afraid' injuries

Phoenix’s anxiety-ridden title character lives in the worst part of town, where nude dudes run around with knives, corpses fester in the streets and brown recluse spiders are on the warpath. Beau is supposed to fly home to see his mom Mona (played at different ages by Patti LuPone and Zoe Lister-Jones) for the anniversary of his dad’s death, but he oversleeps, his keys are inexplicably stolen and he reluctantly makes the call that he's been delayed. Mom’s disappointed, and it isn’t the first time.

A continuing series of unfortunate events then befalls Beau, starting the next day with the news that his mother has been crushed to death by a falling chandelier. Emotional and desperate (and naked in the street after having a relaxing bath fouled up by an intruder), he’s hit by a truck and taken in by a suspiciously kind suburban couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan). From there, the movie plays out like a nightmarish Homeric odyssey, where our sad-sack Odysseus’ epic journey back to bury his mom includes a childhood crush (Parker Posey), a traveling theater troupe, a paint-drinking teen girl, a maniacal soldier, an animated fantasy detour and an all-time Mariah Carey needle drop.

'Hereditary': Ranking the 75 best horror movies of this century

Oh, and Beau is told he has a hereditary condition, like his father, that will kill him the moment he has an orgasm. So he's also got that going for him.

With flashbacks to a young Beau (Armen Nahapetian) and fuzzy old memories that slowly come into focus, Aster builds layers of surreality into “Beau Is Afraid,” enough to make you (and Beau) wonder if any of it’s real. Phoenix delivers an exceptional physical performance, with his face doing the job much of the time to convey Beau’s litany of fears and states of grief, horror and everything in between. And Aster has built an interesting supporting cast around him, including a stellar bit from LuPone. (She's a legend without an Oscar nomination. Is it too early to start manifesting one?)

'No longer part of that circus': Patti LuPone gives up Actors' Equity Card, signals end of Broadway career

Aster insightfully deconstructs the family unit (one of his “Hereditary” themes) and examines our relationships with parents. “Beau Is Afraid” also keeps its audience guessing and scratching their heads – one memorable scene in an attic is guaranteed to break brains and/or cause a laughing fit. It’s a more demanding narrative to navigate than the director’s previous efforts, and not all of it works with its sly subtlety. Yet there’s sensational artistry at work, with Aster peppering much of his storytelling in the background of scenes (photos on walls, informative signs, etc.) that a lot of folks might not even notice.

Brave souls might be tempted to a return visit. And whether you love or hate it – because this is not a movie for middling reactions – “Beau” acts as one heck of a reminder to text or call your mom.

'The best of us': Jake Gyllenhaal details what makes 'The Covenant' movie a different war film

Beau Is Afraid Review: Ari Aster’s Third Film Is Hilarious And Insane Organized Chaos

Beau is afraid cements ari aster as one of the most fascinating big screen storytellers working today..

Ari Aster ’s Midsommar is shocking, horrific and mesmerizing, but one underrated aspect of the fantastic 2019 film is its sense of humor. Amidst the escalating terror and nightmare imagery is a sly winking – a sense that Aster is grinning as his characters trip on shrooms under a midnight sun and is cackling as the protagonist’s terrible boyfriend is sewn into a bear corpse before being set on fire. Hereditary , the writer/director’s feature debut, doesn’t operate the same way, but Midsommar suggests a lurking twisted and wild comedic sensibility.

Release Date: April 14, 2023 Directed By: Ari Aster Written By: Ari Aster Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Zoe Lister-Jones, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Richard Kind, and Parker Posey Rating: R for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language Runtime: 179 minutes

Beau Is Afraid , Aster’s third and latest film, confirms it.

A wholly different cinematic experience than its predecessors, Beau Is Afraid is essentially an exercise in organized chaos. The story unfolds across three distinctly structured acts as the titular character ( Joaquin Phoenix ) endures a trouble-filled trip to see his mother (Patty LuPone) – a high concept plot… but it’s set in a world of unfettered madness and unyielding stress. Practically every moment can be described as a worst case scenario, and Beau, raised in a state of fear, is forced to do a headfirst dive into all of his anxieties in hopes of pleasing his overbearing mom.

It’s Beau’s intention to go home to be with his mother on the anniversary of his father’s death, but it’s a task he struggles with almost immediately due to the horrors of his living conditions: a decrepit inner-city apartment above a sex shop that has a constant flow of lunatics roaming out front, a deadly brown recluse spider on the loose and psychotic neighbors who hallucinate that he’s blasting music at all hours (and retaliate by blasting music of their own). Life is constant alarm, and he reasonably dreads the outside world, but his journey is able to eventually begin in earnest after he is attacked in his bathtub, goes running out into the street, is held at gunpoint by a cop, gets hit by a car and is stabbed by a homeless man several times.

Beau Is Afraid is destined to inspire extreme reactions – but keep an open mind.

In case I haven’t made it abundantly clear, Beau Is Afraid will probably go down as the most extravagantly weird film of the year – and as such, it’s also going to be regarded as one of the most polarizing. It’s a major auteur flex from Ari Aster, who surely cashed in every drop of studio good will from Hereditary and Midsommar to make it, and movie-goers who see what he’s doing and get on his wavelength are going to have a ball (and be able to weather the energy drop in the second act). On the other hand, those who don’t keep an open mind and are exclusively expecting something more akin to Aster’s first two features may be inspired to get all rage-y about it on Twitter and react with exaggerations like “WTF worst movie ever” – but this is me strongly recommending that you to not be that person.

Beau Is Afraid is quick to tell you exactly what kind of film it is. When you register its phenomenally odd flavor, it’s really best to just lean back in your theater chair and await the next dose of radical weirdness that is constantly waiting around the corner to abuse the eponymous protagonist and both shock and inspire hysterics in the audience. You won’t always be able to fully understand the reason why something is happening, either in the moment or looking back on the work in its totality, as the movie functions with its own crazy logic – but if you embrace it, you’ll find yourself marveling at it.

Joaquin Phoenix delivers another outstanding lead performance in Beau Is Afraid, and he is surrounded by excellence.

It’s certainly far from surprising that Joaquin Phoenix would excel playing an off-kilter character, but what makes his work in Beau Is Afraid particularly noteworthy are his subtle choices for a protagonist living in an extreme world. He certainly has his moments of panic where he screams, runs and charges through glass doors, but mostly Phoenix keeps Beau’s feelings of fear, guilt, and anxiety behind his eyes, and it has a brilliant grounding effect that only enhances all of the insanity that is going on around him.

Having the opposite effect is the tremendous supporting cast who each have their own way of feeding the film’s wild tone and plotting and all look like they are having a blast doing so. Playing the couple that strikes Beau with their car, Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan are spectacularly demented as Roger and Grace (a pair of mourning parents who seemingly aim to keep Beau at their home as a surrogate for their dead son) – and special mention goes to Kylie Rogers, who plays their daughter and behaves in quite interesting ways to express her dislike of Beau potentially being her new brother. Patti LuPone, Parker Posey and Richard Kind additionally deliver terrific performances… but it would be saying too much to describe specifics of their roles.

From vicious lunacy, to striking animation in the second act, to endgame revelations that make you rethink everything, Beau Is Afraid is madness that has to be witnessed to be fully grasped, and even after that you’re still going to need a lot of time to get your mind around all of it. It’s a remarkable work of tone and character that goes to some bewildering and mind-boggling places (let it be known that I’ve held back writing about a lot of ridiculous surprises in this review), and it not only demonstrates Ari Aster’s tremendous range, but cements him as one of the most fascinating big screen storytellers working today.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

Jenna Ortega's First Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Red Carpet Look Was The Perfect Mix Of Romantic And Goth I Didn't Know I Needed

James Cameron Clarifies Michelle Yeoh’s Avatar Role, And I’m A Little Bummed

After Bradley Cooper Talked Vince Vaughn's Legendary Improv Skills, Bad Monkey's Cast Got Real About What It's Like Working With The 'Constant Comedic Genius'

Beau Is Afraid Review

19 May 2023

Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster ’s increasingly wild filmography seems to all hinge on one simple, unifying theme: fucked-up families. In his head-lopping horror Hereditary , Toni Collette bluntly informs her son that she “tried to have a miscarriage”. In the sunny folk horror Midsommar , Florence Pugh ’s family is dead from a murder-suicide within the first five minutes. In Beau Is Afraid , the dysfunctional relationship between paranoiac middle-aged loser Beau ( Joaquin Phoenix , obviously exceptional) and his distant, controlling, enigmatic mother (a gift of a role shared by Patti Lupone and Zoe Lister-Jones) forms the backbone of the deceptively straightforward story. In the most basic terms, the plot is essentially “A man pops to his mum’s house”.

The journey between those two points, however, plays like ‘Murphy’s Law: The Movie’: anything that can go wrong for Beau probably will, depicted with neck-snapping gallows humour and some astonishingly well-staged set-pieces, Aster’s camera moving at a frantic lick to reflect his protagonist’s unquiet mind. Not since Darren Aronofsky ’s mother! — a film which, incidentally, also trades in metaphorical-mythical mommy issues — has anxiety been depicted so viscerally, Freudian inadequacy taken to staggering extremes. In this permanently heightened reality, Beau’s irrational anxieties are in fact entirely rational, all his darkest fears being realised seemingly at once.

In the film’s first half in particular, there is a morbid pleasure in just watching the chaos unfold. Beau lives in a godawful apartment building covered in graffiti (choice tag: “Kill Children”) above a porno cinema named Erectus Ejectus. He must sprint to his front door in order to avoid the vagrants, ne’er-do-wells, and the naked man with a penchant for stabbing. The opening section is like The Warriors crossed with a Hieronymus Bosch painting, a descent into a bizarre, bewildering Ballardian hell.

By the time the final act rolls around, reality seems an entirely relative concept.

In the film’s latter half — after having befriended a seemingly well-meaning couple, played by Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane , who cheerfully attach an electronic ankle tag to Beau — our hapless hero heads into the woods, and the film seems to get a little lost in it, too; in a story with an already tenuous grasp on reality, a parallel story opens up, an apparent fantasy told with theatrical and animation trappings.

By the time the final act rolls around — with its revelations of an elaborate Oedipal conspiracy theory, some gestures towards the metaphysical, and perhaps the most monstrous dick joke in cinema history — reality seems an entirely relative concept. What began as a comically exaggerated paranoid farce ends as an audacious slice of surreal, Charlie Kaufman -esque purgatorial art, likely to draw admirers as much as a sense of alienation.

After making a certain amount of narrative sense to begin with, Aster doesn’t really take you along the rest of the way. But that seems to be the point, if there is one: a nightmare is not supposed to end satisfyingly or comfortably. It should only end bewilderingly and abruptly, leaving you blinking and agape in the morning light, wondering what in God’s name just happened.

Movies | 31 08 2023

Empire – June 2023 – Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 cover crop

Movies | 12 04 2023

Movies | 11 04 2023

Movies | 10 04 2023

Movies | 06 04 2023

Movies | 10 01 2023

Movies | 13 12 2022

Screen Rant

Beau is afraid review: an overindulgent mommy issues odyssey for the ages.

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

"I Have To Believe In The Process": Cancelled Looney Tunes Movie Gets Honest Response From Star John Cena

How to train your dragon live-action movie cast vs. animated characters: comparison, avatar: fire & ash title explained by director james cameron.

Ari Aster has become the poster child for A24 horror with Hereditary and Midsommar , but in his latest feature, Beau is Afraid , the director is given carte blanch to explore his thematic concerns. Some of those are familiar — mothers, attics, decapitations, the lineage of madness — while others are unique to this Odyssean journey that sees Joaquin Phoenix's title character journey to the depths of his tortured psyche. Beau is Afraid , for better and worse, is an overindulgent, disturbing, and hysterically terrifying mommy-issues movie that twists the classic hero's journey into an otherworldly contortion.

Beau Wasserman lives in what one's mother imagines the inner city to be like. He faces constant danger on his crowded block, including violent vagrants, decomposing corpses, and a serial stabber named Birthday Boy Stab Man. His apartment is just as bad — a brown recluse spider threatens death at any moment and his neighbor accosts him for making noise despite his near-silent lifestyle. When Beau prepares to head home to visit his mother, Mona Wasserman (Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti LuPone), he ends up on a nightmarish journey that takes him to the dark corners of suburbia all the way to the cavernous depths of a mother's love.

armen-nahapetian-zoey-lister-jones-beau-is-afraid

Aster's growing oeuvre of motifs is ever-present in Beau is Afraid , establishing a visual language that speaks to his previous works while letting him run loose in a world of his own creation. Beau lives in a world like ours, except everyone seems to have lost their minds. This is the genius of Beau is Afraid 's horror — it emanates a deeply unsettling aura even while nothing all that terrifying is happening. From teenage girlhood to being nursed back to health and sleeping with a long-lost crush, Aster finds ways to make the mundane abjectly terrifying or, at the very least, completely unnerving.

Beau, on the other hand, may be one of the most obvious audience stand-ins of all time. Following him for three hours proves exhausting simply because of his lack of interiority. He is there to react and while part of the point of Aster's film is that, in a world like Beau's, that's all there is to do, it does read as thinly sketched. Fortunately, Phoenix is here to imbue every gasp-inducing sight with the fear and awe it deserves. Once the film reaches its apex, that lack of conviction from Beau is partly the point, even if it doesn't entirely work as retroactive characterization.

Similarly, Ryan and Lane's suburban couple remains a stand-in for ideas Aster is playing with. Grace and Roger don't feel quite like fully fleshed-out characters, but they do serve as an interesting foil (and an intricate part of the film's labyrinth) when all is said and done. What's hard to justify is a middle act that, save for a small break amidst the tension, does little in the way of moving things forward. What should be a small breather between increasingly bonkers set pieces becomes a tangent that goes on for a bit too long. It thematically connects, even if it stunts the momentum that Aster has been building until that point.

Steadily, though, Beau is Afraid builds to several big reveals that more or less land the way they're supposed to. One third act twist elicits less of a gasp and more of an, " Oh, of course ," because of the very fact that Aster has allowed audiences to sit in this world for so long. It just makes sense. Another twist doesn't make sense, but this critic found it working simply because of the sheer absurdity. It's bound to be the most talked about part of Beau is Afraid (and possibly of any film this year).

Beau is Afraid will certainly be divisive; what three-hour movie isn't? That it was designed to be this way won't ease some people's complicated feelings, but letting Aster take full control is part of the ride. There is so much detail to take in that it becomes overwhelming at times, a mirror of the way that Beau sees the world around him. An overabundance of choice leads to listlessness, which is how it feels to watch the film at times. Fortunately, Aster saves himself with a showstopping third act that has the potential to be remembered as one of the most audacious of the last few decades.

That it all harkens back to an underlying sense of guilt — the push and pull of mother/son relationships, the complicated feeling of experiencing something one's been expressly forbidden from feeling, the desire to push away the person who has cared for them the most — makes it all the more stunning. For Beau, and for Aster it seems, it all comes back to Mom, and, in what may be the movie's smartest choice, Beau is Afraid saves LuPone for last, leaving audiences with an indelible feeling. What that feeling is will likely run the gamut — expect frustration, exasperation, awe, or something else altogether unquantifiable. Still, Beau is Afraid will make one feel alongside its title character in a way few films do, and it's a torturous and glorious ride.

Beau is Afraid is now playing in select theaters and will expand on Friday, April 21. The film is 179 minutes long and rated R for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language.

Beau Is Afraid

Beau Is Afraid (formerly known as Disappointment Blvd.) is a new supernatural horror/comedy film from Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar.) Joaquin Phoenix stars as the titular Beau in his older years, as a young man with a strained relationship with his mother. After her death, his return home is marked by strange supernatural occurrences.

3.5 star movies

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

For Parents
For Educators
Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

Movie Reviews
Best Movie Lists
Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best TV Lists
Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
Common Sense Selections for TV
Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

Book Reviews
Best Book Lists
Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

Game Reviews
Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

Podcast Reviews
Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

App Reviews
Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

YouTube Channel Reviews
YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

How to Prepare Your Kids for School After a Summer of Screen Time

Family Tech Planners
Digital Skills
All Articles
Latino Culture
Black Voices
Asian Stories
Native Narratives
LGBTQ+ Pride
Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

Beau is afraid.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 1 Review
Kids Say 4 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Brilliant but bizarre, unsettling surreal, mature drama.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 17+?

Rotting corpse in street. Dead bodies. Headless body. Characters killed. Gory wo

Full-frontal male and female nudity in various scenes. Fairly graphic sex scene,

Several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "c--k," "c--t," "t-ts," "a--hole," "p---y," "bit

Characters, including a teen, take prescription drugs. Pills are given to solve

Any Positive Content?

It's hard to nail down exactly what this movie is about, but it winds up on a pe

Roger and Grace are initially good samaritans, but their motives become increasi

Aside from Black actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who plays Beau's therapist, a

Violence & Scariness

Rotting corpse in street. Dead bodies. Headless body. Characters killed. Gory wounds. Piece of broken glass embedded in head; blood pours out when removed. Sequence of guns and shooting. Character stabbed several times. One character gouges another's eyes out. Person threatened with gun. Character violently hit by motor vehicle. Character violently attacked. Man's testicles on fire. Murderer on loose who stabs people. Gunshot noises and screaming. Deadly spider bites. Person hits head on hard objects. Character crashes through glass window. A man chokes a woman. Woman falls into glass cabinet. Man on rampage, with hypodermic needles sticking out of his back. Teen girl dies by suicide from drinking paint. Vulgar graffiti (man peeing and drinking own urine, man ejaculating). Character held captive. Giant penis-shaped monster. Person repeatedly stabs monster, gets killed by monster's claws. Outboard motor explodes. Drowning.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Full-frontal male and female nudity in various scenes. Fairly graphic sex scene, with one character on top of another; one character climaxes, and the other keeps going, moaning, until she climaxes, too. Implied oral sex (one partner shown with head between another's legs). Teens kiss. Teen girl seen in bra. Strong sex-related dialogue. Adult sex shop seen.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," "s--t," "c--k," "c--t," "t-ts," "a--hole," "p---y," "bitch," "cum," "whore," "slut," "f--got," "pissed," "oh my God," "stupid," "idiot."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters, including a teen, take prescription drugs. Pills are given to solve every problem. Teen smokes weed. Main character smokes weed. A character confesses to "drowning her sorrows" and adds that her "breath is pure wine." Cigarette smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

It's hard to nail down exactly what this movie is about, but it winds up on a pessimistic note. You could interpret it as saying that if fear is instilled in you when you're young, you may never be able to find redemption. But, of course, viewers can choose to live life the opposite of the way Beau does, not letting baseless fears get the better of them.

Positive Role Models

Roger and Grace are initially good samaritans, but their motives become increasingly cloudy (their solution for every problem is more pills, etc.). Beau goes on an odyssey to face his fears, which is admirable, but what he finds isn't exactly uplifting. It's as if he spent his entire life being afraid and searching for meaning, but because it all stems from his relationship with his mother -- and therefore was built into his system at a young age -- it's too late for him to find redemption.

Diverse Representations

Aside from Black actor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who plays Beau's therapist, and an actor who appears in the theater sequence (Patrick Kwok-Choon, of Chinese descent), most of the main cast is White. And the primary focus is on a White man, although the cast is pretty well split between women and men. But while the women seem strong and have agency, they're all secondary characters supporting the male lead.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Beau Is Afraid is an epic, experimental, surreal odyssey about a man ( Joaquin Phoenix ) facing his fears. Set in a violent hellscape, the movie includes death, dead bodies, stabbing, guns and shooting, threats, gory wounds, blood, eye-gouging, attacks, characters being hit with blunt objects, suicide by paint-drinking, choking, vulgar graffiti, a penis-shaped monster, and more. There's also a graphic sex scene, male and female full-frontal nudity, kissing, and other sex-related images and dialogue. Strong language includes "f--k," "s--t," "c--k," "c--t," "t-ts," "a--hole," "p---y," "bitch," and more. Characters (including a teen) take prescription pills, sometimes to excess, and characters smoke both pot and cigarettes. Three hours long, the movie is brilliantly made and has some very dark humor, but it can be highly unsettling and will certainly leave many viewers not knowing quite what to think. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (1)
Kids say (4)

Based on 1 parent review

What's the Story?

In BEAU IS AFRAID, Beau ( Joaquin Phoenix ) lives in an urban hellscape and sees a therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) for his crippling anxiety. He's given a new prescription for pills that MUST be taken with water. On the way to visit his mother, his keys and luggage are stolen. Then, when he takes a pill and the water isn't working, he must temporarily leave to rush across the street for a bottle of water, and his apartment is invaded. Then he learns that his mother has died, and he must get to her funeral. Unfortunately, Beau is hit by a truck and winds up in the care of kindly surgeon Roger ( Nathan Lane ) and his wife, Grace ( Amy Ryan ). Escaping a deranged neighbor, Beau embarks on an odyssey that turns more and more surreal as viewers learn about his fearful secrets.

Is It Any Good?

Nothing in director Ari Aster 's previous movies can prepare viewers for what awaits them in this strange, unsettling, surreal, experimental epic with a deep-dive performance by Joaquin Phoenix . Beau Is Afraid begins with a baby being born, from the baby's point of view. Then we meet adult Beau, a wreck of a man who's the perpetual victim of bad luck and bad tempers. His city is filled with angry, shouting, violent people, his apartment building is covered in graffiti, and his elevator shoots electric sparks from below. (Plus, there's a deadly spider loose.) And this is the most normal part of the movie, and the funniest (although the humor is pitch dark). As it goes further and further, the movie explores the roots of Beau's fears, most or all of them stemming from his relationship with his mother. But there's no simple armchair psychology here. Aster does the work and takes the time to go to dark places. Every frame of Beau Is Afraid is intricately designed to contribute to the whole, and it's a brilliant work. The movie's major drawback is that it's not easy to actually recommend to anybody. For many, it will fall somewhere between baffling and unwatchable. It's definitely a challenge.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Beau Is Afraid . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How are drugs depicted? Are prescription pills shown to be helpful? Addictive? Numbing? How so?

How has fear affected Beau's life? What has he missed out on? What are some ways to find courage and avoid a life like Beau's?

What does "surreal" mean? How is it different from watching a "realistic" movie?

What's your take on the movie's ending? What do you think Beau's journey ultimately means?

Movie Details

In theaters : April 14, 2023
On DVD or streaming : July 11, 2023
Cast : Joaquin Phoenix , Amy Ryan , Nathan Lane
Director : Ari Aster
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Gay actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Drama
Run time : 179 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language
Last updated : June 3, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Want personalized picks for your kids' age and interests?

Holy Motors

Cult classics, offbeat animated movies.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

‘Beau Is Afraid’ explained: A disturbingly in-depth analysis of Ari Aster’s guilt trip to hell

A gray-haired, schlubby man in a collared shirt

Copy Link URL Copied!

If you’ve just watched Ari Aster’s new horror-comedy “Beau Is Afraid,” you probably have a few questions. Or maybe a lot of questions. Like, what was that?

As with his previous films, 2018’s “Hereditary” and 2019’s “Midsommar,” Aster packs a lot into his surreal, alternately funny and nightmarish three-hour head trip through the mind of a middle-aged man named Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), whose attempt to return home to visit his mother turns into a hellish odyssey of anxiety, guilt and shame. But he would rather not do the unpacking for you. “I made something for an audience and I hope that it is exciting and fun and makes people feel things,” Aster said in a recent interview with the Associated Press. “I just cannot speak to what those things are, and shouldn’t.”

Aster’s full intentions with “Beau Is Afraid” are known only to him — and maybe his mother and therapist. But we have each seen the film twice in an effort to crack its code, and we have some thoughts. (Needless to say, major spoilers ahead.)

Joaquin Phoenix in the movie "Beau Is Afraid."

Review: ‘Beau Is Afraid’ is quite an odyssey, but not necessarily an oughta-see

Joaquin Phoenix plays a man dreading a visit to see his mother in this latest and most wildly unhinged feature from writer-director Ari Aster (“Hereditary,” “Midsommar”).

April 14, 2023

Toward a Unified Theory of ‘Beau’

Matt Brennan: As I watched “Beau Is Afraid” for the second time this week, armed with a notebook and our mission to “explain” Aster’s (guilt) trip to hell, I began to formulate something I couldn’t on the first watch, mesmerized/bored as I was with our protagonist’s meandering homeward journey: a unified theory of “Beau.” Well, two of them.

Theory 1: Mona Wasserman is behind it all (and not just faking her own death)

Beau’s mother (Patti LuPone), as chief executive and namesake of the ubiquitous MW Industries, certainly has the resources — and the marrow-deep bitterness — to pull off such a feat. MW, which appears to be a cross between Pfizer (pharmaceuticals) and Proctor & Gamble (personal care and hygiene), appears on billboards, posters, appliances, frozen food boxes and beyond. This is one powerful corporation, and one powerful woman. What Mona wants, Mona gets.

Indeed, she so convincingly fakes her own death that Beau finds published obituaries online, in addition to an “MW Digital”-watermarked news clip reporting on her fate. In just days, she has paid (or forced) a beloved employee to die on her behalf; installed a ledger stone in the wall and a memorial to the grisly chandelier accident that took her life; and arranged an opulent funeral for herself.

Two items, both from Beau’s brief survey of the MW Industries mini-museum Mona keeps in her home, would seem to support this theory. Most persuasive is the collage of MW employees that adds up to Mona’s face, which contains not only Elaine (Parker Posey) but also the tattooed bum who chases Beau into his building in the film’s first minutes and Roger (Nathan Lane), who takes Beau in after his unfortunate car accident/stabbing. (I have no doubt that, had I been able to get AMC to pause the film for me, I’d have seen others from the cast.) In other words, Mona has marshaled the manpower of MW Industries to create a sort of “Synecdoche, New York” or “Truman Show” situation for Beau, in which she casts him as the central figure in a brutal odyssey to test his loyalty.

This seems more plausible, practically speaking, when you consider that Beau, far from carving out an independent life in the city without support from his mother, lives in a recently opened MW Industries “rehabilitation neighborhood” depicted on a poster just behind Beau as he examines the collage. If she owns the set and employs the players, how hard would it be to script the drama? (Stray thought: Maybe Aster doesn’t have mommy issues, but studio exec issues.)

Theory 2: It’s all in Beau’s head

Being terminally literal, I was all in on Theory 1 until the kangaroo court that concludes the film, which up until that point hews mainly to real-world referents even as it turns their volume up to 15. I suppose it is just as plausible that Mona would have built an underground stadium in a rock outcropping in the middle of the ocean as it is that she would have directed the entire staff of a major multinational conglomerate to beat the s— out of her son. But the “proof” of Beau’s guilt presented at trial, though it assumes the visual style of surveillance footage, seems much more likely to have come out of Beau’s self-flagellation: a memory of hiding from his frantic mother, for instance, or allowing his friends to steal her underwear. These are exactly the kind of highly specific, relatively insignificant mental images from childhood that might cling to an anxious, guilt-ridden adult. Trust me, I’m Catholic.

Which is all to say that, as I cast my eye back over the film from perspective of the trial, I can just as easily see Beau imagining that his mother would have directed the entire staff of a major multinational conglomerate to beat the s— out of him, in ways both obvious and subliminal, as I can imagine her actually doing it.

Plus, there’s the penis monster. That can’t be real real, right? Right?

Did I forget to take my Zypnotycril with eight ounces of water this morning, Josh, or am I on to something? Which of my theories seems more likely to you, or do you have one of your own? And are there any particular parts of the film you want to dig into further?

A mother and sun at a patio table on a cruise ship.

Chronicle of an Ego-Death Foretold

Josh Rottenberg: Even after watching it twice, there are a few things in this movie — actually, more than a few — that I am still puzzling over. (What’s up with the guy who falls on Beau from the ceiling when he’s in the bath, for one?) But I actually think your two unified theories can be combined into a single Even-More-Unified Theory:

Theory 3: We are trapped in Beau’s head, and he in turn is trapped in his mother’s

Aster has suggested in interviews that his central aim with the film was to place the audience inside Beau’s mind and his feelings, so I don’t think we’re meant to take anything he sees and experiences too literally — and that includes the penis monster, which we can get to later.

As I see it, Beau’s journey is a psychological odyssey made up of fears, dreams, fantasies and repressed memories, none of which adhere to the usual rules of logic. Asking if Beau’s mother was really the unseen puppet master in her son’s life is sort of like asking if Gregor Samsa really turned into a giant bug in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” (Kafka is clearly a touchstone for Aster.) For Beau, the sense of being continually monitored, manipulated and controlled by his smothering mother, of having his life circumscribed by her worries, expectations and demands, carries a metaphorical and emotional truth, if not a literal one.

One thing I caught on my second viewing is that the ending of the movie is actually foreshadowed in a fleeting moment near the beginning: After Beau leaves his therapist’s office, as he’s walking through a less menacing part of the city than his own hellscape of a neighborhood, we briefly see a boy playing with a toy boat in a public fountain. As Beau passes by, the boy’s mother angrily grabs her son’s arm and tugs him away, causing the boat to capsize just like the one Beau will find himself on in the final scene. Beau’s fate is foretold in that one moment, and from that point on he has no hope of escaping it.

Three people hold hands while saying grace around a dinner table

Brennan: I admit, after reading your much more concise theory, that I have probably taken “Beau Is Afraid” not only too literally but also too seriously. (I can only imagine what the other theater patrons thought of me scribbling furiously in my notebook during the movie on Monday night. What a freak!) And your note about the foreshadowing contained in the film’s first minutes is a useful segue into other indications we have of where Beau is headed and why we shouldn’t see his journey as a linear one.

At one point, for instance, he literally fast-forwards to the end of his story, captured on “Channel 78” in Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger’s living room. We see Beau’s emergence from the woods after Jeeves’ (Denis Ménochet) attack on the theater troupe; Beau sitting on the ledge above his mother’s coffin; even, as Grace passes by the television, the empty coliseum of the closing credits, after Beau’s own boat has capsized. Each time Beau is knocked unconscious (which is a lot), we catch further glimpses of this unconscious logic, in which Beau appears to exist in multiple places and times simultaneously. After he’s hit by Grace and Roger’s truck, there’s a flash of the black, star-pricked sky he sees when he’s out on the ocean alone. After he smacks his head on the tree limb in the forest, we see his mother closing the attic door. After he’s zapped by Roger’s “health monitor,” we return to what Beau himself describes as a recurring “dream” about resisting his mother’s attempts to get him in the bathtub — while Beau also watches the scene from the bathtub.

At this point I feel as though I am just listing facts about the film hoping they’ll add up to something more than, “Wow, this guy’s mother did a worse number on him than Norma Bates.” Then again, if there is a point to “Beau Is Afraid,” I suppose it’s that parent-child relationships, particularly mother-son relationships, are so elemental, so Oedipal, that there can be no rational understanding thereof. (I mean, nothing more tellingly foreshadows Beau’s apparent drowning, with his mother’s distant cries for accompaniment, than his emergence into the world to Mona’s terrified screams.) The line from the film that has stuck with me most, after two viewings, is the one that makes this point most explicit: When Mona, closing the attic door on adult Beau, hisses after him, “Don’t you get it, you stupid idiot? That wasn’t a dream. That was a memory.”

Now that we’re in the attic and I’ve brought up Oedipus, we might as well get it over with: Let’s talk about the penis monster. (I had to watch the scene through my fingers both times. It’s beyond disgusting.) Put on your psychologist cap, Dr. Rottenberg, and tell me what you think the monster, and the film’s other psychosexual terrors, might mean. For example, what do you make of the (possibly apocryphal) tale that Beau’s father, and entire male line before him, died at the moment of their first ejaculation? And what does it mean that Beau survives it, but kills Elaine in the process?

Testicle and Taboo

Rottenberg: I’ll admit that, even after two go-rounds with this movie, I’m still not sure quite what to make of the penis monster, who I have come to think of as Jabba the Nuts. But, like the naked guy running around Beau’s neighborhood, I’ll take a stab.

Mona tells Beau that the hideous phallic creature in the attic is his father, but we clearly can’t trust everything she says. And that’s before we even begin to contemplate how exactly a 7-foot-tall penis with insect legs would have impregnated Mona to begin with. (Let’s not go there.)

My theory is that Beau’s real dad is the mystery man who approaches him after the play in the woods and tells him that he knew his father and that he is still alive. Beau, who has just experienced a fantasy father-son reunion within the dream world of the play, certainly believes he could be, calling out “Dad, run!” just before the man is blown up by Jeeves. And the man does bear some resemblance to the blurry photo of Beau’s father we catch a quick glimpse of earlier in his apartment.

In her desire to control every aspect of her child’s life, Mona has filled Beau with deep-seated fears about his own sexuality, stunting his development. The story she has told him about his father’s death serves to keep him an infantilized, dependent man-child. (There’s a reason this man who is in his late 40s dresses like an 8-year-old circa 1983 and has the social skills to match, particularly around the opposite sex.)

As Mona tells Beau when he’s young, “Only women know women. Men are blind.” And to ensure Beau remains blind and distanced from his real father — who may have helped him chart his own independent path toward manhood — she has concocted the fictitious story of the familial curse.

So who, or what, is Jabba the Nuts — and who is the bedraggled, starving man we see chained up with him? We’re pretty clearly in the realm of Freudian symbolism here (attic = unconscious), so I think the monster represents Beau’s repressed sexuality, a raging, insatiable id that, like his own distended testicles, has grown to cartoonish proportions. The man chained up with it, who is purportedly Beau’s lost brother, represents his more courageous and self-possessed self, which his mother has also metaphorically locked away.

When Beau has sex with Elaine — in his mother’s bed, no less! — and doesn’t die, he experiences a feeling of genuine liberation and, for an all-too-brief moment, becomes his own man. But, in a cruel twist, Elaine — who it turns out worked for Mona (and, like Martha, dies for her) — keels over instead, suggesting Beau can never elude the real curse his mother has placed on him: Like the Mariah Carey song says, he will always be her baby.

As Mona tells Beau moments after Elaine’s death, “You’re in my house, and my house is your house, which it always will be.” Again, in a movie where locks, keys, chains and surveillance technology are recurring motifs, there is ultimately no escape.

By the way, a couple more Easter (or Aster) eggs I caught on a second viewing: The first time we see Beau in the film (aside from as a newborn), he is in his therapist’s office, looking at a fish tank. At the end of the film, after he chokes his mother, she falls headfirst into an empty fish tank, bringing things full circle.

Also, as we see on the therapist’s prescription pad, Beau lives in the fictional city of Corrina, CR. There’s a Bob Dylan song called “Corrina, Corrina” on his 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” which includes the pleading refrain, “I been worryin’ about you, baby / Baby, please come home” — a sentiment straight out of Mona’s anxious, needy heart.

Fear and Loathing in Asterville

Brennan: Your mention of Dylan brings us to terrain I’m better equipped to handle than a case of epididymitis run amok: The film’s phantasmagoric dogpile of cinematic, cultural and political points of reference. As your reading of Beau’s relationship with Mona suggests, “Beau Is Afraid” hews rather closely to the subgenre of horror movies (see: “Psycho,” “Carrie,” “Dead Alive,” “Black Swan,” Aster’s own “Hereditary”) about domineering mothers and traumatized children, even if its tone is more satirical than chilling. Where “Beau” distinguishes itself, for me, is in the provocations of its situations and settings that have nothing to do with the Wassermanns per se.

For starters, there’s the city where Beau lives, an exaggerated cross between the seedy, teeming New York of “Taxi Driver” and the crime-infested urban cores imagined on Fox News, populated primarily by assailants, corpses and beggars. Graffiti covers every inch of the foyer of Beau’s building; vagrants shuffle along like the undead in a zombie film; trash piles up on street corners and abandoned cars along curbs.

At first, I felt uncomfortable about Beau’s paranoia. It struck me as infelicitous at best that Aster’s “hero” should be “subjected” to the very sort of inner-city crime fantasy that so often misrepresents urban life in American pop culture. The more I chew on it, though, the more I see Aster’s vision as a critique of that paranoia, and of attempts to address social inequality through policing and “private-sector solutions.” (Possibly the most darkly funny line in a film full of gallows humor is the police officer, gun cocked, shouting at an unarmed Beau not to “make” him shoot.) Indeed, beyond the corner that MW Industries has attempted to “rehabilitate,” the city seems ... almost normal? The pedestrian mall where Beau purchases that white statuette of Madonna and child is certainly thriving!

Even the dangers of Beau’s immediate vicinity come in and out of focus as his own mental state evolves. When he turns in for bed the night before his flight to Wasserton — before his anxiety gets the better of him — the ambient noise is the light murmur of any city just before midnight. When Mona chastises him for his delay, however, the street outside erupts in midafternoon gunfire, sirens and barking dogs. To believe that the city is a miserable death trap for all its inhabitants, Aster suggests, is to think like Beau (a coward with no sense of self) or, worse, his mother (a rapacious capitalist merely envisioning violent cities from her palatial enclave).

“Beau Is Afraid” flips the idea on its head, and pushes it to the extreme, during Beau’s recuperation at Grace and Roger’s house — the section of the film that grew on me most from first to second viewing. The notion of the suburbs as the American dream’s dark underbelly isn’t exactly new, but Aster’s heart-poundingly, head-trippingly, paint-drinkingly intense iteration of the trope is a thrilling one. Amy Ryan popping pills to stanch a mother’s grief? Nathan Lane talking like an outdated sitcom dad to win Beau’s trust? Their screaming, foul-mouthed daughter, Toni (Kylie Rogers)? Their deceased son’s catatonic ex-soldier-slash-illing machine friend? Douglas Sirk, eat your heart out!

I read this section of the film, in which the physical security Beau (briefly) enjoys comes with the blossoming of a much deeper existential dread, as the one where Aster comes closest to identifying societal causes for Beau’s fears, and indeed Mona’s. After all, it’s in the suburbs of “Beau Is Afraid” — a place of self-medication and post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide and surveillance, war and its aftermath — that the world of the film edges up to our own. Who wouldn’t read that list of symptoms and diagnose a society in distress?

Whether the crisis of modernity has made Beaus and Monas of us all is something you can respond to or not, Josh. This movie has worn me and my powers of analysis down to the nub. Before I raise the white flag, though, I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk a little more directly about my favorite passage in the movie: the play in the woods. It is the best of “Beau” in microcosm, bawdily funny, visually inventive, with a vein of genuine feeling running through it. Its resonances with Beau’s experiences in the rest of the film are omnipresent but rarely exact. And, perhaps most important of all, its Matryoshka doll of stories at least nod to a place, a time, an alternate universe where Beau’s fate could have been different. Where he could have been unafraid.

A man walks through an animated village.

Rottenberg: I agree that the play in the woods is in some ways the key to understanding the whole movie and its emotional high point. As he enters the theater troupe’s camp, Beau passes a sign that reads “Know Thyself.” And in watching — or, rather, imagining — the alternate life he could have lived if only he wasn’t chained to his mother, he experiences a genuine moment of insight and catharsis. In the play’s climax, as he hugs the three sons he will never have, Beau — who came into the world as an infant to the sound of Mona screaming, “Why isn’t he crying?” — finally unburdens himself and sheds real tears.

In the gentle pregnant woman who takes him in, Beau — having been cast out as “a demon” by his surrogate mother, Grace — sees the idealized, selfless maternal figure he has been seeking all his life. Overwhelmed with gratitude for her kindness, he gives her the mother-and-child figurine he has been carrying, which he intended to give to Mona — the ultimate betrayal, for which he will be punished in the film’s final moments.

There are still a whole lot of questions we could tackle here, Matt: Why does Beau live in a run-down apartment when his mother is a wealthy titan of industry? What are the “three things” in the joint Toni makes Beau smoke? How does Jeeves survive to kill the penis monster after we see him blast himself through the chest with a machine gun? But like you, I’m feeling analytically depleted.

And if any reader feels like we went on too long or our theories missed the mark, as Beau says countless times in the movie, I’m sorry.

Brennan: I will happily stand trial over any interpretive crimes I’ve committed here. But only if I get to have Richard Kind as my lawyer.

Osgood Perkins makes exquisite horror films. He’s got it in his blood

July 12, 2024

Los Angeles, CA - June 25: MAXXXINE director Ti West poses for a portrait in front of the famous "Psycho" house on the Universal Lot on Tuesday, June 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

‘MaXXXine’ is Ti West’s Hollywood horror story. The real-life locations are even scarier

July 2, 2024

Bill Pullman who stars in "Murdaugh Murders" in Los Angeles on Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (Shayan Asgharnia / For The Times)

Bill Pullman gets into the twisted mind of a killer. He could use a few laughs now

May 27, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Matt Brennan is a Los Angeles Times’ deputy editor for entertainment and arts. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsroom’s television editor. He previously served as TV editor at Paste Magazine, and his writing has also appeared in Indiewire, Slate, Deadspin and numerous other publications.

Josh Rottenberg covers the film business for the Los Angeles Times. He was part of the team that was named a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist in breaking news for covering the tragic shooting on the set of the film “Rust.” He co-wrote the 2021 Times investigation into the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. that led NBC to pull the Golden Globe Awards off the air while the organization underwent major reforms. A graduate of Harvard University, he has also written about the entertainment industry for the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company and other publications.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Kevin Spacey arrives outside Crown Court in Southwark, London, Monday, July 24, 2023 for sexual assault trial

Kevin Spacey refuses to leave his Baltimore mansion after foreclosure sale

Aug. 16, 2024

Nine Inch Nails vocalist Trent Reznor performs during a concert at Key Arena in Seattle, Saturday July 26, 2008. Seattle is the first stop on the band's Lights in the Sky summer tour in the U.S. (AP Photo/Stephen Brashear)

‘The Crow’ original soundtrack sketched a musical alternative in time

Adam Epstein attends CRY-BABY Opening Night on Broadway at Marquis Theatre on April 24, 2008 in New York City.

Entertainment & Arts

Adam Epstein, Tony-winning producer, dies at 49. Brother says he packed in 100 years of living

Aug. 15, 2024

Gena Rowland with sunglasses on her head and a pinkish red scar around her neck posing with her left hand on her cheek

Gena Rowlands, veteran actor who brought husband John Cassavetes’ films to life, dies at 94

Aug. 14, 2024

‘Beau Is Afraid’ review: the most bonkers movie of the year

From surrealist dream sequences to man-sized penis monsters, Ari Aster's new horror is totally off-the-wall

A fter one of the first screenings for Beau Is Afraid , someone stood up and started ranting that he’d just seen the worst film ever made. “I better not hear one single person fucking clap!” he yelled, genuinely angry. As more screenings rolled out, the reactions got more extreme. It was a surrealist horror without any respect for the audience. It was director Ari Aster going through therapy in real-time. An IMAX arthouse experiment. A disaster. A masterpiece.

Read more: Horror maestro Ari Aster: “I make each film as though I won’t make another”

Overreactions aside, Beau Is Afraid is probably all of the above. Following up Hereditary and Midsommar with his most divisive film yet, Aster has made something utterly unlike anything else you’ve ever likely to see – a weird, scary, funny, awkward, upsetting and oddly life-affirming act of self-obsession. He calls it a “Jewish Lord Of The Rings ”, but that’s definitely not it either.

Fast becoming the darling of indie house A24 after just two films, Aster’s latest is what happens when a studio gives a promising new director the money and scope to do whatever the hell they want. And what Ari Aster wants to do is talk about his mum.

Laid out in four or five distinct acts over three deliberately uncomfortable hours, the film finds Joaquin Phoenix as Beau Wassermann – a man weighed down with anxiety and guilt and mother-issues – trying to get from his apartment to her house. As the plot goes, that’s sort of it, but the detours along the way drag us through an epic journey that comes reeling out of Aster’s own subconscious like an expensive, beautifully ugly fever dream.

Phoenix is extraordinary as Beau – pouring his whole self into someone else’s psychosis for a jittery, child-like performance that feels like it might break apart at any moment. Patti LuPone also deserves all the Supporting Actor awards next year for her turn as Beau’s monstrous mum – just one horror among so many in a film that crackles with dread and anxiety from the very start.

And it’s funny, too. Made like a comedy, even if it runs like a horror, Beau Is Afraid almost challenges you to laugh even when you feel like crying. Hung so heavily with Freudian symbolism that it features a scene where a man beats a giant penis monster to death, it’s impossible not to see it all as Aster trying to turn his own counselling sessions into something as terrifying, twitchy and accidentally hilarious as only he sees them.

Not that any of that is a bad thing. Standing out in a summer of big-budget movies made by committee, few other films of this size have ever been as uncompromising. Beau Is Afraid is a nightmare in more ways than one. Nothing is real. Everything is frightening – even the funny stuff. Try and remember the story the next day and you’ll only pick out the images and sounds that burrowed into your head.

Far too easy to hate, Beau Is Afraid often doesn’t even feel like it wants to be loved. But stick with it and you’ll find a film so overstuffed with ambition that makes all the others look like they aren’t trying hard enough.

Director: Ari Aster
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan
Release date: May 19 (in UK cinemas)
Related Topics

Sports Add-on

Español Add-on

Entertainment Add-on

Select Your Plan

Streaming library with tons of tv episodes and movies, up to 6 user profiles, no ads in streaming library, download and watch, available add-ons.

Cast & crew

A mild-mannered introvert man is born with a rare genetic disorder that makes him impervious to physical pain. When his new beau is taken hostage in a bank robbery, his affliction becomes hi... Read all A mild-mannered introvert man is born with a rare genetic disorder that makes him impervious to physical pain. When his new beau is taken hostage in a bank robbery, his affliction becomes his superpower. A mild-mannered introvert man is born with a rare genetic disorder that makes him impervious to physical pain. When his new beau is taken hostage in a bank robbery, his affliction becomes his superpower.

Robert Olsen
Lars Jacobson
Amber Midthunder
Jacob Batalon

Top cast 12

Nathan Caine

News reporter

Prison Guard

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia Ray Nicholson is Oscar-winning Actor Jack Nicholson's son.
March 14, 2025 (United States)
United States
Cape Town, South Africa
Safehouse Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

More to explore

This 'Lost' Star Is Returning to TV in New Thriller 'The Assassin'

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

The Big Picture

Matthew Fox returns to TV with new drama series, The Assassin , based on Victor the Assassin Series by Tom Wood.
Fox stars as ruthless assassin Victor, hunted by enemies after a mission gone wrong, launching a revenge mission.
Production companies Gaumont and Entertainment 360 back the project, potential hit due to extensive source material.

Lost alum Matthew Fox has put pen to paper on his next project, marking his return to TV following last year's C*A*U*G*H*T , which was reserved for Australian audiences. The new drama series titled The Assassin is based on the popular book series, Victor the Assassin Series by acclaimed British novelist Tom Wood . According to Deadline , the project is currently in production at Max with Fox also serving as an executive producer.

The series hails from writer-producer John Glenn, whose expertise has contributed to the success of the hit military drama, SEAL Team . Per the official synopsis, The Assassin is centered around a ruthless assassin named Victor (Fox). After a mission goes wrong, Fox realizes he has been betrayed by an anonymous client. Chaos ensues as Fox is "hunted across the globe by multiple enemies, including relentless CIA operatives and a contract killer equally as deadly." Having to constantly look over his shoulders for survival, Victor goes full-blown John Wick , launching a revenge mission that starts with uncovering the identity of the client who set him up. However, Victor might yet become his own undoing as his humanity that has long remained buried begins to resurface within him, posing "the greatest threat to his survival."

Production companies behind the project include Gaumont and Entertainment 360, the latter of which is behind Netflix's smash hit mini-series, Ripley (starring Andrew Scott ) which is being considered for 13 Emmy Awards, as well as The Fall Guy (starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt ). Should The Assassin succeed at winning over Max subscribers, then the series could potentially enjoy a healthy lifespan given its extensive source material that currently includes 11 novels and 2 short stories. Glenn will serve as showrunner and executive producer alongside author Wood and Fox.

What Has Matthew Fox Done Since Lost?

Matthew Fox's star shone the brightest during his successful run as Jack Shepherd on Lost . Following the show's end, Fox seemed poised to continue his streak of successful projects, but unfortunately, that was not the case as his career stalled for various reasons. His post- Lost movies Alex Cross and Emperor were both box office failures and while he appeared in the commercially successful World War Z , his part in the blockbuster zombie movie was only a small one.

Fox eventually took some time away from acting to focus on his personal life and other interests. However, he couldn't ignore his first love for long as he made his return in 2022 with a role in the Peacock limited series, Last Light . Fox's emotionally accurate performance proved he'd not lost his mojo, but sadly, it wasn't enough to make up for the show's glaring flaws. His return to acting is yet to receive the success it deserves, but fingers crossed that Max's The Assassin will finally serve as the project that will see him back to winning ways.

The Assassin is yet without a release date but stay tuned for updates.

Matthew Fox

IMAGES

Beau Is Afraid movie review & film summary (2023)
Beau is Afraid (2023)
Film review: ‘Overstuffed’ plot eclipses pitch-perfect performances in
Beau Is Afraid
Beau Is Afraid Trailer Pushes Ari Aster Into the Adventure Genre
BEAU IS AFRAID

COMMENTS

Beau Is Afraid movie review & film summary (2023)
It's Aster's funniest movie yet. Beau is a quintessential Aster protagonist, barely making it in a hellish landscape that's lovingly detailed by Aster and production designer Fiona Crombie. The downtown neighborhood where Beau lives is defined by violence and madness: People fight in the middle of the street, they threaten to jump off ...
Beau Is Afraid
Rated 3.5/5 Stars • Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 06/01/23 Full Review Josh I cannot say that Beau is Afraid is objectively the best movie I've ever watched, although it is certainly among the top 10 ...
'Beau Is Afraid' Review: A Visit With Mommy Dearest
Ari Aster's "Beau Is Afraid" is a supersized, fitfully amusing, self-important tale of fear and loathing. As the title announces, its protagonist, Beau Wassermann — a terminal sad-sack ...
Beau Is Afraid First Reviews: Ambitious, Uncomfortable, and Just as
Joaquin Phoenix stars in Beau Is Afraid, the highly anticipated third feature from writer-director Ari Aster, and it's an ambitious effort for both actor and filmmaker that may or may not satisfy their fans.The mind-bending three-hour psychological drama is a lot different from Aster's previous movies, Hereditary and Midsommar, and while its early reviews are more mixed, most critics agree ...
Beau Is Afraid
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2024. Alas, at least the first hour of Beau is Afraid is a complete riot, a smorgasbord of black comedy and modern neuroses with a dash of slapstick ...
'Beau Is Afraid' review: Joaquin Phoenix stars in Ari Aster's passion
Beau Wassermann, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a middle-aged sad sack who, true to the title, is afraid of a lot of things. He's afraid of getting sick and dying. He's afraid of the side effects ...
'Beau Is Afraid' Review: Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster's Dark Odyssey
April 10, 2023 7:00pm. Joaquin Phoenix in 'Beau Is Afraid' Courtesy of A24. Playing Beau Wassermann, the character who gives Ari Aster 's third feature its name, Joaquin Phoenix goes balls to ...
Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Beau Is Afraid: Directed by Ari Aster. With Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane. Following the sudden death of his mother, a mild-mannered but anxiety-ridden man confronts his darkest fears as he embarks on an epic, Kafkaesque odyssey back home.
Beau Is Afraid
Jul 3, 2023. Beau is Afraid is not a primary emotion. It's not a primary anything. Trying to sum up this film's content in a binary, black or white, way or description is virtually impossible. So much of this film, it's humor, it's dramatic moments, it's more emotional moments, simply can't be classified as "basic".
Beau Is Afraid is an exercise in laughing to keep from screaming
Director Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid amps up the comedic absurdity to tell a haunting story about coping with anxiety. By Charles Pulliam-Moore, a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture ...
'Beau Is Afraid' Review: Ari Aster's Surreal ...
Beau Is Afraid is constantly battling between two extremes: ... Movie Reviews. Beau is Afraid (2023) Joaquin Phoenix. Your changes have been saved. Email is sent. Email has already been sent.
'Beau is Afraid' Review: Ari Aster's Bizarre Odyssey is the Best Movie
A24. Beau is Afraid feels like a warped product of the world's most anxious mind, in the best way possible. This is Aster's most audacious and deranged movie yet — a movie so weird it makes ...
Beau Is Afraid Review: Ari Aster Tests the Limits
Aster is out to test the limits. Beau Is Afraid is Aster's third film as a writer-director; it's both more ambitious and more tiresome than his earlier pictures, the 2018 grief-horror ...
Beau Is Afraid, explained: What the hell is going on?
Act 1: The Departure. At core, Beau Is Afraid is the tale of a very lost soul named Beau Wasserman, the only son of his mother Mona Wasserman (played at different ages by Zoe Lister-Jones and ...
'Beau Is Afraid' review: Ari Aster delivers a brilliant, 3-hour-long
Beau Is Afraid is structured less like a film and more like a novel, with each chapter chucking Beau into a new setting. Production designer Fiona Crombie masterfully distinguishes each world from ...
'Beau Is Afraid' review: Joaquin Phoenix goes on a bizarre hero quest
Not much is clear about his new dark comedy "Beau Is Afraid" (★★★ out of four; rated R; now showing in New York and Los Angeles, in theaters nationwide Friday), seemingly by design, but ...
Beau Is Afraid Review: Ari Aster's Third Film Is Hilarious And Insane
A wholly different cinematic experience than its predecessors, Beau Is Afraid is essentially an exercise in organized chaos. The story unfolds across three distinctly structured acts as the ...
Beau Is Afraid
Beau Is Afraid is a 2023 American surrealist tragicomedy horror film ... in the United States on April 14, 2023, before a wide release the following week. The film received generally positive reviews from critics but was a box-office ... Filmmaker John Waters selected Beau is Afraid as the best movie of 2023. Writing for Vulture he said, ...
Beau Is Afraid
18 May 2023. Original Title: Beau Is Afraid. Ari Aster 's increasingly wild filmography seems to all hinge on one simple, unifying theme: fucked-up families. In his head-lopping horror ...
Beau Is Afraid Review: An Overindulgent Mommy Issues Odyssey For The Ages
Beau is Afraid, for better and worse, is an overindulgent, disturbing, and hysterically terrifying mommy-issues movie that twists the classic hero's journey into an otherworldly contortion. Beau Wasserman lives in what one's mother imagines the inner city to be like. He faces constant danger on his crowded block, including violent vagrants ...
Beau Is Afraid Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 1 ): Kids say ( 4 ): Nothing in director Ari Aster 's previous movies can prepare viewers for what awaits them in this strange, unsettling, surreal, experimental epic with a deep-dive performance by Joaquin Phoenix. Beau Is Afraid begins with a baby being born, from the baby's point of view.
'Beau Is Afraid' explained: A disturbingly in-depth analysis
As your reading of Beau's relationship with Mona suggests, "Beau Is Afraid" hews rather closely to the subgenre of horror movies (see: "Psycho," "Carrie," "Dead Alive," "Black ...
'Beau Is Afraid' review: the most bonkers movie of the year
19th May 2023. After one of the first screenings for Beau Is Afraid, someone stood up and started ranting that he'd just seen the worst film ever made. "I better not hear one single person ...
Watch Beau Is Afraid Streaming Online
Start your free trial to watch Beau Is Afraid and other popular TV shows and movies including new releases, classics, Hulu Originals, and more. It's all on Hulu. ... Enjoy all your favorite shows, movies, sports, and more using the Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ apps (or sites, for those on a browser). Download each app separately to access each ...
AfrAId (2024)
AfrAId: Directed by Chris Weitz. With Keith Carradine, David Dastmalchian, Katherine Waterston, Riki Lindhome. The Curtis' family is selected to test a new home device: a digital assistant called AIA. AIA learns the family's behaviors and begins to anticipate their needs. And she can make sure nothing - and no one - gets in her family's way.
'Immaculate' Review
The nunsploitation horror Immaculate, starring Sydney Sweeney of Euphoria, is a film that isn't afraid to get vicious. Read on for our SXSW review.
Novocaine (2025)
Novocaine: Directed by Dan Berk, Robert Olsen. With Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Jacob Batalon, Betty Gabriel. A mild-mannered introvert man is born with a rare genetic disorder that makes him impervious to physical pain. When his new beau is taken hostage in a bank robbery, his affliction becomes his superpower.
This 'Lost' Star Is Returning to TV in New Thriller 'The Assassin'
Matthew Fox returns to TV with new drama series, The Assassin, based on Victor the Assassin Series by Tom Wood. Fox stars as ruthless assassin Victor, hunted by enemies after a mission gone wrong ...

Movie Reviews

Now playing

Hollywood Black

Peyton Robinson

Hundreds of Beavers

It Ends with Us

Monica Castillo

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

Cinematographer

Latest blog posts

A Woman Without Peers: Gena Rowlands (1930-2024)

The Needle Drop Sessions: Pump Up the Volume & Untamed Heart

Locarno Film Festival 2024: Youth (Hard Times), Transamazonia, Moon

Thumbnails 8/15/24: Six Must-Reads You Don’t Want To Miss This Week

‘Beau Is Afraid’ Review: A Visit With Mommy Dearest

Beau Is Afraid First Reviews: Ambitious, Uncomfortable, and Just as Funny as it is Terrifying

How does it compare to Ari Aster’s other movies?

Is it a horror movie?

Is it funny?

What can we really expect from the viewing experience?

What else can we compare it to?

How is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance?

Is it difficult to understand?

Will it require multiple viewings?

How is the length?

Should we just give it a shot?

Related News

Movie & TV News

Top Headlines

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Beau Is Afraid Reviews

Movie Reviews

Horror-comedy 'Beau Is Afraid' is a passion project gone astray

'Midsommar' Shines: A Solstice Nightmare Unfolds In Broad Daylight

The 86th Annual Academy Awards

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

David Rooney

Related Stories

Full credits

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Director Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid amps up the comedic absurdity to tell a haunting story about coping with anxiety.

Share this story

What happened to all the temporary air conditioning units at the Olympic Village?

More from The best entertainment of 2023

Beau is Afraid is Ari Aster’s Anxious Odyssey — And His Most Audacious Movie Yet

Beau Is Afraid arrives in theaters on April 21.

Beau Is Afraid Is a Bleak Black Comedy That’s More Tedious Than Hilarious

More Must-Reads from TIME

What the hell is going on in Beau Is Afraid?

Act 1: The Departure

Act 2: Initiation

A Respite, Gone Wrong

Act III: Return

Most Popular

Today, Explained

This is the title for the native ad

More in Culture

'Beau Is Afraid' review: Ari Aster delivers a brilliant, 3-hour-long panic attack

What is Beau Is Afraid about?

Joaquin Phoenix leads a preposterously incredible cast.

Beau Is Afraid is a cinematic dare.

'Beau Is Afraid' review: Joaquin Phoenix's bonkers hero quest is the mother of all guilt trips

Beau Is Afraid Review: Ari Aster’s Third Film Is Hilarious And Insane Organized Chaos

Beau Is Afraid is destined to inspire extreme reactions – but keep an open mind.

Joaquin Phoenix delivers another outstanding lead performance in Beau Is Afraid, and he is surrounded by excellence.

Most Popular

Beau Is Afraid Review

Related Articles

Screen Rant

"I Have To Believe In The Process": Cancelled Looney Tunes Movie Gets Honest Response From Star John Cena

Beau Is Afraid

Or browse by category:

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books