It’s possible I would not have made the connection that Beau Is Afraid is a particularly Jewish film unless director Ari Aster had openly described it in an interview as “Jewish Lord of the Rings.” Or if the man sitting behind me at the New York premiere had not referred to it as–speaking as a Jewish person–“the most Jewish thing he’s ever seen.” On the surface, one might not discern anything outwardly Jewish about Beau Is Afraid. Some of the principal cast is. Patti LuPone, an Italian engaging in the age-old tradition of Italians playing Jews and vice versa, embodies the overbearing, nagging Jewish mother stereotype. But as a worrisome, neurotic, insecure, “fervently Googling symptoms, oh my God I hope I’m not dying” Jewish person myself, it’s possible that the cultural undercurrents of the film still would’ve struck me even if I hadn’t had them spelled out. I could see a lot of myself in Joaquin Phoenix’s perpetually overwrought Beau Wassermann, who finds that the world that he fears is out to get him really is. It’s the worst-case scenario for the nebbish Jew archetype.
A remake of Aster’s 2011 short film Beau, Beau Is Afraid is like if a Woody Allen protagonist was the Griffin Dunne character in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and the plot of that movie was pumped with existentialist steroids. It’s a paranoid, sexually repressed, labyrinthine odyssey with a schlubby hero—a bit like Under the Silver Lake, another movie that distributor A24 had no idea how to market to their clamoring, hyper-online, teeny bopper audience. And like After Hours, Beau Is Afraid similarly plays out like one really long joke. For his third and most ambitious film (I’m loath to conjure Magnolia comparisons), Aster leans all the way into the funny bone he was wont to exhibit in his seemingly ultra-austere first features, Hereditary and Midsommar.
Beau (Phoenix) hasn’t visited his mother, Mona (LuPone) in seven months. It doesn’t seem like very long, but to Beau it feels just short of an eternity. He relays this to his kindly and patient therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and explains how guilty he feels for the perceived excessive time between visits, despite visits to Beau’s mother not being pleasant experiences. Mona loves Beau, but it’s not a healthy kind of parental love. When Beau’s keys are stolen from his apartment door on his way to the airport, the inconvenience outside of his control is framed by his mother as more proof that Beau doesn’t really love her. Over the course of one phone call, Mona’s enthusiasm for her son’s impending visit turns to broken patches of silence and desperate inquiries from Beau about what he should do—about what would make Mona most happy. There’s no answer or resolution, only a quiet, resigned end of the call. It’s a more terrifying sequence than anything in Aster’s first two films.
And then, the worst thing that could ever, ever possibly happen, does: As Beau tries to reschedule his flight, a UPS driver picks up when Beau calls his mother. Why? The driver came to drop off a package and found the front door mysteriously open, curiosity leading him to discover a dead body on the living room floor, its face smashed in by a chandelier. The ensuing investigation by Beau and the driver reveals that the body belongs to none other than Beau’s mother, dead as a doornail with most of her face and head gone. The race to get back to his mother turns into a race to get home to arrange her funeral, Beau’s journey there impeded by a comical and cosmic sequence of events in an unevenly dystopian world, scattered about with cartoonish characters who are neither good nor evil but guided by irreverent, chaotic primality.
In Beau Is Afraid, Aster’s got a lighter, more playful touch despite the intimidating 179-minute runtime. He digs further into the familial trauma that his so-called (often derisively) “elevated” horror films explore, but in a far more obviously arch and openly comedic manner that suits both him and the film much better than it did his last two. Aster cultivates a uniquely absurd and off-kilter world, crafted meticulously by production designer Fiona Crombie, wherein character motivations are erratic, hilarious and questionably driven. In this strange universe (in which it’s never quite clear, or necessarily important, what the time period is), there is never a sense of safety for poor Beau. This is first exhibited on his way back home from therapy, when his last stretch of distance through the confusingly lawless city streets ends in an uninitiated mad-dash escape from a heavily tattooed man.