Beau is scheduled to leave the next day to visit his mother, a fraught proposition that leads to the shrink wondering aloud whether Beau has ever harbored matricidal fantasies; within a few moments, he’s prescribing Beau a “cool new drug” that is sure to alleviate his worst phobias and projections.
Spoiler alert: It doesn’t! After this forebodingly ironic setup, “Beau Is Afraid” sends its sad-sack protagonist on an increasingly deranged journey through what is either a pitiless, reality-adjacent American landscape or his own inner terrors. Battered, bruised, savagely whipped into a creature of almost fetal passivity, Phoenix’s Beau is far from ideal: Part Dante, part Dorothy, he’s a man desperately trying to find a path through the darkling wood of his own psychic wounds.
For the past few years, Aster has gained a cult following for his exacting, imaginatively audacious world-building. Those gifts are on prodigious display in “Beau Is Afraid,” which is divided into chapters that roughly coincide with blackouts Beau suffers as a result of violence or his own addled state. The film’s most bravura — and shockingly disturbing — sequence finds Beau at home in an unnamed city, where he lives in a squalid apartment in a sleazy, crime-infested red-light district.
At one point, Aster stages a magnificent play within a play within a play that recalls the soaring counterfactuals of “
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