Beau Is Afraid (2023)

	Directed by: Ari Aster	COUNTRY USA GENRE Drama NORWEGIAN TITLE Beau Is Afraid RUNNING TIME 179 minutes
	Produced by: Lars Knudsen Ari Aster
	Written by: Ari Aster

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Beau Wasserman	Joaquin Phoenix	½
Mona Wasserman	Patti LuPone	½
Grace	Amy Ryan	½
Roger	Nathan Lane	½
Toni	Kylie Rogers
Jeeves	Denis Ménochet	-
Elaine Bray	Parker Posey	-
The therapist	Stephen McKinley Henderson
Dr. Cohen	Richard Kind	-
Penelope	Hayley Squires	-
Strange Man	Julian Richings	-
Young Beau	Armen Nahapetian	-
Young Mona	Zoe Lister-Jones	-
Young Elaine	Julia Antonelli	-

Review

Making a truly idiosyncratic motion picture is almost impossible in a day and age where the audience is hyper-experienced, even saturated with stories and impressions. Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid still comes close in its first half, which is a narrative vortex about a timid, anxiety-stricken man (Joaquin Phoenix) and how he experiences the world and the people in it as dangerous, unforgiving, and hopeless to navigate. Like many films of this length (three hours) and level of artistic ambition, Beau Is Afraid has several shifts in mood and tone, and Aster's vision starts to lag around the halfway point with the introduction of a painfully vapid parable of Aesopian proportions, told through Beau's encounter with a travelling troupe of actors. And it continues to lag when Beau soon after arrives at his mother's house for the definitive cinematic therapy session – a drawn-out Oedipal visual and thematic rambling, where Aster's desire for idiosyncrasy completely implodes, and he instead creates an indigestible, pointless pulp of 'something borrowed, nothing new', meaning well-worn horror and absurdist tropes patched together with a peculiar self-indulgence.