Beau Is Afraid Is Your Worst Nightmare, and It’s Wonderful

The writer-director Ari Aster has set himself quite the challenge with his new film, Beau Is Afraid. The scale is ambitious, the running time lengthy (about three hours), and the plot difficult to summarize, but maybe the toughest sell is the personality of the main character, Beau Wassermann (played by Joaquin Phoenix). He is a paragon of passivity, a man whose worries follow him wherever he goes and make even simple tasks preternaturally impossible to execute. He is a cartoonish coward who mumbles and yelps every line of dialogue—not the kind of person who usually leads a picaresque adventure.

That dissonance is the point in Beau Is Afraid, which follows Beau’s dizzy journey back to his domineering mother, Mona (Patti LuPone). Although the comedy-thriller focuses on one man’s psychosexual dysfunction, it’s told with Dickensian sweep; everything about the title character is inflated to heroic proportions, including his abnormally large, floppy testicles. The film shares some of the unsettling horror of Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, but I’d call Beau Is Afraid a more straightforward comedy—as long as the idea of Looney Tunes crossed with Portnoy’s Complaint sounds funny to you.

[Read: What kind of movie Ari Aster wanted Midsommar to be]

I invoke Looney Tunes partly because of the antic energy of Beau’s first act, which is set in an unnamed city plagued with violence and chaos. When he ventures outside his crumbling apartment building, Beau has to dash across the street, dodging and weaving among out-of-control vehicles and aggressive passersby. When he tries to buy a bottle of water at his local bodega, the owner yells that he’ll call the cops if Beau doesn’t provide the exact change quickly enough. Aster has taken a situation that resembles normal life and doused it in thick anxiety; Beau essentially lives inside a fretful mother’s nightmare of the worst neighborhood imaginable, a predicament that practically requires her to phone him every day to ask if he’s okay.

Beau’s familial ties are their own source of stress. His therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) gently inquires about his upcoming cross-country trip to visit Mona: Has he ever fantasized about being rid of his mother? The film doesn’t divulge much about that tension straight away, but Beau is clearly physically burdened, often stooped over and shuffling. His pathetic postures are grimly hilarious; when Beau’s scary neighbors pass threatening notes under his door, he responds by sleeping on the floor, surrounded by mouse traps.

If you aren’t laughing yet, then the rest of Beau may not quite be for you. But if you can get on its strange wavelength, it’s one of the most fascinating films of recent years, a layered epic that delights in continually complicating the audience’s understanding of the main character. After missing his flight to see Mona, Beau goes on an odyssey. First, he contends with a cloying suburban couple (played by Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) who seem intent on keeping him in their home forever; then he encounters a theater troupe in the woods that acts out a glorious vision of what his life might have been like had he taken a more active role in it.

That sequence, told with impressionistic animated visuals, is the sensitive core of the story Aster is trying to tell; it’s sweet and knowing where so much of Beau Is Afraid is disorienting and severe. Yes, the movie is a highbrow parody of Freudian angst, as indebted to the barbed comedies of Albert Brooks as it is to the cerebral hellscapes of Philip Roth, but it’s not without compassion for its prickly porcupine of a protagonist, who’s eager to roll into a ball anytime he’s confronted with the slightest obstacle. And the empathetic interlude in the woods ensures that the movie’s final chapter—when Beau finally makes it “home”—feels equal parts farcical and emotional. Aster has immersed the viewer in a deeply loopy, surreal world. He’s also managed to zoom in on the unassuming man who’s finding his way through it.

Beau Is Afraid is abrasive and dense, but that’s to be saluted. Aster is cashing in on the success of his first two films to create something daringly vulnerable for a wide audience. Phoenix, an actor who is more than capable of turning the intensity dial to extremes, is the perfect partner for Aster’s heightened storytelling and willingness to lay bare dark, embarrassing feelings. Together, they’ve made a challenging work that is sure to have its freaky imagery and even freakier humor pored over for years. The film’s most enduring message, however, is also its simplest: Beau Is Afraid is just about a guy trying to figure it all out. Who can’t relate?