It’s a polarizing movie but those tend to be the important ones.

Beau is Afraid is the best movie out of the ones I’ve seen recently. Not necessarily the most enjoyable, but I couldn’t quit thinking about it, which is what makes it great.
I’ve been obsessively watching director Ari Aster’s interviews and Q&A for days.

At this point I think he’s a genius on the level of Tarantino or Scorsese.
It’s fascinating to see how normal and harmless he seems when his films are so disturbing.

Beau Is Afraid contains a lot of black humor as well as anxiety and sadness. I had to chuckle when he said he tends find the worst case scenario funny – reminded me of me.
This is yet another movie about family trauma. Aster has been cagey about the nature of it, but judging by Beau Is Afraid and Hereditary (which traumatized me thoroughly), Aster must have had some traumatic family experiences of his own.
People are driving themselves crazy trying to figure out what it all meant, treating it as a puz

zle to be solved when it’s not that kind of movie. The events and scenarios that frighten Beau are so over the top that you can’t tell what’s real.
All you need is the theme: The horror of being a man child who isn’t allowed and isn’t able to grow up.
It’s very Freudian. Think of it like a long nightmare that points to a deeper truth. The best way is to just let the dream logic wash over you.
It reminded me of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Similar theme of the narcissistic mother and the protagonist who attempts to become an authentic person and fails.
Like Pink, Beau is unable to escape his traumas. There is a point where he tries to get over that hump and become his own person, but he fails. Doesn’t have enough juice.

It reminds me of the secret message in the Wall – at the very end Pink says “so this is…” and at the very beginning, “where we came in.” It’s a closed loop.
You don’t get to know whether much of what Beau sees is literally true. So much of what happens is a projection of his fears onto the world. But we can draw some conclusions.
His mother is evil or at least a malignant narcissist. That’s pretty clear.
She might not have killed the housekeeper, but it seemed like something she would do. She might not have locked his twin in the attic, but it seemed like something she might have done.
Telling him his father and grandfather died from having sex sounded like something she might have done. A very cruel way to keep him dependent.
Everyone Beau connects with turns out to be on his mother’s payroll, so that there’s no one in the world that he can trust.
His mother used his image to help build her business empire and apparently used him as a guinea pig for new drugs.
Beau was only acceptable as a boy. She apparently had no use for men, even a grown-up son. Growing up means sex, and becoming a man and men are dangerous and unpredictable.
It’s polarizing – not everyone is willing to watch a 3 hour movie where the would-be hero fails. But I think it needed to happen that way. Not every momma’s boy manages to escape.
I think there’s also a larger theme about modern society: How to be a man in a world that has eliminated positive, traditional roles for men.
Beau imagines himself as a farmer who protects his children, but that role is unavailable to him.
If a boy child is made to believe that being a man is inherently bad, the only choices become be a bad man or remain a child forever. We need to normalize the concept of the good man.