I got home from the theater after seeing Beau is Afraid hours ago and I just didn’t want to sit down to write a review. Even with the RT scores showing a mixed critical and audience reception, a lot of smart people seem to really love this movie… but I hated it. And it’s hard to articulate why other than saying knuckle-dragging things like “it was boring”.

But here we are… Beau is Afraid stars Joaquin Phoenix as Beau, a guy who is afraid. There’s a lot going on in his life to be afraid of but the main things seems to be an airline flight to visit his mother. But then he learns she might be dead and that sets off an odyssey of paranoia and anxiety… kind of like the one he’d already been on.

I liked Mother! I really really liked Darren Aronnofsky’s nightmare-inspired flick! So I should probably love Beau is Afraid since it’s playing in the same abstract sandbox. I also liked David Lynch’s Eraserhead AND Mulholland Drive. So I should have like Beau is Afraid. All of these movies exist in a post-logic world where wholesome concepts like cause and effect, existence, and continuity are all half-formed suggestions of a fever-ridden mind.

And yet the only thing I could think of in the opening half hour of Beau if Afraid is how up its own ass it was. How high on his own supply Ari Aster was. How this is what people who hated Mother saw when they complained that movie. It felt like an ego run amok with all the A24 money he asked for and no one to tell him when to quit.

Three hours of what ultimately felt like a therapy session for Mr. Aster. Apparently it takes him that long to exorcise the mommy demons through exhibition therapy. By making us his paying victims. Three hours of random, logic-unbound dream-infused imagery and editing that ended up in a judgement about his mommy? Really? Is that all this excruciatingly long and scattershot film was about? Surely there’s more since I can’t connect the A to B to C of many scenes throughout the film.

Because maybe it wasn’t about that… or this… or anything much at all. Maybe it just exists for Ari Aster to fuck around and for us to find out. A self-entitled “look at what I can do with millions of dollars and they’ll still distribute it” messianic madhouse of a movie.

Or maybe I’m just the thundering dunderhead who doesn’t “Get it”. Quite possible. Maybe even probable.

I did… appreciate?! Yeah, let’s go with that… I did appreciate his ability to edit together the film. I actually started to enjoy the play-within-a-movie segment for its audacious length and disassociation from continuity and logic. And I did sit there in my theater seat and think back to various segments of the film that had long since sailed by and admire what a trek or quest the film’s structure felt like. It seemed, at times, that we’d really gotten somewhere and those fleeting islands in our ship’s passing felt so far away in our mental telescope.

But that doesn’t stop me from being ultimately annoyed at how self-indulgently overly-long and seemingly pointless so much of this film felt. And even when I did get the point, how obvious and annoying it was. Like the opening act’s chaotic city street being SO chaotic and SO violent that it was obvious we weren’t playing with a full deck called reality. This was simple-minded analogy film-making. So blunt that whatever reality-smearing subtlety they were going for was lost.

I could go on… but I think I’m saying the same thing over and over again (just like Ari Aster). Things are getting meta in the review! But hopefully they remain logical and direct. Pardon me while I just go watch a “normal” movie for smooth-brained types. This wasn’t for me.

Score: 58