Beau Is Afraid film review — Joaquin Phoenix leads a frantic, faux-experimental folly

We all get old in the end. Witness A24, the boutique New York studio that has spent the past decade growing into an American behemoth. A handful of its films (Uncut Gems, Ex Machina) were always better than the rest. But the glib, splashy movies the company specialised in were all so beautifully marketed they made the A24 brand itself hot stuff. Now it has entered a prosperous middle age. Oscar winner Everything Everywhere All at Once is just the flagship of an outfit opening international offices and turning out bad tear-jerkers (The Whale), like every Hollywood titan in history.

But establishment status makes hipsters uneasy. Cue Beau Is Afraid, a $35mn outburst from writer-director Ari Aster that is, remarkably, the priciest film A24 has ever backed. The star is another Oscar winner, Joaquin Phoenix, pulling various faces but most often a stunned wince. Join the club. The movie is a chore, a grinding, faux-experimental folly from a company in the grip of a splattery midlife crisis. Would it not have been simpler just to get tattoos?

We begin in utero. As per Freud, you too will wish we’d stayed put. Instead, Phoenix soon shuffles on screen as the adult Beau. Adult is a relative term. Riddled with anxiety, hairstyle speaking of male pattern baldness and the downy fragility of a chick, he has been spoiled and stunted by his wealthy mother. Or at least so he hints to his analyst. The whole film resembles therapy, though sadly not so much that we’re paid to listen.

Aster usually channels his inner child into scary movies: the much-applauded Hereditary and Midsommar. Beau Is Afraid is trailed as a departure, but horror remains the underlying vibe. After the shrink, the first act is a darkly comic exercise in urban paranoia, Beau besieged in a drab apartment overlooking a hellscape of sex perverts and violent street people. The mood is queasy: Eraserhead reimagined by hedge fund managers. It is also the best part of the movie, made at least with Looney Tunes vim.

Eventually though, bereavement sets in motion a return to the family home. “In motion” is pushing it though, given the pointed stasis often involved in Beau’s Oedipal odyssey. There will be stays in a fairytale forest, a reverie of the future and flashbacks to the past, but many, many scenes dwell in American suburbia, which Aster boldly portrays as bland and stifling. Teenage girls join his mother, homeless people and sex in petrifying Beau, though his real terror should be that he never once resembles an actual character. He is only ever Phoenix, performing.

Aster’s best and final gag is that his lavishly vacant film clocks in at two minutes short of three very long hours. A shame the joke is on us, but still. Whatever frightens the director, it clearly isn’t a real producer. One of those might ask what end is being met by the frantic stylistic high jinks the movie is littered with; or whether, for all the loud psychodrama, it has a thing to say. Instead, A24 simply smiles and hands over the $35mn allowance. You call that parenting?

★★☆☆☆

In UK cinemas from May 19