Respond to these rapid questions in our Beau Is Afraid quiz and we will tell you which Beau Is Afraid character you are. Play it now.
Have you heard the story about the youngster who was afraid of his mother? This joke is told in “Beau Is Afraid” for three astounding, occasionally taxing, but always captivating hours. Joaquin Phoenix’s captivating performance at the film’s core actualizes what it might be like for a boy to abruptly stop developing and instead turn into a graying body. Phoenix’s voice is quite fragile and his lips appears to be tiny, as if he were still sucking. His eyes, which frequently convey a primitive character, have never appeared so gentle. His persona would turn out to be much too naive for this environment. Beau’s nightmare and his fate are revealed in the narrative that follows.
Ari Aster is the writer and director of the movie, and he’s always been a lovable man. Even if his superb, trauma-laden dramas “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” are full with the agony of relationships, the cruel jest that lies beneath them is what gives them life—they are bleak comedy about the fear that everyone has of losing their free will and getting screwed from the start. Being destined from birth is the subject of the engulfing fantasy “Beau Is Afraid,” which is loaded with motherly concerns. This is Aster’s funniest film to date.
Beau is a classic example of an Aster protagonist, barely surviving in a horrific setting that Aster and production designer Fiona Crombie painstakingly rendered. People fight in the middle of the street, they threaten to leap off buildings, and dead bodies are scattered around Beau’s area in downtown. It’s a Busby Berkeley musical, and the choreography is death and devastation. Aster, who has been working with Pawel Pogorzelski for a while, observes this opulent disarray in the same manner that Peter Greenaway did with long dining tables in “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover.” Such tracking shots here gorgeously depict a sick, depressing planet eating itself alive in the open.
Beau’s world-building serves as a ferocious prelude to the colossal worries that will later surface in both the present and the past, including a lack of personal space, the risk of not being able to please people, and the impossibility of uncontrollable bad luck. Aster draws you in with each bizarre, claustrophobic turn of events by embracing his brutal sense of comedy, such as when an irate neighbor continues slipping him notes to turn down the volume even though he’s sitting in silence. It has a punchy, rollicking opening act that makes you laugh to keep from screaming and sets a dreadful rhythm that the film is not very concerned with maintaining. From this point forward, nothing will be as easy; consistency can be confusing.
But you shouldn’t waste any more time and start this Beau Is Afraid quiz.
The most terrifying times in Beau’s life are when his mother, Mona Wassermann, calls him. Beau can see Mona’s initials on almost every item in his run-down apartment. The enormously popular Mona, played over the phone with beautiful venom by Patti LuPone, makes Beau feel even smaller and thereby intensifies the intense, unnerving tension. Mom replies, “I trust you’ll do the right thing,” in Aster’s heartbreaking dialogue. He accidentally misses his trip to see her (it’s a lengthy story), and all of the guilt, shame, and humiliation are condensed into a phone conversation. He lacks free choice but does have a constant yearning to not let his mother down. The extended close-ups of Phoenix on the phone, attempting to maintain composure, are some of the best parts of the film, especially when he subsequently learns some terrible news about his mother.
The story of “Beau Is Afraid” is told in chapters that are different lengths and tones, and during them, Beau’s sense of security changes. Beau is gravely injured after having a breakdown that causes him to scream and run naked through the streets. He is taken into the care of two suburban parents (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), who manage to hide their own suffering behind thinly veiled smiles while tending to him and giving him medication. They will assist Beau in going to see his mother tomorrow. Beau must do so. Beau (Kylie Rogers) finds a new opponent in Toni (Kylie Rogers), who is upset about this strange stranger sleeping in her rainbow-colored bedroom. Beau has essentially become their family’s replacement kid for their lost soldier boy Nathan. Rogers is a striking flaw in the chapter’s unsettling portrayal of a nuclear family, but everyone else adds fascinating depth to the smiling terror of this sequence. She bursts into and out of each scene like a powerful natural force—and this film is many of them—making Beau’s voyage even more perplexing.
Beau Is Afraid Quiz
Phoenix’s character is forced to sit down halfway through “Beau Is Afraid” so that it can float into a stop-motion segment with beautiful animation done by Cristbal León and Joaqun Cocia (“The Wolf House”). It’s a movie-within-a-movie where “Beau Is Afraid” touches on sentimental, delirious, poetic aspects of its muddled mind and balances out its other uncanny moments. Additionally, it contributes to the film’s wildly erratic rhythms (much like the notorious lewd joke “The Aristocrats,” “Beau Is Afraid” prefers shapeless tangents for its full horrific effect, which is occasionally obtuse and occasionally distancing). An significant metaphor that becomes crucial to the rich, painful quality of the film, of art being so lifelike that don’t even recognize how much of yourself is in it, completes the scenario.
Also, you will find out which character are you in this Beau Is Afraid quiz.
In order to teach us more about little Beau (Armen Nahapetian), “Beau Is Afraid” leaps back in time. This includes a flashback on a cruise ship with a young girl who makes his mother feel threatened. The artificial sets and the way Nahapetian resembles a younger Phoenix make the sequences visually arresting, but they also highlight a flaw in Aster’s growing maximalist worldview. He is unable to express sensitivity in a way that is convincing enough, and certain clumsy twists here rob this intended tragedy of its emotional impact.
In these sequences, Zoe Lister-Jones portrays Mona, and what a tremendous performance it is. Lister-Jones reveals what made such a monster in Beau’s psyche while aiding in our understanding of Beau by illustrating Mona’s power and yearning. One scene features her lying in the dark with her kid while a red light shines on her face as she tells him a story from the past that will ruin Beau for good. Because of the time and unnerving gentleness with which Lister-Jones delivers each traumatic revelation to us, syllable by sentence, the monologue is completely captivating.
About the quiz
The last act of the movie, whose particular details won’t be revealed here, sees “Beau Is Afraid” fully realized as an exploitation movie made from a therapist’s notes. With moments of sheer dread, mind-blowing cartoonish insanity, and an unsettling blending of the past and present, it is a full-on Grand Guignol emotional and psychological agony, all set to a wonderfully picked Mariah Carey song. More personalities, secrets, and psychological explosions are crammed inside Aster. Despite the fact that this frantic piece contains powerful performances that feature fire and brimstone, it also causes a tiredness that is not to Aster’s advantage. The sequence is stunning visually, with a setting of unsettling modern architecture that towers above the characters and interspersed images that will make you smile. The main speech, which reads like an Oedipal rant, and the twists that border on self-parody become tiresome at such a loud intensity, much like the furious strings of Bobby Krlic’s score. In its grand declaration, “Beau Is Afraid” runs the risk of reducing its complex but disorganized arrangement to a straightforward scream.
Also, you must try to play this Beau Is Afraid quiz.
The movie has a number of unexpected performances from actors including Parker Posey, Denis Ménochet, and Stephen McKinley Henderson that flourish in the film’s bizarre surroundings. The most significant character in “Beau Is Afraid” is Aster, who is visibly struggling with his career. There is no rule that says one must have a particular number of features before their authorship may be considered. The 2011 original short film “Beau” is only one of Aster’s works included in “Beau Is Afraid”; other works include the concept of his short “Munchausen,” the hellish cityscape of “C’est la Vie” (starring Bradley Fisher, who here plays the role of “Birthday Boy Stab Man”), and Aster’s obsession with head trauma, communes, etc. The startling use of first-person point-of-view views in this film (a terrified youngster nodding to his mother) and its bookending scenes cause a portion of the movie to feel like a rehash of what made “Hereditary,” which is made all the more profoundly personal. The first shot of “Beau Is Afraid” perfectly captures the exterior of this film’s intimate nature. The epilogue gives us a sense of how it all feels like entertainment.
Naturally, all of this is based on my initial experience with the film. Any fan of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” knows that these films benefit from repeated viewings and a closer examination of the mechanics each time. When revealing these plots about horrible relationships, Aster’s extraordinary talent as an entertainer includes manipulating how much an audience understands on their first viewing as opposed to their second or third. Most of all, I’m curious to see if the three hours of “Beau Is Afraid”‘s emotional content will grow more complex or if it will crumble under their weight. But like Paul Thomas Anderson’s own third film “Magnolia,” which is also three hours long, Aster’s ambition is what matters; it is now even more clear that he has never produced a feature-length work or a short that is careless or arrogantly self-assured—and he never will. We now know who to thank for that after watching “Beau Is Afraid,” a disorienting but remarkable experience.
On sale in a few theaters starting April 14 and across the country starting April 21.
For more personality quizzes check this: Breeding Difficulty Quiz.
