Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid” is a supersized, fitfully amusing, self-important tale of fear and loathing. As the title announces, its protagonist, Beau Wassermann — a terminal sad-sack played by the invariably watchable Joaquin Phoenix — is anxious, well, about everything. He seems to have good reason given the chaos and violence churning outside his apartment. Then again, the tumult may be all in his head. Beau has issues, you soon learn, and he’s an unstable narrative presence, which makes him an ideal vessel for an Ari Aster creep-out.
Outwardly, “Beau Is Afraid” seems to be a departure for Aster, whose first two features center on horrific happenings and some seriously bad relationships. In his first of these, “Hereditary,” a family is destroyed (and revived) by its witchy past; in his follow-up, “Midsommar,” a young, foolish couple travels with friends to a pastoral corner of Sweden, where they become chew toys for a murderous pagan cult. In both, Aster shrewdly draws on horror-film conventions — his abuse of the human head has become a kind of authorial signature — though the sense of ambiguity that he cooks up in them owes more to the art house than it does to the uncanny.
In “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” Aster meticulously peels back the ostensibly ordinary surface of the world, its patina of normalcy, to reveal the annihilating malevolence beneath it. By contrast, all the icky, nasty stuff is right out in the open in “Beau Is Afraid,” which over three long, eventful hours tracks its protagonist as he struggles to visit his mother, a pop-Freudian gargoyle named Mona (Patti LuPone, ferocious and amusingly outsized). He makes it to her house, though only after a series of adventures that take him from the horrors of the unnamed city where he lives to a suburban asylum and then to a shadowy forest and beyond.
Aster likes wowing viewers as much as he likes scaring them, and he does both with visual polish, a firm grasp on his craft, stories that have ample interpretive leeway and a pitiless attitude toward his characters; you learn to never become attached to anyone in his movies. In “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster changes things up by making Beau difficult to cozy up to. A blur of a man with a soft middle, thinning hair and a bearing that oscillates between panic and resignation, Beau doesn’t resemble the typical American movie hero: He isn’t nice, appealing, attractive or all that engaging, and he lacks apparent interests, ambition and deep purpose.
