'Beau Is Afraid' film review: Modern Odysseus tale - if he had crippling anxiety, guilt & fear

Writer-director Ari Aster's intentionally bizarre third film 'Beau Is Afraid' (in theaters nationwide April 21) is one coward's three-hour panic attack guilt trip disguised as an absurd road trip.

In short: After the sudden death of his mother, anxious Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) embarks on an arduous journey to bury the overbearing woman who looms largest in his life. Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Zoe Lister-Jones, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Parker Posey also star.

The inclination is to assume there's an incredible depth to 'Beau Is Afraid' beneath its surface lunacy - but this misadventure is quite simply a weak man being tested and ceaselessly failing. There's no mystery to solve here - mostly because the story is told exclusively from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, rendering most (if not all) of the story beats as not literally happening to Beau. A lot (if not all) of his journey could simply be taking place in his head. Virtually all of ‘Afraid’ is rooted deeply in how the character feels - which would be great … if the central character or his feelings were complex. Although the exact percentage of the film that occurs in any sort of objective "reality" is unknown, the story is inarguably informed by Beau's numerous, deep-seeded neuroses - most of which drives the film literally by just having Beau run screaming from one scene into the next.

Simply put, 'Beau is Afraid' is Ari Aster at his least focused and most sadistic, as the filmmaker imagines a perpetually distressed middle-aged man with deeply unresolved maternal issues - and tosses said protagonist on a cruelly devised gauntlet of Beau's worst fears. The fundamentals for an amazing story are squandered in a self-indulgent, repetitive movie that seemingly only has one goal: embarrass Beau as thoroughly as possible and make the audience squirm at his endless degradation. And he's afraid of everything and everyone everywhere. And at every turn, Beau is confronted with some perceived threat, but his fears cower him, his worst fears are realized and he is defeated - a complete inversion of the archetypal hero's journey.

Saddled with a bloated three-hour runtime, 'Afraid' suffers a flatness of story and character from start to finish. The arduously long film is merely the meandering journey of a paranoid man with a persecution complex weathering indignity after indignity. The nearly one-dimensional titular character is best defined by his constant shrieks of terror ... and that's about it. The aptly titled movie is exactly as promised: Beau is an afraid man and he's forced to make a journey rooted in his deep inadequacy. Honestly an hour-and-a-half or even two-hour version of this same basic premise would be a gripping and harrowing ride. Aster's basic story has the makings of a truly unnerving ride - if only the story was better focused and storytelling more disciplined.

'Afraid' succeeds on an experiential level as the audience is thrown into Beau's unenviable shoes as he takes L after L after L. And aside from mocking the traditional hero's story, making the audience as discomforted as possible seems to be Aster's main goal with this increasingly bizarre and half-baked story. And this is the film's failing: 'Afraid' is simply an exercise in watching a loser fail over and over and over, until he fails utterly. Despite the film's bizarre plot twists, the story's repetition of Beau's impotence and failure makes the film predictable in the worst way: no matter what absurd plot twist Aster throws at Beau, Beau is consistently pathetic. For all the "shock" thrown into the film, there's very little that's actually surprising because Beau doesn't have a character arch - he neither grows nor regresses. Beau is simply a one-note character: he is the personification of angst. This shallow character is simply not compelling enough to root for - so 'Afraid' comes off as little more than a carefully crafted, three-hour gauntlet designed to punish a spineless loser.

In the footsteps of Toni Collette in 'Hereditary' and Florence Pugh in 'Midsommar,' Joaquin Phoenix is yet another stellar lead performance in an Ari Aster film. Phoenix totally commits to this undiluted personification of fear. Beau is a paper-thin character, yet Phoenix embodies a man whose mundane, daily life is an unyielding horror film - with dangers lurking around every corner. His performance alone is worth the price of admission. The rest of the ensemble cast does their best to flesh out projections of Beau's internal inadequacies and guilt as he spirals into some psychotic break.

'Beau Is Afraid' makes some impotent attempts at comedy, such as the gag of a naked man who stabs random folk. It's supposed to be funny because there's a guy who stabs people ... and he's naked. Hilarious. The attempts to weave in something approximating "comedy" into this nightmare are so half-hearted that they seem pointless and misguided.

Final verdict: Aster's latest is a shallow, bloated manic immersion in pure anxiety undermined by a grossly inflated runtime and total lack of character development. Cannot in good faith recommend this to casual film audience - but Aster fans will probably embrace it.

Score: 2/5

'Beau Is Afraid' opens in theaters nationwide April 21. The dark comedy horror is rated R for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language and has a runtime of 179 minutes.