There’s a comfort to be found in the savage neuroses of Beau Is Afraid – if you think it’s hell to live inside of your own head, imagine what it’s like to live in Ari Aster’s. Aster’s film takes the so-traumatic-it’s-funny sequences of his previous work – Toni Collette frothing at the mouth in Hereditary, or Midsommar’s bad boyfriend going up in flames – and spins them into a three-hour comedy of bad vibes and ritual humiliation. It’s as memorable, audacious, and indulgent as you’d hope from A24’s most expensive film to date – and from a release that, according to a viral tweet last month, reportedly left one American cinemagoer so enraged that he stood up during the end credits and bellowed, “I better not hear a single person f***ing clap”.
Aster has enthusiastically assured us that there’s nothing autobiographical about Beau Is Afraid. Thank god, since it’s hard to read the film as anything but a drawn-out, highly paranoid spiral. It begins with its hero’s literal expulsion from the birth canal, wailing and bewildered, and ends with the Kafkaesque persecution of his guilty soul. In short, it’s life with catastrophic thinking at the wheel.
