The first word we see written down in "Beau Is Afraid," Ari Aster's raging Oedipal phantasmagoria of a movie, is "Guilt," with a capital "G." It's not the last word to pop up in a story full of angry scribblings, earnest love notes, slick corporate logos, detailed sex-shop menus, foulmouthed graffiti and signposts both encouraging (follow every rainbow!) and cautionary (beware the brown recluse spider!). But Aster, a virtuoso of emotional annihilation, likes to pick at the scabs of his characters' tortured consciences, as his fans will remember from "Hereditary" (2018), with its brutal drama of maternal ambivalence, and "Midsommar" (2019), in which a romance persists, fatally, out of obligation rather than love. Even by those standards, the guilt he lays bare in "Beau Is Afraid" is next-level; it carries the weight of a thesis and the rage of an indictment.
The man on trial is Beau Wassermann, a gray-haired, sad-eyed, stoop-shouldered, thick-gutted, droopy-testicled Jewish loner played by a wholly committed Joaquin Phoenix. Beau, true to the title, is afraid of a lot of things: illnesses, drugs, death, life, violent men, beautiful women, orgasms. One of the movie's most unnerving qualities is the way it seems to both mock and confirm his fears, as if to suggest he's both utterly paranoid and not paranoid at all.
And what Beau fears most of all is the possibility — nay, the inevitability — that his most shameful thoughts will be exposed for all to see, including his true feelings about the mother whose scornful judgment and smothering affection have been his scariest lifelong constants.
