The more time I spend contemplating the work of writer/director Ari Aster, the more frustrated I get with him. His feature debut Hereditary is a special film to me for a number of reasons. On first viewing, while I was impressed with the film craft and atmosphere, that ending really threw me for a loop. Then I clung onto Nyx Fears’ compelling and thought-provoking take of it as a trans allegory, which not only says something about how convoluted the lore surrounding King Paimon wound up being that that was the more logical explanation, but it’s one of the bigger instances of my flirtings with edgelord optimism; the approach of finding positivity in the midst of emphatically fucked-up ideas and scenarios, in this case being an empathetic view of society’s lack of empathy towards trans people. Or, at least, when viewed through that lens.
All of that makes for one of the more complicated connections I’ve made with a film I’ve reviewed on here, and possibly ever seen beyond that, and those two ideas (fatalistic family tragedy about how we’re doomed to choices beyond our control, or Lynchian psychological portrait of a mother’s rejection of her trans son) are still butting heads in my brain at the time of writing this.
And to think, Hereditary has basically become a running joke among my family, since I really got into the trans interpretation of it and… well, let’s just say that my attempts to convince my parents of the same was less than successful.
My take on Aster’s follow-up, Midsommar, though? Much simpler. It’s a dark break-up movie dressed as a slasher dressed as a Pagan acid trip, and it’s the film that finally got Florence Pugh on my radar as an actor worth looking out for.
Anyway, between those two, I went into Aster’s latest with some trepidation based on past experiences, but still hoping for something good. I mean, after Aster was rather insistent on Hereditary’s story being literal, seeing him go for something properly David Lynch/Charlie Kaufman is at least an interesting direction to take, as is the decision to lean more into his pitch-black sense of humour. However, what ultimately resulted from this is a film that did not work for me.
In its entirety, at least. For quite a while into its three-hour running time, Aster’s presentation of what he describes as a “nightmare comedy” worked very well. The depiction of the city that the titular Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in is like something out of a doomsday scenario, with latrinalic graffiti covering the walls and citizens equally crazed and terrified running away and into each other, all medicated to the nth degree. Oh, and there’s an initial gag to do with a naked serial killer dubbed ‘Birthday Boy Stab Man’.
It fits into a certain ‘nightmare logic’ that suits Beau’s character of a terminally anxious and… well, afraid man. It’s something I recall from my own nightmares, where as soon as something comes to mind that scared me in a past dream, boom! It suddenly appeared right in front of me. As a way of getting into Beau’s head nice and early, it’s very effective, and Phoenix’s timidity on-screen sells it even harder. He somehow goes even further beyond his tragic turn in Joker to show someone even more at the mercy of his own neuroses, permanently terrified of everything around him and everyone he encounters.
From that foundation, the narrative is a prolonged odyssey that follows Beau as he tries (and continually fails) to make it to his mother’s funeral. He gets taken in by an ostensibly nice couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan) after they hit him with their car, and then he gets lost in the forest and meets a theatre troupe that kinda-sorta do a play that tells the story of Beau’s life, and then he eventually has his big confrontation once he finally makes it to the funeral. It’s quite shaggy-dog as such things go, and the specifics of the things he runs into vary from the simply surreal to the outright insane. Without directly spoiling it, I can now safely say that, after having seen Beau come face-to-face with his father, I now understand any and all criticisms of the finale to Alex Garland’s Men. Not saying that I agree with them, mind; just that I now get where they’re coming from.
Between its frequently somnambulist imagery and go-for-broke staging (right down to getting the directors of The Wolf House to do some stop-motion work, in a team-up that makes way too much sense given how fucked-up Wolf House is), there’s a lot here I should theoretically be into. But the longer it went along, and the more it kept violently shifting thematic gears to continue telling the story of Beau’s chaotic psychology, the more I felt it slipping away from me. It hits a lot of familiar points as the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man in its showing of Jewish fatalism, as well as Aster’s own Hereditary, in how it presents Beau as someone who is fated to lose no matter what.
However, where A Serious Man had the benefit of the Coens’ knack for philosophy on film, and Hereditary had its awe-inspiring atmospherics to smooth over the iffy parts, this just leans all the way into kicking Beau while he’s down and then continued to kick him. Like with Bardo last year, this comes across like the director is laying into himself by proxy… except there’s nothing to really be gotten out of it as an outside observer. That it carries on with this ‘woe is me, life is pain and shit, look at me torture myself’ routine for, again, three straight hours, is galling enough, but there’s no catharsis to be gotten out of it. It doesn’t purge those negative feelings or provide any sense of relief from them, even momentarily; it just wallows in it. During the finale, Aster’s insistence on continually letting Beau have it for his perceived slights gets to the point where the arguments against him start to lose legibility and coherency, even beyond the dream aesthetic all of the events are soaked in to begin with.
Honestly, this only wound up confirming why that alternative take on Hereditary appealed to me as much as it did, and why Midsommar worked for me along the same lines: Because they both rely on rejecting this kind of nihilistic approach to the universe and one’s place within it. With Hereditary, it was the notion that biology isn’t the be-all-end-all dictator of one’s own path in life, even though there are those who likely will never be able to grasp the idea of creating that path in such a fashion. And with Midsommar, I honestly read that ending as a happy one, since it indicated the end of an abusive relationship, with the victim of said abuse finally being among those who can empathise with what she’s been through and who helped her move past it.
That this film is devoid of any such optimism, or even optimistic interpretation, isn’t the inherent issue, though; not every story has a happy ending, and it’s silly to insist otherwise. It’s just that, when I do take this film at face value, there’s nothing to emotionally gain from its content or its ultimate message of internalised hopelessness. I left the cinema miserable, and I get that that is likely the intended result, but it wasn’t even in a way that felt justified by what caused it. Quite frankly, I wish I had just stayed home and watched something else.
Beau Is Afraid, to me, is the equivalent of a hammer made out of jelly. It’s admittedly impressive on a technical level, not the least of which for how it manages to hold together as a singular mass, but I see no practical use for it other than its creator getting bragging rights for having constructed it in the first place. I reckon I have been more than fair with more recent films that have gone down this similar road, where the creative process is used by a filmmaker to look at their own damage and make art out of it, but I just can’t get behind something this devoted to self-flagellation without any sense of closure or even lucidity about the exercise.
I honestly don’t have a problem with the idea of cinema or art in general being used as a means of personal therapy that then gets displayed for public consumption; there is good that can come from that equation. But when that mentality results in stuff like this, I would genuinely prefer it if Ari Aster just took all this to a licensed therapist. At least then, he wouldn’t be charging me for the privilege of hearing all his baggage devoid of context or even actually knowing the guy personally.
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