Embracing his ruthless sense of humor, Aster sucks you in with each absurd, claustrophobic development, like when an angry neighbor keeps sliding him notes to turn the volume down, even though he’s sitting in silence. This world-building for Beau is like a furious overture of the towering anxieties we’ll see later in present-time and in flashback: a lack of personal space, the threat of being unable to please others, and the impossibility of rampant bad luck. Working with long-time collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski, Aster surveys this sumptuous chaos like Peter Greenaway did long dining tables in “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.” Here, such tracking shots gorgeously capture a sick sad world eating itself alive in broad daylight. It’s a Busby Berkeley musical, with death and destruction as the choreography. The downtown neighborhood where Beau lives is defined by violence and madness: People fight in the middle of the street, they threaten to jump off buildings, and dead bodies lie about. It's Aster’s funniest movie yet.īeau is a quintessential Aster protagonist, barely making it in a hellish landscape that’s lovingly detailed by Aster and production designer Fiona Crombie. “Beau Is Afraid,” an enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues, is about being doomed from birth.
His excellent, trauma-filled dramas “ Hereditary” and “ Midsommar” may be packed with the horror of relationships, but it’s the cruel joke underneath that provides their driving force–they are pitch-black comedies about the universal fear of losing free-will, of being screwed from the get-go. The film’s writer/director is Ari Aster, who has always been a funny guy.
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