Having given us two classic scary movies with Hereditary and Midsommar, film-maker Ari Aster now unfortunately beckons us down the rabbit hole for a giant and epically pointless odyssey of hipster non-horror. Running at over three hours, Beau Is Afraid is a colossal recovered memory of mock Oedipal agony which is scary, boring and sad in approximate proportions of 1 to 4 to 2. 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.
Joaquin Phoenix is on really uninteresting form, playing to his weaknesses as an actor as he gives a narcissistic performance of pain, sporting a permanently zonked expression of anxiety and torpid self-pity at the misery that surrounds him. He plays Beau, a middle-aged man now living in squalor and stricken with depression, regularly seeing a therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) for anxiety and taking meds. These tend to undermine the surreal grimness of his urban surroundings; is he just hallucinating? The pure oddness of this alt-reality urban dystopia, though very striking in its way, slightly brings into question how seriously we are supposed to take it all in the first place.
