It might be tempting to call Ari Aster’s new movie Beau Is Afraid a therapy session. It clearly addresses the writer-director’s parental anxieties, allowing him to vent and visualize a series of dreams-turned-nightmares related to guilt, repression and inherited trauma. (It is an A24 sort-of horror movie, after all.) But ultimately, describing Beau as therapy would be inaccurate, or at least incomplete: therapy sessions are rarely this long.
Including its end credits (which technically run over the lingering final scene of the film), Aster’s movie lasts for two hours and 59 minutes, a runtime that seems like the result of a contractual obligation, or possibly a bet. Someone must have told Aster his movie couldn’t go over three hours. For better or worse, Beau Is Afraid feels like the type of movie that, lacking that kind of specific limitation, could easily last forever.
