Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Beau Is Afraid)

(TW: child abuse)

Oh god. Oh dear God in heaven. Once again I find myself returning to an Ari Aster film. Two years ago I did Midsommar for one of these and it was an anxious nightmare of a film, one which reflected back on me and made me feel the life of an anxious nightmare for that day. Things have not gotten any cheerier with his next film. Beau Is Afraid was three hours of Asterian nightmare for me to wring myself through, and it didn't help that I was interrupted 25 minutes in by some stuff and errands which needed to be done. For four hours I marinated in this absolute hell. Four godforsaken hours of this. Now I have to talk about it, and to talk about it I have to relate what I took from it.

This is a story about horrific psychological abuse. I got mad at the movie at around the halfway point for being this protracted, almost nihilistic place where everything and everyone was out to betray and hurt the poor, confused, badly wounded Beau. It was misery-inducing, and the thought of enduring another 90 minutes of it just about made me turn on the film. All poor Beau wanted to do was get to his dead mom's funeral, and he gets stabbed and kidnapped and abused and framed and chased by a PTSD-riddled soldier. Absolutely terrible. Then two things happened. The first was the play in the forest, which turns into this beautiful metafictional thing with striking visuals as Beau becomes a player in the play, a dreamer as part of the dream. There's a certain beauty to it, and a certain ambiguity that comes with it all which made me sit up and pay attention. This was quite a nice section of the film. It goes to shit immediately after, but the change of pace was appreciated and the way it was done adds some ambiguity and wonder to the proceedings.

Then the other shoe drops. The mom is alive. The mom faked her own death to make Beau feel bad, but things stretch out well beyond that. Everything that has happened, damn near everyone that Beau has met who isn't a forest player (or maybe they're in on it too, who the hell can tell?) was paid by the rich mom as part of this ghoulish test to test Beau's loyalty to Mommy. A test he could never pass because her standards are impossible. She'll claim "YOU TOOK DAYS TO GET HERE" but if he got there in a day then she'd be outraged he didn't get there in hours. She is a horrid person, a rich bitch who paid millions to others to gaslight and gatekeep Beau, to do terrible things, even die in the name of making him feel bad while Beau himself lives in squalor in one of the worst parts of America. The protracted "trial" at the end, which might be real and might not be, expresses the impossibility of Beau to ever live up. Every thoughtcrime against Mommy is a death sentence in itself, a justification to hate that which she hates.

It's absolutely hellish, but even in the downer ending Beau realizes there's no salvation, no apology that can satisfy the beast. Beau loses his life, probably, but I think in that last moment he also loses his fear. For better or worse, he's free of this awful world, a world where a woman will pay more to gaslight her son than to make things better, and a world where these paid shills will betray and hurt Beau with not just businesslike professionalism, but glee. Beau might actually be better escaping such a hellish place on his whole terms, and I'm better for escaping this absolute nightmare of a film. It says what it wants to say very strongly, it's very good at doing it, and is an incredible film. I never want to see it again in my fucking life.

Oh yeah, and Beau's dad is a giant penis locked in the attic. Or something.