Beau is Afraid will make you afraid for your mental health

This epic, bewildering odyssey will make you question whether you need to understand a movie to get its value.

Beau is Afraid stars Joaquin Phoenix as a paranoid manchild. Picture: Roadshow

Beau is Afraid may actually be unreviewable.

To cast conventional judgment on a film that is indiscernible makes it challenging to consider – what is it you’re actually writing about if the most overwhelming impression it makes is utter bewilderment?

About two hours and forty minutes into its three-hour long odyssey, one character says to another, “Now I know everything” and the other replies, “You don’t know anything”. And that’s exactly the moment in which you’ll mutter to yourself, “I know nothing”.

Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is middle-aged and profoundly tragic. The only calls on his phone log are to his mother, his therapist and the chemist.

He’s a paranoid and neurotic manchild with serious mummy issues thanks to unresolved childhood traumas involving his overbearing and controlling mother Mona (Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti LuPone).

When Beau misses his flight to visit Mona, her guilt-inducing passive-aggression sends him on an epic journey that even Homer would describe as maximalist. But Sigmund Freud would be devouring this Oedipal quest with great relish.

‘I give up trying to understand this movie.’ Picture: Roadshow/A24

Beau is Afraid is like being on an acid trip inside a mirrored maze. Just when you think you might have a clue, an inkling, or a hint of what’s going on, the world starts spinning again like an episode of vertigo.

You’ll never truly get what’s happening – maybe if you had an advanced psychology degree and a hobby in dream interpretation, or maybe if you’re the love-child of David Lynch and Darren Aronofsky. But the question is, do you need to?

How necessary is it to understand a movie you’re watching, to make sense of the plot or follow a character arc when no clear narrative or even theme is forthcoming? How much of it is magical realism and how much of is in a character’s head? All of it? None of it? Somewhere in between?

Is this just about mummy issues? Or is it trying to something about human disconnection? Our over-reliance on pharmaceuticals?

Beau is Afraid is an acid trip inside a mirror maze. Picture: Roadshow/A24

Is it enough that Beau is Afraid is wildly original, smugly provocative and a bonkers, sensory experience. That it will make you so anxious that you’ll burst out in uncomfortable laughter has to count for something, right?

A visceral experience is still better than being bored. Actually, the movie is very funny, and intentionally so. Beau is Afraid is not always alienating and crushingly bleak.

Writer and director Ari Aster broke out in a big way with his debut feature Hereditary, a bloodcurdling horror movie that featured, among many other disturbing images, a floating Toni Collette decapitating herself. Aster then tortured Florence Pugh’s character in a series of sadistic pagan rituals in Midsommar.

That sets up expectations of a fright-fest. Beau is Afraid is not a horror movie in a traditional sense. It’s not scary but it is often distressing. The first act feels like the worst, most heightened version of your Covid fears, when every small thing was a potential threat.

Beau is Afraid is in cinemas from April 20. Picture: Roadshow

It gets more discombobulating from there. Beau’s feelings of being besieged at every turn will be mirrored in your own reactions. It will start to feel as if Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan and Parker Posey have it out for you, personally.

You’ll also never come across a more bizarre use of a Vanessa Amorosi song in a Hollywood movie.

Beau is Afraid feels like you’ve stepped inside Aster’s nightmares – and it makes you concerned for his mental health. And for your own.

This is a movie that will inspire deep love in some and seething hatred in others. But for most of us, Beau is Afraid will be, more than anything else, completely baffling.

Rating: 3/5

Beau is Afraid is in cinemas from Thursday, April 20

Originally published as Beau is Afraid will make you afraid for your mental health