Film Review: Beau is Afraid falls short of the intended terror

Joaquin Phoenix in Beau is Afraid

• Beau is Afraid
• ★★★☆☆

Beau is Afraid (16s) stars Joaquin Phoenix as the middle-aged Beau Wassermann, a shut-in we might describe as experiencing a mid-life crisis were it not for the fact that Beau has been living in crisis his entire life. 

Riddled with anxieties and paranoias, juggling medications and treatments, Beau is devasted to learn this mother Mona (Patti LuPone), whose singular brand of parenting created his neuroses at a young age, has been decapitated by a chandelier.

Forced out of his apartment to travel cross-country to Mona’s funeral, Beau is exposed to every terror he has ever imagined — and as events grow increasingly surreal, we begin to realise that the writer-director, Ari Aster, has set himself the very difficult task of portraying mental illness from inside the mind of a man embarking on a road-trip through the badlands of his own subconscious. 

Phoenix is in excellent form as the bewildered, self-haunted Beau, but the sheer volume of Beau’s ailments mitigates against our empathising with his plight, especially when the scenarios into which his fears lead him are frequently played for black comedy. 

There’s good support from Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane as a married couple who give Beau temporary shelter from his storm, but Ari Aster is too insistent on making explicit the parallels between Beau’s private and public odysseys, which results in a rather awkward mish-mash of Homer, Kafka and Freud.

(cinema release)