Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Beau is Afraid’ on Paramount+, an Epic Psychosexual Nightmare Like No Other

Joaquin Phoenix and filmmaker Ari Aster team up to assault our every sensibility in Beau is Afraid (now streaming on Paramount+, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), a psychodramatic horror-comedy that’ll be the most challenging three hours you’ll gut out all year – if, as the man once said, ya got the yarbles to endure it. Those who DID have the yarbles found themselves found themselves FOR or AGAINST Aster’s challenging mommy-issues movie, which finds the writer-director pushing the audacity even further than he did with Midsommar and Hereditary, lightning-bolt films that are staples of the recent “elevated horror” movement. The one-line description of Beau dubs it “Kafkaesque,” but frankly, this A24 movie makes Kafka look like Elmo’s Potty Time. 

BEAU IS AFRAID: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It begins just like it does for all of us: In the womb. It’s like an art student’s experimental film in there – muffled sound, occasional fragments of light, then all of a sudden, you’re screaming. This is Beau’s birth, and in the chaos we can hear the voice of his mother, less exhilarated, more distraught at having just performed the “miracle” of birth. Now Beau (Phoenix) is an adult, sitting down with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Beau confesses that he drank mouthwash, but the doc says that’s not a big deal. Then they talk about his mother, who calls right then and there, MOM it says on Beau’s phone, but he doesn’t answer. We learn that Beau never met his father. Tomorrow, he’ll get on a plane to visit his mother, and the doc drops an allegory on our boy: If you drank from a well that made you sick, would you go back for another drink? The point seems lost on Beau. The therapy doesn’t seem to be working for him.

Beau leaves the doctor’s office and enters Chaos World. The streets are a place of open murder and nudity and drugs and screaming and laughing at people threatening suicide and fighting and f—ing. Beau dashes to the front door of his apartment building, barely avoiding being attacked by a lunatic. The elevator fizzles and sparks as the door opens to his floor. There’s a sign on his door warning everyone who cares to read it that incredibly poisonous brown recluse spiders are loose around here. He tries to sleep, but one of his neighbors keeps sliding notes under his door complaining about the loud music he’s clearly not playing. The next morning, there’s a whole thing where he needs water to wash down his medication and his apartment key ends up being stolen and no water comes out of the faucets and he needs to leave to get water and while he’s across the street fishing coins out of his pocket for water the crazy street people invade the building because he propped the door open because he lost his key and now they’re in his apartment cooking and dancing and f—ing and smearing shit on the walls and so he sleeps on the fire escape. He misses his flight. And his mom ain’t happy.

The next day he gets his apartment back and then calls his mother and someone else answers. It’s the UPS guy. Something terrible has happened. Beau is struck to his core. Then he’s struck by a truck and he wakes up attached to an IV in a teenage girl’s bedroom. Thus begins Beau’s righteously f—ed-up sojourn to reunite with his mother, which involves: encounters with a sweetheart couple (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane) and their far-beyond-angsty daughter (Kylie Rogers) and a PTSD-stricken war vet (Denis Menochet), a theater group camped in the middle of the woods performing a production that’s shockingly parallel to Beau’s life, a flashback to a formative moment in his youth, a flash-forward to a future that maybe could be but probably won’t be, a reunion with an old friend (Parker Posey) and finally, a heart-to-heart with his mom (Patti LuPone) that’s way overdue and wouldn’t surprise us if it involved the actual violent removal of their hearts. It’s all rather disturbing, he said, with the mightiest of understatement.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Beau is Afraid is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York merged with Darren Aronofsky’s mother! – a frightening concept, I know, but accurate.

Performance Worth Watching: Is anyone out there more willing to challenge himself and take risks in front of the camera than Phoenix? His performance shows shades of his riveting work in The Master and You Were Never Really Here, but ultimately has more in common with the things-just-happen-to-this-guy plot/character from Inherent Vice. 

Sex and Skin: Frontal male nudity, a depiction of testicles that’s best described as troublesome, female toplessness, a sex scene that’s set to Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” that’s so upsetting that laughter leapt from my body as if it had been imprisoned in there for decades and finally fought its way out.

Our Take: Beau is Afraid is violent, explicit, terrifying, hilarious, indulgent, audacious, grotesque, insane, daring, belabored, fascinating, ugly, vicious, unapologetic, tasteless and – this is the big one – unforgettable. It will wear you down and wear you out. Aster stages it as an epic three-hour nightmare-logic journey that doesn’t make sense in the sense that being inside someone else’s head never does, but on the other hand, the psychology of Beau’s woes ring with remarkable clarity. He’s emotionally and sexually stunted and it’s all Mom’s fault, but he’s also a sweet, prevailingly harmless man who likely would rather catch a mosquito and release it outside than kill it, although to be more accurate, he’s such a passive participant in life, he’d probably just let it bite him and deal with the discomfort rather than put forth too much effort. 

Phoenix plays Beau as an empty vessel who doesn’t know if he wants to be filled or not, and even if he could theoretically be filled, it might leak out all the holes anyway. There’s not much to him. He’s dragged along this journey by circumstance and the voiceless tug of long-submerged psychopathological artifacts. It seems the only person who can fill him is his mother, and I know how that sounds – awful – but that’s nothing compared to where Aster leads us, places that are simultaneously metaphorical and pointedly graphic. His direction is clear, detailed and controlled, spoiled by a reported $35 million budget, and the return on investment here is art, uncompromised (see also: The Northman, the ambitious epic fantasy by Aster’s creative peer, Robert Eggers). This twisted, neo-Homeric odyssey is maddening but oddly coherent in its intent: Telling the tragedy of a man whose umbilical cord has been repurposed as a leash.

Considering the psychological chasm that is Beau, the primary character here is Aster’s vision. He’s confrontational and, if not quite nasty, then outlandish. He crams the corner of every frame with political, interpersonal and psychosexual provocations that are often as funny as they are disconcerting; the line between horror and comedy has rarely been so thin. The flashback sequences aren’t as potent as they could be, but at least they’re more subtle, a reprieve from the disconcertingly lucid madness that engulfs Beau, and dominates the film. I won’t hazard a guess as to what drove Aster to make Beau is Afraid – that’s between him and his psychoanalyst, I guess – but what I do see is a series of brazen choices that few, if any, other directors would make. He’s no Zulawski or Lynch or Haneke yet, but he’s damn close to being a mighty new name in nightmares.

Our Call: Beau is Afraid is an amazing film and I’ll never watch it again. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.