"I'm very neurotic and I'm obsessed with worst-case scenarios," Ari Aster explained at a Q&A for Hereditary, his feted – and truly frightening – debut feature, when asked about his exhaustive pre-production process. "That's how I end up writing stuff like this."
No kidding. The writer-director's analyst surely has their work cut out for them with his latest film: Beau Is Afraid is a cruelly absurd saga of sexual repression in which a slump-shouldered Joaquin Phoenix, as the emotionally stunted titular character, bears the brunt of Aster's spectacular catastrophising – realised here on a budget substantially roomier than that of either Hereditary or his 2019 follow-up, Midsommar.
Hence the erratically mushrooming story-world, with Beau traversing state lines, social strata, and even artistic media (an animated landscape takes over from live action in one extended sequence). These realms are rich in details both hilarious and disquieting: Note the "O'Loha" microwave dinner Beau sups on (it's "the best of Hawaii and Ireland"); the punny names of the sex shops on his street (Asstral Projection; Erectus Ejectus); the many commemorative touches in the home of a deceased soldier's parents, including a custom jigsaw puzzle of his military portrait.
You certainly can't miss the Mariah Carey needle-drop that does for Always Be My Baby something like what David Lynch did for Roy Orbison's In Dreams in Blue Velvet.
This is Aster's Synecdoche, New York, with Charlie Kaufman's melancholic self-loathing subbed out for a mother lode of mommy issues – and, like Kaufman's film, Beau Is Afraid is likely to strike some as a profound statement about the purgatorial nature of existence and others as a janky Rube Goldberg machine meant to purge the artist's fears of death and women.
Can't it be both?
You probably think you know where you land on this kind of thing; but if you're less than certain and you've got the necessary three-hour window in your day, then finding out easily warrants the price of admission. Hell, that's almost covered just by hearing the way Nathan Lane, as one of numerous supporting cast members firing on all cylinders here, says "My dude."
Aster gives his protagonist a nominally simple goal: Summoned by his mother – played by musical theatre legend Patti LuPone in the film's present day and by Zoe Lister-Jones in flashback – Beau is trying to get back to his childhood home.
From the moment he emerges from his apartment, however – situated in a positively Boschian nook of some fictive city (beware such colourful locals as the nude, shiv-wielding "Birthday Boy Stab Man") – he is thrown off-course by a Mr. Bean-worthy series of unhappy accidents. Despite mounting physical injuries, the guilt-fuelled son persists. He blunders through episodes in bourgeois suburbia, a magical forest, a dystopian stadium – as strung together like an abject Jewish version of The Pilgrim's Progress, with each new location holding the promise of some fresh humiliation.
Beau weathers it all without outburst or even much surprise. Each bizarre twist of fate's knife is met with a resignation that belies decades of being browbeaten and heavily medicated (he's just been put on what his therapist reassuringly calls "a very cool new drug") – but also, as becomes apparent, an upbringing of rather unique privilege and experience. This middle-aged milquetoast may still be a virgin, but he seems to have seen it all. At this point, he's – yes – afraid, but he's no longer fazed.
Phoenix, for his part, exhibits characteristic dedication to what must be one of the more physically demanding characters he's taken on, from wrestling nude in the tub with a home invader to gamely hurling himself through glass windows. Through it all, he manages to sustain some hint of sparkle in his eyes, suggestive of just enough sentience to keep his character from playing as a purely beneficent blank; a human version of Robert Bresson's Balthazar.
While Beau, in his perverse commitment to his mother's wishes, would seem to be another Oedipus Rex redux, he's closer to being a particularly sorry illustration of the theory that saw Otto Rank dropped from Freud's inner circle: In The Trauma of Birth (published in the original German in 1924), Rank posited that the castration complex did not, in fact, originate with the father – envisioned by Freud as de facto cockblock to the progeny's desire for incestuous intimacy with the mother – but rather in the very act of expulsion from the womb.
For Rank, neurosis was catalysed by birth itself – a thesis that would seem to underpin Aster's choice to begin Beau's story in vitro, right at the moment of transition from snug uterine darkness to the white light of the hospital and the muffled shrieks of his mother, quick to berate the medical team.
"Don't you EVER raise your voice at me! I am your MOTHER!" Toni Collette bellowed in one of Hereditary's most startling scenes. As Beau's mama Mona – an imperious redhead; picture a brassier Isabelle Huppert – LuPone engenders roughly the same degree of terror in her character's son with only a pointed silence.
Aster first made waves with his 2011 short The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, which offered an offbeat take on incest; that same year, he also made the short from which Beau Is Afraid would be developed. To date, his body of work suggests a deep and abiding commitment to illustrating Tolstoy's proposition that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Well, the second half of it, at least – I very much doubt he believes in happy families.
Beau Is Afraid is in cinemas now.
