Beau Is Afraid

The movie lost money because it was too long, the first half of the movie was great , the second half lost me. The scene in the forest and all the imaginary cartoon effects should have been eliminated greatly reducing the cost of the movie, The ending was silly, keeping it realistic would have enhanced the movie compared to what transpired. I would rather have Beau go up to the attic and have the movie end leaving me to guess what was up there, anything would have been better than the nonsense the director came up with.

The first half shows what the social decay in America is beginning to look like, that portrayal makes a real horror show..

I loved what I have watched from Ari Aster...until this one movie. It is not that I dislike it. In fact, I think it has some brilliant moments that stole a laugh from me. The acting is superb. The cinematography is beautiful to my taste and suits well with the story. But...yesss, but it is way too histrionic at times and too long as a whole. As a plain viewer and nothing else, some scenes are way too long (like the very last one), where the point is made within the first minute or two and there is no need to keep it 20 minutes long. And that gets me out of the story. It might be the pace, the editing or even that I am not getting something I should.

I don't like or dislike the movie. I do know that if it was about one hour shorter, I would have been more compelled. And that is what I believe this art of cinema was invented for.

'Beau Is Afraid (2023)' is a surrealist Oedipal odyssey, an anxiety dream from hell, a never-ending nightmare told in four chapters. When I say it's a nightmare, I don't mean that it's revealed to be a bad dream; I mean that the movie itself functions as a nightmare from start to finish. Whether the plot is meant to be taken as face value with the understanding that the feature is operating entirely on dream logic or if the piece is meant to be presenting a mixture of fantasy and reality as filtered through its anxiety-ridden protagonist's worldview is unclear, but there's never a moment that breaks the absurd normality so it doesn't really matter. Whose nightmare is it? Since Beau is a character within the dream, albeit a perspective character, and we never see him outside it, how can we be sure that it's his? Then again, the only thing that makes a bad dream a bad dream is the fact that we can wake up from it, and no such relief is provided here. Perhaps this isn't so much a nightmare as a nightmarish experience?

To be honest, I don't think Ari Aster has thought about it that deeply. His latest is a mean and unforgiving film with no intentions of not frustrating its audience, a brazenly bizarre exercise in constantly abusing its hero. Although it touches on themes of anxiety, guilt, shame, codependency and severe mommy issues, it doesn't really have all that much to say about any of them. That's why the feature eventually runs out of steam. It becomes clear what it's doing very early on, and then it just keeps doing it for nearly three hours. That's a long time not to really care about something. The reason you can't engage with it on a deeper level is that you're constantly aware of the fact that it isn't real, or at least is presented in an unreal way that has you waiting for the reveal - meta or otherwise - that it isn't, and Beau is kind of a blank slate of a hero, an audience surrogate meant to filter the absurdities of the plot directly into the part of their brain that registers discomfort. The picture is nowhere near as unsettling as it could have been, and - despite the fact that it constantly throws genuinely unexpected and potentially upsetting things at you - it remains in a singular register for its duration. Said register is ridiculous, but it's unwavering; although the narrative's intensity ebbs and flows, it's constantly doing the strangest thing it could and therefore becomes oddly monotonous.

Of course, the feature does capture its nightmare logic and unreal reality rather well. In fact, every element of the experience exudes sheer surrealism, a tangible strangeness seeping from its every frame. It is, in fits and starts, inexplicably claustrophobic, the encroaching tight space not being physical but metaphorical. You're trapped in this awful reality, just as Beau is, and things just keep getting worse and worse. It batters you over the head with its utterly awful absurdity for three hours, three hours, and rarely gives you even an inch of breathing room. While that does create some horrific and disconcerting sequences, it also contributes to the monotony I mentioned earlier. After all, when everything's awful, nothing is. Well, that isn't exactly true, but you see what I mean. You sort of become numb to the film, unfazed by its truly weird nature, and it isn't able to properly shock you after its first movement. That first movement is the most successful, primarily because it naturally establishes the tone and world before you've had chance to adjust to it. The rest of the affair is continuously well-made, with committed performances and a cohesively confusing aesthetic, but it gets less and less effective as it goes on. Still, there's plenty of humour to be found here and the flick is packed so full of sight gags and dark jokes that it's practically bursting at the seams. It is, in many ways, a feast for the senses, as funny as it is freaky. The fact that this made so little money (it reportedly lost A24 $35 million dollars) is definitely a bad thing, because it means that studios are less likely to give this kind of cash to directors in the future. Even if I have my reservations with the result of Aster's more-or-less blank cheque, I love the fact that he was able to make such a big swing.

Ultimately, this is a movie of diminishing returns that's so focused on being as strange as possible in every single scene that it ends up becoming monotonous. It isn't really about anything (when it wraps up, you're left wondering what the point is) and it's very long, too. Still, it's never exactly boring and it's often rather entertaining (especially in its opening movement). Plus, even its least successful segments have moments which work well. It's impressively committed to the bit and it's a relatively wholistic recreation of a sweat-inducing, anxiety-ridden, guilt-infused nightmare. It's not as good as it could have been, but it's not bad. Just don't expect it to make any sense.

A fascinating movie with an exceptional ending, can't tell how much I enjoyed the movie and the ending reminded me of another masterpiece the stranger by Albert Camus... Only this time the mother herself is the judge.

The thing that makes this movie precious is that we don't see young directors delivering these kinds of movies specially at this quality. Anyway I'm not a professional when it comes to movies and I'm not sure what to call the genre of Bea is afraid but for sure it's my favorite. The only bothering point is the length of the movie which makes it hard to be watched several times and at the same time it requires you to do so.

After being so mesmerised by hereditary and midsommar I was really looking forward to seeing this. The acting was really good. Joaquin Phoenix never disappoints with his acting Patti LuPone was phenomenal in her scenes. Even Amy, Ryan and Nathan lane had some great moments, but the first hour of the movie, I was really confused the second hour of the movie, I thought okay maybe they will start to explain a little of what is going on the third hour when it all came together I was even more confused. I left the cinema in total confusion. I really want to like this movie. I neither hate it nor love it.