Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023)

[cdnchris]

I wouldn't consider this a spoiler but one sequence made me think of Defending Your Life and then I remembered Aster wrote the essay for the Criterion release. And now I'm just going to think of the film as a bonkers remake of Brooks'.

I liked this. It was funny and went by quickly despite the long runtime. I think I got the gist of the story and the character, though I know another viewing will expose more. I actually dont know if i fully care to understand every little detail in this, and i dont know if anything in it actually matters, but it's the first Aster film i actually want to rewatch. As to whether

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It's a dream or not. I think it works both ways. You could see the film as a dream, mental breakdown, or that those meds are really fucking with him. But then you could also take the film literally, that the mother set up this elaborate stunt to test Beau, making CRS from The Game blush. When looking at the photos of employees, above and to the right from Parker Posey, was Nathan Lane, and I'm sure if I looked I'd find Amy Ryan in there as well, of course suggesting they were in on it. May not actually mean anything, but I just happened to notice it.

Also, the world needs more Parker Posey and Richard Kind.

[therewillbeblus]

I noticed the same photos, which, regardless, play into that paranoid 'egomaniac with an inferiority complex' state of insecure anxiety some of us know too well. Posey stole the last act, breathing new life into the film and I came away with the same reaction. She should be in literally everything - this small role alone showed tremendous range that could be applied to most parts..

And that's another element to this film that's gone a bit overlooked - how 'characters' Beau interacts with demonstrate a range of dramatic and comedic dexterity, which both serves to emphasize the melodrama of his perspective on his life, and also heighten the unpredictably labile shifts people can exhibit, offering confirmation bias that he's unprepared to cope with other people, and/or that they are/the world is dangerous; but also perhaps demonstrating that this is true if taken at face value. I think there's room for both/all of that to exist in the world of this film, and real life. Beau is a tragic figure, not just to his own worst enemy in himself, but because he is actually unprepared to deal with a hostile world in real and skewed terms

[brundlefly]

I’m glad the camera does not hang long on those photos. One of the great successes of the movie is that whether or not anything is happening at all it all feels like it is.

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And having everything reduced to Beau wandering through an elaborate mother-created real-world conspiracy is a lot less interesting and real than what it represents, Beau being certain his mother has been behind everything that has ever happened in his life.

That effect is what makes me rationalize the parts I liked least: Spending time with Beau. Observing him trying to talk on the phone is my own new biggest nightmare. His internal landscape is a far more interesting place to be than any room in which he stands, and I think those interminable stretches during which we have to wait for Beau to act are an attempt to set up the paralyzing reality of what’s going on in his head without doing trite transitions in and out of that. As twbb says, it’s not like Beau’s self-image is anything better than the miserable, impotent creature we observe. (My favorite Phoenix performance is Inherent Vice, so it’s not like I’m averse to him going mumbly.)

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The one time I think – I’m a week out of the film, there’s so much to forget about it, so forgive – we do the standard wake-cut from fantasy to reality (or “reality”) is during the play. And that got at something very real for me, the way we can be inspired by art to insert ourselves into it then disconnect from it to create something completely different of our own. How trying to reconnect to it afterwards can make the original feel alien/irrelevant/silly. Appropriate that Aster hands a lot of that over to other filmmakers (Happy he continues to support the La casa lobo animators!) And I guess you can also see that whole segment as another illustration of the fragile way Beau connects with the world.

Aster has a willingness and ability to access to deep, genuine places of anxiety, fear, and disconnection; the end of Beau’s fantasy tapped a well of regret and loneliness that made me choke up.)

conceive the mind as this vast, disordered, symbolic landscape that's infinite, but also turned in on itself. The human mind is a total mess, basically. Beau is Afraid reproduces that on a structural level, laying out Beau's mind as a place both comically small-minded and yet wildly disproportionate, so much so that it becomes increasingly hard to even parse it, let alone order it or apprehended it as a whole.”

Not that the movie isn’t willing to go anywhere and do anything it sees as fitting into Beau’s skull, but I appreciated that Aster’s got a pair of guiding principles at work for his picaresque that access primal places but don’t demand he explicitly explain or explain away everything.

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While Beau is not a functional human being, he at least starts the movie living on his own in a developed urban landscape with other adult humans. Someone takes his keys, as clean a symbol of autonomy as he’s got. (He doesn’t own a car.) We move from the city to the suburbs to the forest to his childhood home (with a nightmare-filled attic, even) to the open water. I don’t know that there’s a clear A-B-C psychological path; having one would probably be too reassuring. Everything is so unreal and anxiety-ridden from the start, so it’s not a methodical descent into the id. But it still is a regressive developmental journey (as a map, not a character arc) from independence to dependence where he winds up on trial in a womb.

At each station, Beau experiences a different kind of family and each one falls apart. He’s never been allowed to create his own family before because he’s been led to believe that doing sex would kill him. His solitary life is a failure. He becomes a surrogate child in something that has the form of an ideal nuclear family – though that never feels less than a hostage situation, he has a bizarre relationship with his new sister (he sleeps in her bed, she takes him to repaint her dead brother’s room like a nursery and kills herself there), has the family dog (the dead son’s army buddy, who may well have killed him and seems like a medicated/reprogrammed hostage) sicced on him. He joins a community of orphans, and even before his presence leads to their destruction, he disassociates from them through fantasies of his father and disconnects from their work by creating his own. His own fantasy family is one destroyed by natural disaster, its reunion interrupted by gunfire. Back in his home, in his mother’s bed (of course), listening to “Always My Baby” (of course) he forms a couple with his childhood sweetheart and accidentally kills her by doing sex for the first time. He’s then left with his original family unit, him + Mom, and strangles her.

It's a path and a cycle to which Aster can adhere while messing around within.

Beau is Afraid could conceivably go on forever. Tho' the movie is long, the ending is still abrupt; it doesn't so much end as stop

And even with all the above – where do you go after crawling back in the womb and failing there? an exciting prospect – I agree to the extent that I waited through the credits convinced it would go on. Did not feel like Aster would ever let go of this movie. In that way it reminded me of the last number in All That Jazz, a final farewell that won’t. The trial itself reminded me less of Defending Your Life than of Pink Floyd – The Wall – and I wondered if LuPone’s hair color had been chosen to echo that of the wife(!) in that.

(Also enjoyed Attic Dad as a hilarious riff on the rival lover in Zulawski’s Possession, intentional or no.)

Anyway, I’m glad people have been as dumbfounded/overwhelmed by this as I. Was shocked the crowd with whom I saw this didn’t get audibly restless; there were a pair of collective gasps down the stretch. And the ‘plex I was in seemed to be staging anxiety attacks outside to set the atmosphere. A customer at the concession stand had the only worker tell them the price of every single item while another slowly strangled the giant Ziploc bag of popcorn they’d brought from home until it broke open and spilled all over the floor. On the way in, a little girl was screaming at the top of her lungs at the entrance of Super Mario Bros. across the way. (She wouldn’t go in because it was going to be too scary. Her older brother begged their mother to still take them in. Please don’t make us go back home, it isn’t a horror movie at all, she’ll love it when she actually sees it, he pleaded.) On the way out, one woman from our theater told her partner that she didn't want to spend another minute with the main character because, "What was the point?" And her terrible boyfriend threw his arms in the air and moaned, "Am I going to have to explain the whole thing to you?"

[therewillbeblus]

Terrific post, brundlefly - I agree with every word, and love how you tracked his progression across/into physical space, including an interpretation of the final set piece. Reminds me a bit of my theory that Wes Anderson continued to expand physical space across his first handful of works, documenting the fruitless yearning for an external cure to his introverted dysregulation - until he was able to (literally) let go of his baggage and transition into a more self-actualized, distanced state post-Darjeeling with more acceptance

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except there’s no hope for Beau there, granted, this is just one movie’s journey and not a decades-worth!

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The one time I think – I’m a week out of the film, there’s so much to forget about it, so forgive – we do the standard wake-cut from fantasy to reality (or “reality”) is during the play. And that got at something very real for me, the way we can be inspired by art to insert ourselves into it then disconnect from it to create something completely different of our own. How trying to reconnect to it afterwards can make the original feel alien/irrelevant/silly.

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What’s so amusing about this moment, is that as Beau becomes acclimated to the illogical nature of his own dream logic (which I think intentionally comes after our own- Aster drags this out once we’re more or less grounded in the ‘present’, sans wild, intrusive art direction that distracts us from the impossibility of having kids if he’s never had sex- thus allowing us to help him come down; the guy needs co-regulation every step of the way, even from the audience who paid to sit and do nothing but watch!) he’s still bombarded by the man claiming to be (or hinting at being) his father, which is hilariously destabilizing on a number of levels: a) Beau isn’t safe from absurd delusions even when he wakes out of a dream state (a time when we’re also all inherently more vulnerable), b) if his father is alive, then he could have had kids, which makes the fantasy sequence he just slipped out of actually possible to exist, further blurring the lines of what could be real.. just after the first and only cue we/he received as to a layer of “fiction” vs “reality”! c) If his father is alive, then that means his mother lied, kicking off the third act of skepticism about her death and ultimately (failed) confrontation

[Mr Sausage]

Great post, brundlefly.

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Beau is Afraid could conceivably go on forever. Tho' the movie is long, the ending is still abrupt; it doesn't so much end as stop

And even with all the above – where do you go after crawling back in the womb and failing there? an exciting prospect – I agree to the extent that I waited through the credits convinced it would go on. Did not feel like Aster would ever let go of this movie. In that way it reminded me of the last number in All That Jazz, a final farewell that won’t. The trial itself reminded me less of Defending Your Life than of Pink Floyd – The Wall – and I wondered if LuPone’s hair color had been chosen to echo that of the wife(!) in that.

I didn't mean that it could've kept going after the final scene (tho' it could've--where you go after reentering the womb is rebirth, after which, if you're Beau, you probably relive the whole nightmare over again). I meant that in between the opening and closing scenes, a potentially infinite number of things could happen. There's no real reason for the movie to stop when it did, hence it's surprising when it finally does. The movie is a set of permutations on a single scenario.

[pianocrash]

I'm with Chris here - this was easily Aster's breeziest runtime (the real stick in my craw re: his filmmaking), albeit one that felt too painful at first, but only truly became tedious toward the climax (with no blame cast on the always great but somewhat ill-defined therein Richard Kind), and probably couldn't have worked any other way. The only scene I really want to revisit is

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Beau's initial walk back to his apartment, which is basically the opening scroll from Midsommar, alive & moving, for this film. The projection I saw wasn't fully lit (though the sound seemed rendered perfectly throughout, especially during the note-passing sequence), so it rushed by in a blur, but I do recall the lady on the segway's helmet being baby blue, and part of her clothing being the same pink that later appears in the bedroom meltdown scene, and of course, the whole boat motif in miniature (along with so many others, I'm sure). I only caught up to this during the Channel 78 scene, which also made me realize (as well with the portraits of all the staff members of MW, one of which I swear was the running tattooed man) that Amy Ryan's character was trying to hint Beau onto what was actually happening around him, and, in turn, why he kept traveling into one familial situation to the next. The shift from one family to the next leads to his highest fantasy (wife & 3 kids, tragically separated for years), at which their reunion sparks the eventual horror and fall from grace that follows. By that point, you know there can't be a way out for Beau that doesn't end poorly, as each time he's presented a familial system, no matter what he does (or doesn't do), he is rejected and ends up alone, again, naturally.

And it probably goes without saying, but I loved the small, unexpected homage to Starship Troopers (your move, Andrew Bujalski).

That being said, Aster's overall technique is visually thrilling in ways that other horror/comedy/whatever adjacent films perceive themselves as being (primarily: effective), but I'm not sure his particular wavelength here will be gaining any new converts who are in the either/or column. His touch of despair is still lighter than Charlie Kaufman's Razorblade Of Irony (something that feels beyond comprehension, at this point, as in I'm Thinking Of Ending Things), so at least there's that! But the more I turn Beau over and over in my mind, the more I'm appreciating it (also, thanks to this thread). Wild times we're living in, truly.

[Mr Sausage]

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What was the Starship Troopers reference?

[brundlefly]

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b) if his father is alive, then he could have had kids, which makes the fantasy sequence he just slipped out of actually possible to exist, further blurring the lines of what could be real.. just after the first and only cue we/he received as to a layer of “fiction” vs “reality”! c) If his father is alive, then that means his mother lied, kicking off the third act of skepticism about her death and ultimately (failed) confrontation

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Yes! This compounded that feeling of regret, of a wasted life built around one false and paralyzing rule.

Enjoyed the Anderson write-up, thanks.

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tho' it could've--where you go after reentering the womb is rebirth, after which, if you're Beau, you probably relive the whole nightmare over again

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You’ve made me dread there’s someone out there interpreting the whole movie as a natal fantasy who wishes it had ended with some ruinious tidy bow like an actual birth scene and I hope no one ever finds that and links to it.

[therewillbeblus]

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Beau's initial walk back to his apartment, which is basically the opening scroll from Midsommar, alive & moving, for this film. The projection I saw wasn't fully lit (though the sound seemed rendered perfectly throughout, especially during the note-passing sequence), so it rushed by in a blur, but I do recall the lady on the segway's helmet being baby blue, and part of her clothing being the same pink that later appears in the bedroom meltdown scene, and of course, the whole boat motif in miniature (along with so many others, I'm sure).

Interesting catch - I'm sure there are many more examples of homages throughout (I mentioned two more obvious ones in my initial writeup, but I know I caught more during the screening itself and couldn't recall them when reflecting back). The question I still have is: Were these visual ideas already present in Aster's script, which as I understand was written before either of his first two films - indicating that he may have just reapplied them elsewhere, skeptical that this could ever get made at all? Or did he reintegrate visual ideas from his past films as easter eggs to throw the audience off a bit and incite that kind of deja vu paranoia of our own? I really hope it's the latter - that would be a cool creative decision

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b) if his father is alive, then he could have had kids, which makes the fantasy sequence he just slipped out of actually possible to exist, further blurring the lines of what could be real.. just after the first and only cue we/he received as to a layer of “fiction” vs “reality”! c) If his father is alive, then that means his mother lied, kicking off the third act of skepticism about her death and ultimately (failed) confrontation

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Yes! This compounded that feeling of regret, of a wasted life built around one false and paralyzing rule.

This point reminds me of why Annihilation worked at all. Despite finding it heavily flawed, I always admired how it disrupts the few 'grounding' cues we rely upon (temporal expectations; universal physical consequences on members of the same species) to feel connected to our environment and one another. Beau is Afraid engages in a similarly horrifying internal illogic, albeit one less focused around a "rational" diagnosis (i.e. being in an alien zone) and so it's even scarier since we don't even have that basic trigger point for the surreality of his/our experience!

I wonder how this'll play for me when not seen in a theatre environment. My audience (a packed house on opening night) didn't laugh at all - or at least I only noticed my buddy and I reacting in any way whatsoever, and there was something unsettling about that: like the expectations for collective energy were not met, causing a feeling of loneliness and confusion and introverted preoccupations on if I'm responding 'right' or 'wrong' to stimuli in friction with my fellow man. Part of me thinks I'll appreciate it more watching in isolation, able to respond without that distraction, able to more safely feel uncomfortable within a controlled environment that I'm more comfortable in. And yet reflecting back, that extra layer of awkwardness from my theatre experience - feeling like an outsider in a large group of people in a public place - seems extremely appropriate for the themes and tone of the film, even if it was uncomfortably distracting from the art at the same time... kinda like Beau awakening from his reflexive engagement with the play!

[pianocrash]

I really wish I had caught it with a full house, as I was the sole participant in a midday showing. But to your point, it allowed me a kind of distance to be without the collective reflection of what was going on, which I actually would've appreciated during a few places. However, I don't think I'd have emerged as positive/for the film as I might have with a crowd of similarly confused or angry people: both instances are probably correct, either way.

As for all the cues within the film re: his earlier films, it felt like a genuine progression of his writing, overall. I think there are probably visuals he likes to keep using in all of his films, but this time it didn't seem as direct call-backs, except for use of those devices as such, which was a relief.

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No bears that I could remember, but I think it's clear if any actor mentions getting a full body cast of themselves as part of their role in the production of an Ari Aster film, we are eventually going to see them as a dead/desecrated body somewhere along the line (Parker Posey mentioned this briefly on Seth Meyers before I saw the film, so I kind of had a feeling). For Midsommar, Aster had spoke about using a cast of Will Poulter done for another film previously (The Little Stranger) in a similar capacity.

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What was the Starship Troopers reference?

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Beau's father impaling Jeeves in the head, space-bug style.

Also, I should probably mention, the Brain Bug in Starship Troopers was certainly vagina-derived (see also: the capture & CENSORED "study" of that creature by "scientists" at "the end" of "that movie"), and Beau's dad was a penis monster.

[Mr Sausage]

the NYTimes has an anatomy of a scene, really a small audio commentary, with Aster talking about Beau's walk back to his apartment from his therapists. Things that struck me:

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-I think I know where this is filmed.

-The kid with the toy boat presages the movie's end.

-The jumper reflected in the glass, with their arms out against the sky, seemed religious to me--Christlike? Dunno

[brundlefly]

the NYTimes has an anatomy of a scene, really a small audio commentary, with Aster talking about Beau's walk back to his apartment from his therapists.

Seeing that sequence again reminded me that in terms of Aster callbacks, "Erectus Ejectus" goes at least as far as 2011's doofus short "TDF Really Works." Perhaps Harry Potter-inspired.

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[Swift]

regarding the cast of the film...

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is there any word on who exactly played the angel from the outdoor play assuming it's the same actor who also played the angel in Beau's fantasy and was the actor that picked up Beau on the side of the road to deliver him to his mother's someone notable? I feel like they looked familiar

I swore while watching it that the actress playing the angel and the narrator of the play was Juliet Rylance (of The Knick and Perry Mason) as it sounded exactly like her but IMDB says it was an actress named Maev Beaty. The driver also struck me as being someone of significance, but I think that's probably because he looked a bit like Warren Beatty to me.

IMDB also says that David Mamet played the rabbi at the funeral.

[black&huge]

went for a second time last night and just some details in case anyone missed:

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- whichever poster pointed out Nathan Lane's character being on the Employee/Mona Mosaic that Beau looks at is correct. He is above the tattoo guy in the mosaic who looks a bit different from the tattoo guy that we see earlier in the movie though (I may be wrong)

- the strange man Beau thinks is his father is the same one that randomly appears at a distance in the family's yard that Beau gives a quick peek to through the window

- that quick cut where Beau imagines a random man whose head/face is not seen kicking in his apartment door is wearing the same exact cargo shorts/tanktop of the man that Beau sees bringing that palette of water bottles up to the store window across the street before he leaves to go get one. Presumably the same person but why we see him in Beau's anxiety thought and in the store in up to anyone's guess

- the movie takes place in a fictional state we see twice in the movie the state initials CR, the second of which I don't remember but we do see it on the top of his therpiasts notepad when we see a close up of him writing the prescription

these two are just ones that maybe most peole caught onto but I completely missed the first time since there was so much going on:

- when Amy Ryan's character tells Beau to turn to channel 78 he actually does fast forward to the events that happen up until the very end of the movie ending with the arena/jumbotron

- the boy in Beau's memory who refuses to get in the bath isn't Beau looking at a younger version it's actually the strange chained up man in the attic/his brother. During the final confrontation when Mona is playing his therapy sessions over the speaker he states there's another boy, braver than him who asks about their dad. It's his twin brother. The chained up man is even still wearing the same shirt the boy in the memory refuses to take off

lastly:

- I wanna be sure about this last one but I think the UPS guy on the phone was voiced by someone that was not Bill Hader and he only did the physical appearance during the news report Beau watches of his mom's death. However we all know by now Hader can craft many different voices but he always has some familiarity across all of them. I think he could have also provided the voice but I mostly think it's two different people playing the UPS guy.

[pianocrash]

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I wanna be sure about this last one but I think the UPS guy on the phone was voiced by someone that was not Bill Hader and he only did the physical appearance during the news report Beau watches of his mom's death. However we all know by now Hader can craft many different voices but he always has some familiarity across all of them. I think he could have also provided the voice but I mostly think it's two different people playing the UPS guy.

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This could very well be the case, but I realized it was Hader speaking as the call kept going, especially after he told Beau to hang up and call back. Something about Hader's voice as it nearly cracks with rage is specifically his, and that boiling point is what clued me into recognizing him before his actual semi-reveal later on. Or maybe not?

regarding the cast of the film...

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is there any word on who exactly played the angel from the outdoor play assuming it's the same actor who also played the angel in Beau's fantasy and was the actor that picked up Beau on the side of the road to deliver him to his mother's someone notable? I feel like they looked familiar

I swore while watching it that the actress playing the angel and the narrator of the play was Juliet Rylance (of The Knick and Perry Mason) as it sounded exactly like her but IMDB says it was an actress named Maev Beaty.

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[Drucker]

I don't think I caught it called out in this thread but I could swear that

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the person who is in his apartment building and tells him "you're fucked" after his luggage gets stolen is seen later on in his mom's house as the funeral clean-up is occurring.

This film just isn't for me. I found reading this thread more entertaining and thought provoking than the movie itself, which just mired me in discomfort and confusion. And the truth is maybe I just struggle with ambiguity? I don't like not knowing

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if his father is alive. I don't like not knowing if the entire visit to Nathan Lane's family's house is real? Because apparently he's connected to his mother in some way. Are these people she has poisoned through her pharmaceutical company? I guess I don't know and never will.

If I can try to qualify specifically about the film's ambiguity that bothers me, is that this film doesn't feel like it was made trying to invite the audience in to dissect a world which is open to interpretation. I felt like the film deliberately obscures what is actually happening and that there is a concrete "answer" to what is happening, and Aster is kinda just hiding it. If the film really is a grand conspiracy, why is Aster making figuring out what that conspiracy is so damn obscure?

Beyond the above, I just found the film viscerally unpleasant. I hated the first part. Hated hated hated. I hated all of the nasty and repetitive graffiti. I hated the gunshots and the violence. I hated the zombie-like atmosphere that poor Beau has to call life in his day to day. And again, maybe this is a perfect example of a film just not being for me, and people who embrace horror and other nastier films will enjoy it. And if so, fine. But seeing graffiti that reads "suck cock motherfucker" or whatever in the backdrop of every scene struck me as an unnecessary, and a waste of effort. We get it, he lives in hell, show me something else.

The one part that really worked for me was the dream sequence in the middle. What an incredibly delightful interlude. Right up until the moment he snaps back into reality. The lighting was incredible, as were the close-ups of Phoenix, who really kept me in the film for the duration of it's runtime. Why not make the whole movie out of the black box?

[therewillbeblus]

I think the “answer” is that it doesn’t matter because to Beau’s relentlessly ubiquitous paranoia and thwarted belongingness within our world, the sensations are real, so it would be disingenuous to zoom out and parse out what is objectively real. His subjective reality is the reality to this character. It’s viscerally unpleasant by design also because that’s Beau’s constant state. I found huge chunks of this movie frustrating and alienating and annoying and tiring too, because Beau’s social-emotional state absolutely sucks to be in, and he is not a likable or interesting character to join as a surrogate or to watch from a small distance. But that’s also because he doesn’t like or know himself at all, so we see him just as he sees himself and is: always afraid, inert, alone. The part you liked the most is the only real reprieve he and we get - a fantasy that just be disrupted to bring us back into the (sur)reality of discomfort. The film isn’t all that because it would be the opposite kind of film, one where escape is possible, or controlled. Beau has no skills to control anything, including the length of comforting delusions. He and we would both be more satisfied if he could!

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If there's an explanation Aster has for the conspiratorial clues around Lane et al, the prompt to turn on the TV, what we see when fastforwarding, etc., it's likely an abstract one: That to Beau's skewed perspective, it's fatalistic that he will wind up where he does, and that everyone will be involved in some way, contributing to his mother's hold on him, because that is the dominating narrative he knows - and the one we experience him reflexively traversing through this film. She's still alive because he knew she would be, and deep down he knew she would be before he saw the clothes at the funeral, because there's just no way her hold from him could ever be released. He needs it to be, but does not know how to live without it containing him. There is no opportunity to 'live' freely either way.

[black&huge]

I'll finally contribute some of my thoughts after two viewings andI I'll preface by saying I'm not a fan of Hereditary though I think most of that film is pretty good and I don't like Midsommar at all:

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After seeing it the first time and I try not to do this often but I searched up some general reactions and found an article about the SFX team making the giant penis monster for the film. It was an article all about that but they mentioned that the person heading the fx team asked Aster a side question on if the movie is supposed to be literal or not. Aster told him it didn't matter but hinted that yes, if there was an answer to that question everything in the movie is actually happening.

My own personal opinion on why that movie worked so well for me at least was because right after it had ended on that first viewing I chose to take the entire thing literally. I've never been good at explaining in one big chunk why something resonates with me so well but here's a scattering of things that I think make up a majority of the reasons this sucked me in:

When it comes to the humor there's several instances of where I think the actual are jokes in the film. I can pick out three specific examples of the type of humor the movie is going for. I don't think it's just obvious ones I think most of the humor comes from gags that you find odd and linger in your head in a "that's ridiculous" sort of way. Those three examples are:

- Beau outrunning the tattoo man in the beginning. I thought it was funny because we get the idea he has to do this each time he comes home from his appointments. It reminded me of when Griffin Dunne's character tries to hop the turnstile in the subway in After Hours only for a cop to just suddenly appear before him

- The day Beau runs away from the family's home is started off with Nathan Lane's character having a send off barbecue in the morning. That's the joke because who the hell does that for the occasion and the time of day? As an add on Lane has quite a few passively funny moments. Before Beau notices his monogramed pajamas (how the hell did they even get those to him so fast? another gag) on the daughter's bed you hear a voice over where Lane's character refers to himself in the third person and says "beddy bye time for the Raj-man!" I only caught that on my second viewing and just found it very entertaining

- The reason Beau's keys were even taken was because he went back to get dental floss from his bathroom. Considering we see how his Mom lives and she's has seemingly endless money and resources she would at the very least accomodate him for something as little as that and yes, it is a plot device to get the movie going to where it goes but it's funny that that was the reason.

I think the most interesting thing to think about of the movie is the chunk of Beau's life we don't see at all from his teens to his current middle age. We get the flashbacks to his adolescence on that cruise ship to establish his first love but by the end of the film we find out that he's been living in a nieghborhood that is another one of his mom's business pursuits in the current time. His microwave in his apartment and the frozen foods all don his mom's branding and it's even on a lit sign in his neighborhood. He's been slowly conditioned and controlled over time and that's the time we don't see. It became so normal for him to be surrounded by her in some way he doesn't think much of it. There's some loose evidence to support this as well of how he's so normalized to this. When he looks at the framed photos hung on the pillar as he descends the stairs in the living room after her funeral there's one of him wearing the same outfit in the beginning of the movie on his phone in his apartment. I assume this was when he calls her to break the news he wont make his flight but the angle of photo is pretty clear she had to have had a hidden camera in his apartment. It's another one of her jabs to place blame on him for her own narcissism that we get a nice healthy (over)dose of when she confronts him at the end. When he sees that photo he is caught off guard for a second but continues past it to observe the rest of achivement timeline. Sidenote: I personally think his mother was so meticulous she was even responsible for his keys getting stolen from his door.

Which brings me to the end here. Mona's brand logo is actually dropped into the opening credits I believe the second to last after all the production company title cards are going. I like to think that the audience is also in Mona's grasp. We're seeing the movie (not completely) in her control to show us how awful her son is but as much we see Beau's point of view and the most sad thing is when that fantasy sequence happens during the outdoor theater it's Beau's attempt to find escapism because maybe he's never actually done that before and all that sequence does is recount the events of the film and even includes the flashback of when Mona tells him how his father died which then ruins his dream of having a family when one of his fictitious sons asks him how he had kids when he's never been with a woman due to the fear of him possibly dying like his father did. All Mona's doing. Beau can't even escape into fantasy without her influence.

This film ran the gamut of emotions it's funny, entertaining but overall sad/mean. I think Phoenix's performance especially at the end is nothing short of great. All of his reactions to his mother's revealings, the one that got me the most is when she plays his therapy sessions over the speakers and he reacts with "how could you do this to me?". Another random but I loved bout it is that we only really get a few instances of Beau having anxious thoughts or recitations: the beginning when he calmly tells his therapist about him swallowing mouthwash, the thought of a random man kicking in his door and his quiet freakout after the daughter makes him smoke the cornucopia joint in the car because all of thos anxieties are externalized in the world around him: his neighborhood, the dysfunction of the family, the outdoor theater attack, etc. I still can't quite get all my feelings in order and the one thing I'd like to perfectly be able to iterate is my feelings of this being a sad and brutal movie but I just have to say once again that most everything about this just worked for me as a whole. I think it's great.

Also did anyone else think at the end when the motorboat capsizes that the part of it that sticks out of the water resembled a casket? The movie starts with his birth and ends with his funeral (preceded by a trial). He got the death sentence.

[Drucker]

Great post B&H. I agree that Phoenix's performance was masterful, and I started to think about the films he has been in since like 2010 and it's almost all great films, and quite a diverse grouping.

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If everything in this movie is happening, let me pull aside an example. How does the guy fall in Beau's bathtub? Curious what you make of that scene. To me that was so clearly an imagined fear and feels like such a perfect metaphor of being overwhelmed with your own internalized fear, and literally drowning in your own stress.

Kudos for Aster for making something so bizarre that clearly resonated with folks here. But just still not for me.

[therewillbeblus]

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I think that moment and the lawyer falling to his death on the rock, which are clear callbacks to Aster's first two features, also leave open the reading that Beau/we/Aster is incorporating extraneous references from unrelated areas into his acute reality, which only serves to further destabilize his sense of control, and exacerbate the narrative that he's hypersensitive to and amplifying fear-based cues from everywhere, destined to be perpetually terrified. The whole movie can mirror as the experience of having the brand of OCD-brewed anxiety that manifests as intrusive thoughts rather than behavioral rituals

[Kracker]

So finally just watched this and thought its one of the years best just because there's so much to take apart and its one of the most Kafkaesque movies I've seen. At first, I began to compare it to Eraserhead but then threw that away as the third act actually made this movie decipherable rather than just a nightmare of Ari Aster transcribed to film; its meant to taken more literal than people like to imagine. As outrageous as that first act is, its meant to illustrate Beau's anxieties in a world that he was not raised to navigate or function in.

I could probably pick this one apart all day but I'll just go with my first impression which is was that Beau is Afraid about how parents, mothers specifically, tend to emotionally abuse their children, control and manipulate their lives, condemn them for just normal human things, and then are just shocked when they don't get the love they expect (and desperately need) from them.

Joaquin Phoenix pulls off a performance that no else could but really the entire cast just knocks it out of the park, Ari Aster just seems to get greatness out of his actors.

Great on second watch because you see a lot of things that, by design, you aren't supposed to notice:

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First and foremost, the Mona Wasserman logo (with no text) that appears in the production cards and then is littered throughout the first act, a nod to how you don't realize but from the start of the movie, the mother is running the show. Even the first scene with the therapist, we get the foreshadowing bookend of him writing "Guilty" on the notepad instead of "Guilt" as a nod to the ending trial. (an even bigger and earlier foreshadow than the toy boat, mind you) From then on you notice all sorts of clue throughout, starting with the blinking red light on the therapist's desk.

But honestly the only one worth noting was the fact that the superintendent (You're fucked!) and the manager at the funeral were indeed the same person (confirmed in the cast list), indicating Mona's cruel ruse went as far as arranging for Beau's keys to be stolen and then being disappointed when that let him stop him from coming to see her. From there, its all subsequent. The Nathan Lane family turns out to set up by his mother as well, when you see his face on the employee poster, meaning that she had even arranged to have him hit by that car.

Speaking of the therapist, he did wind up being my favorite secondary character with how Ari turned him from warm and comforting to diabolical and evil. Someone remarked how Ari Aster was the embodiment of the "men will do anything but go to therapy" meme and the evil therapist seemed to be his answer to that.

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Also did anyone else think at the end when the motorboat capsizes that the part of it that sticks out of the water resembled a casket? The movie starts with his birth and ends with his funeral (preceded by a trial). He got the death sentence.

Yeah that was pretty on the nose and the first/last scene bookend is what drove home the Kafkaesqueness for me by iterating how Beau had absolutely no control or agency and had effectively been rendered impotent, obviously in more ways than one.

But the ending was truly brilliant with:

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the audience slowly leaving and mirroring the theater audience, with the light obviously resembling a movie projector. As if Ari Aster was predicting the reaction to his own movie: The Marvel going audience, that regularly complains about Hollywood not producing any originality, getting something new, different but outside their comfort zone like Beau is Afraid and not meeting it with applause or amazement, but with bewilderment and indifference. Im a sucker for when filmmakers actually do something with the credits that keeps me watching until the screen blanks.

[therewillbeblus]

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In addition to noticing one of his mother’s billboard advertisements of Child-Beau in the background during Beau’s stroll back to his apartment at the start of the film, this watch I also noticed that the street vendor in that scene is in the photo of his mother’s employees at the funeral, with Posey and Lane. I suspect the others are also various extras throughout the film.

[therewillbeblus]

I've just finished Alasdair Gray's novel Lanark, and almost every thought I could muster on it has been said in this thread. Boy is it a great companion piece to this film.