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.
Beau is the latest in a parade of seat-stretching cinematic endeavors. Bloated running times, the conventional wisdom goes, are everywhere, and it’s easy enough to back up that assertion with numbers from across a variety of genres. The action sequel John Wick: Chapter 4 is 169 minutes long. Last year’s biggest worldwide hit, Avatar: The Way of Water, is 192 minutes; it was in theaters simultaneously with the Oscar hopeful Babylon, not far behind at 189 minutes. Indian sensation RRR, a surprise hit in the US, comes in at 187 minutes (though that one has a built-in intermission). Hell, Scream VI is the longest-ever installment in that series, albeit by just barely crossing the two-hour mark. Martin Scorsese made some headlines recently when a series of breathless reports kept us posted on the possible length of his next film, Killers of the Flower Moon. It turns out the movie will not be four hours long. It will, however, be three hours and 26 minutes long, nearly matching the supersized length of his previous project, The Irishman.
Are these expanded running times film-maker flexes, status symbols at a time when franchises get more attention than directors or stars? Or are the extra minutes just keeping pace with said franchises, which are under pressure to deliver eye-catching spectacles to justify their theatrical releases? Maybe it’s both of those things, locked in a battle of escalating hubris. Whatever the reasons, expanded running times are too often treated like a dangerous plague. This expansiveness, newfound or not, is actually fine. Let movies be long.
Obviously, running time is as individualized as editing, acting or writing, all of which come together to create that decidedly non-magic number. There’s no particular time-based metric that determines a movie’s quality. But honestly, if you were to try correlating length with quality, movies that crest the 165-minute mark would be winning, at least recently. The fourth John Wick has room for several of the most stunning action sequences in recent memory to play out with extra grace notes and laugh-out-loud moments. The Avatar sequel has a similar sense of spectacle, and the extra time to really sink into its characters and world. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon may be long, but it sure isn’t slow, and uses its runtime to ricochet through an impressionistic fake history of cinema’s first few decades.
Aster’s Beau Is Afraid is the most trying of this recent crop. It’s the kind of nightmarish extended journey into a film-maker’s psyche that would seem more appropriate after we’ve spent nine or 10 movies getting to feel like we know the guy, rather than a handful of movies into a promising career. (Amazingly, Aster once thought it might serve as his feature debut.) Yet even this uneven and potentially self-indulgent movie takes advantage of its long sit. As the title character (Joaquin Phoenix) makes his way through passages of dark comedy, childhood memory and warped reality, it builds a whole world out the contents of Beau’s head, turning some potentially claustrophobic locations into psychological landscapes. The nagging panic that seems to take over viewers asked to sit still for longer than two hours is part of the movie’s strange, wandering momentum. All together, it’s an immersive experience – especially in Imax.
“Immersive experience” is also a buzzword in the pop-art world, describing stand-alone exhibits that aim for something more interactive, Instagrammable, tactile experiences than a typical museum. Movies can’t really offer those qualities, not without fundamentally altering their DNA. But they can, to a certain extent, bend time to their will, in ways that will always be more dramatic than letting five hours of binge time fly by on the couch as you smash that “next episode” button. Of course, all of these long movies will ultimately be seen by plenty of people on their couches. But first they play in movie theaters, which is where an epic runtime becomes part of that dark, weird immersion – and where I went back for seconds of Wick, Avatar, Babylon and The Irishman, among other epic-length undertakings. There’s plenty of 160-minute tedium out there, but a good long movie offers a certain fullness of escape (and then lets you escape that experience back into the real world, whether you want to or not).
Searching for examples of how this immersion might have changed over the decades, I looked back to the box office charts for 20 years ago, did some quick calculations, and found that yes, the average running time for the top ten movies at the US box office in mid-April 2003 was about 100 minutes, shorter than the top ten’s average for the same time in 2023 by nearly 15 minutes (although the top ten for the same period in 2013 averaged 9 minutes longer than 2023, indicating how these fluctuations can be relatively arbitrary). 2003 was helped along by a number of sub-90-minute movies: The concise real-time thriller Phone Booth, yes, but also the forgotten Jamie Kennedy vehicle Malibu’s Most Wanted and the poorly reviewed romcom Chasing Papi. April 2003 also boasted beloved, under-two-hour classics such as, ah, What a Girl Wants and Bringing Down the House.
Which brings to mind many of my most tedious recent movie-watching experiences – almost none of which were movies that got past 105 minutes. Cocaine Bear supposedly takes up just 95 minutes of your time, but I could have sworn I was in the screening room, trying and failing to have fun with its strained, self-conscious shock value, for at least two days. Renfield isn’t especially brisk at 93 minutes; rather, it feels as if it was hastily chopped up in a desperate attempt to pointlessly shave five or six minutes from its clock. And surely we’re all familiar with the pain of settling in for a Netflix comfort-watch like the romcom Your Place or Mine, and finding that it somehow feels relentlessly bloated or padded without ever crossing the two-hour Rubicon.
This is all to say that of course there are virtues to snappy pacing, and of course there are instances where an 85-minute-and-change runtime is a great asset (two creature-feature thrillers, Crawl and The Shallows, come to mind). But Babylon, Avatar and Beau Is Afraid were never candidates for a tight 85. These are movies that want to do more – and won’t work for everybody, especially an intentionally off-putting head-trip like Beau. Don’t blame the minutes that pass by, the time that the film-makers supposedly steal from innocent moviegoers. Any runtime can be wasted; any given three hours can turn into a glorious reverie, an endless slog, or forgettable blip. There’s no need for constraints on the popular artistic medium that most closely resembles time travel.
