YMMV / Beau Is Afraid

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Therapists are evil and out to get you.
  • Living passively will only lead to misery and death.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Considering Mona is still alive and practically reshaping reality to get Beau to do her bidding, one has to wonder if Beau's father really is that monstrosity he witnesses in the attic or just another tool she is using to wear away at his sanity. A few moments in the movie imply that Beau's father was just a regular man, such as the dialogue between Mona and a male voice during the birth scene or the man in the Orphans' play that claims to have met him. It's possible that the monster wasn't really the father or that he mutated into it.
  • Arguably, this could be applied to every single character in the movie (other than Beau). We know that at least Beau's therapist, Roger and Elaine work for Beau's mother Mona, but considering how long and far her reach extends we have to wonder if the same isn't true for Beau's noisy neighbour, the cleaner, Birthday Boy Stab Man, the Orphans of the Forest and everyone else!
  • Is Beau himself a reliable viewpoint character? How accurate are his perceptions to what is "actually" happening? He's clearly traumatized and mentally unwell from the beginning, and that's before he takes his meds without water despite being warned that doing so can have serious side effects. The behavior of virtually every other character is bizarre and exaggerated, with Beau himself being the only one who seems to notice anything odd about, among other things, the cartoonish levels of criminal behavior among his neighbors and Roger's family stuffing their faces with mysterious pills constantly. Even the two most obviously supernatural occurrences, the attic monster and the final Kangaroo Court scene, relate directly to Beau's two biggest anxieties, namely his desire to know his absent father and his self-loathing respectively, and thus could simply be hallucinations as he hits the bottom of his downward spiral.
  • An opening credits gag reveals that the entire film was partly produced by Beau's mother's company. Even though the film follows Beau throughout, is it possible that the perspective of the events shown is actually Mona's and not Beau's? Compare to Aster's previous film Hereditary, in which everything that occurs to Annie and her family is a direct result of her mother Ellen's actions, even though Ellen has died before the events of the film take place.
  • Was Mona sexually abusive in addition to emotionally? She and Beau shared a bed well into his teens, and she was on a positive crusade to prevent him from becoming interested in girls his own age, using the flimsy justification of his genetic heart condition making arousal potentially fatal. Alternately, if his father truly is a giant monster, maybe that wasn't the gene she was worried about.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: It's not particularly surprising that a three-hour movie written as an allegory for the director's deepest anxieties and insecurities, consisting largely of putting its protagonist through an exhaustive (and for some exhausting) Trauma Conga Line, wasn't a box office success; it's more surprising that Ari Aster was even given the budget to make it.
• Awesome Music:
  • The trailer remix of Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger" turns the already awesome song into something truly epic.
  • The scene itself might be uncomfortable, but there's no denying how great and catchy Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby" is and how it hilariously contrasts Elaine and Beau's awkward sex scene.
• Common Knowledge: The younger version of Beau is not a de-aged Joaquin Phoenix, but rather actor Armen Nahapetian. This misconception mainly popped up due to Nahapetian looking so much like Phoenix.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The entire movie, basically. Beau's adventure oscillates wildly between funny, terrifying and cringe-worthy, usually multiple times within the same scene:
  • One of the most noteworthy instances of this would be the sex scene between Beau and Elaine. It's already pretty awkward to witness considering Beau is still inexperienced and neurotic, but just as he is about to climax, he realizes his father may have passed down his condition in which having an intense orgasm could kill him due to cardiac arrhythmia. He spends the rest of the time panicking in terror while Elaine is enjoying herself. Eventually, Beau turns out fine, and Elaine decides to keep going to finish herself off. But then the kicker? Elaine is the one who ends up dying by sex, while still on top of Beau. Cue shock, disgust, laughter, or all of the above.
  • Then there is what can already be considered the most infamous scene in the whole movie: Beau discovering that his father is a giant penis-shaped monster. You won't be able to unsee it, but chances are you may have laughed at the absolute ridiculousness of it.
• Ending Fatigue: Beau finally arrives at his mother's house for the funeral... and the movie still has almost an hour left to go. We get long scenes of Beau walking around and looking at pictures, then reuniting with Elaine and having sex with her. Then we get The Reveal that Mona was alive all along. And then the movie still keeps going on with the infamous penis monster and Beau finally snapping, killing his mother, and escaping in a boat. The end, right? Wrong. There's still a whole entire scene where Beau goes into a cave and a giant trial happens. Then a fight breaks out at the trial, Beau's boat explodes, and he finally dies. Especially with how many scenes in this act seem to last very long, it feels like the movie is spinning its wheels to get to its conclusion.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: One interpretation about the attic in Mona's manor is that it represents Beau's subconscious and thus the penis-monster that's allegedly his father and his brother were representations of his male libido and his self-determination, respectivelly, both kept repressed by his mother.
• Jerkass Woobie: Toni. While she acts like the typical teenage brat and is needlessly cruel towards Beau, it's heavily implied that she's depressed and her parents only make it worse by idolizing her dead older brother while doing very little to treat her own issues. That's why her sudden suicide by drinking paint is so shocking.
• Memetic Mutation: When the film's teaser poster was first revealed, Joaquin Phoenix's name was bigger than the film's title, leading some to joke the film was actually called Joaquin Phoenix.
• Padding: Even the movie's biggest fans seem to agree that a minute shy of 3 hours is very long for a movie like this, especially as its first hour is very tightly constructed and presented, and its chaotic, anxious energy just dissipates after that. The infamous play scene is seen as a big contributor to that, in addition to a good chunk of hour three, which is just padded with five-minute scenes of Beau looking at pictures and looking nervous (despite these scenes constituting The Reveal.) That the third hour takes place mostly in a single house doesn't help.
• Paranoia Fuel: So much of the film revolves around common neuroses turning out to be accurate.
• Squick: Beau's dad is a giant monster penis! And when Jeeves shoots at it, it bleeds blood and semen!
• Spiritual Antithesis: To Everything Everywhere All at Once. Both are surrealist comedies that feature some truly absurd imagery and center around dysfunctional familial relationships, but while Everything ultimately has an optimistic message and the dysfunctional family reconcile, this film is hopelessly bleak from beginning to end, and the family never gets any better.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • To Synecdoche, New York. Both films are about a milquetoast man whose entire reality seems to be plotting against him (aided by an untrustworthy therapist), and spends years pining for a lost love only for her to abruptly die their first night together. Both films feature a dreamlike atmosphere of Surreal Horror and Surreal Humor, with an emphasis on the breakdown between fantasy and reality. The difference is mostly in presentation, with this film exploring the horrific elements. If Synecdoche feels like watching someone have a dream, Beau is undoubtedly a nightmare.
  • Also to A Serious Man. Like the Coen brothers' movie, the protagonist of Beau is a Jewish man who finds himself tormented by bizarre troubles surrounding his dysfunctional family, with Beau dialing up the ambiguously supernatural/religious events of the former into pure surrealism (and, coincidentally, both movies star Richard Kind).
• Tear Jerker: Beau's entire situation is this, especially if you relate to him or know people who are in a similar situation to his.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Already a common reaction to Ari Aster's previous works, including his notorious short films, this film doubles down on the Trauma Conga Line thrust upon its protagonist. The entire setting is out for Beau, whether through apathy or blatant hostility, and the few people in the story who show him kindness either die or are revealed to have ulterior motives. Some audience members stopped caring about Beau's situation an hour into the movie because of how hopeless it already was even before he's killed 2 hours later, making the rest of the film feel like a pointless misery fest.
• The Woobie: It wouldn't be an Ari Aster film if the lead wasn't this. The titular Beau Wassermann is a polite and kind man plagued by anxiety and psychological issues who spends the entire film going through an extended Trauma Conga Line and encounters many people who try to manipulate and or hurt him, while the few characters who are nice to him either betray him or die horribly. And in the end, he is unfortunately denied a happy ending after all his suffering, as his emotionally abusive mother extensively guilt-trips him and literally sentences him to a tragic death via drowning. Poor Beau indeed.

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