Film / Beau Is Afraid

"There's a dead man in the pool."

"You will walk many miles. Dozens will become hundreds. Hundreds will become thousands. Your adventures will continue for years and years."

Beau Is Afraid is a 2023 surrealist tragicomedy horror film written and directed by Ari Aster. Co-produced by A24 and Aster's production company Square Peg, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix, with Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Parker Posey, Richard Kind and Michael Gandolfini among the supporting roles.

Beau Wassermann (Phoenix) is an extremely anxious man who is trying to visit his smothering, mysterious mother Mona (LuPone). However, after being besieged by random, distressing events, he is run over by a seemingly affable couple, Roger (Lane) and Grace (Ryan), who take him home with them and nurse him back to health. The strangeness of Beau's past and present collide as he tries to get home to his mother.

The film was in development by Aster since the early stages of his career. His 2011 short film Beau served as a basis for parts of the film, and a draft of the film's script dated to 2014 was leaked and circulated online. It was officially announced by A24 in February 2021 (with Disappointment Blvd. being its announced title, solely to muddy the waters about its connection to the leaked script).

Beau Is Afraid was released on April 14, 2023^note delayed from an original planned release in 2022. Its trailer can be watched here.

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Beau Is Afraid contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Beau's mother Mona is manipulative and narcissistic, on top of having a creepy Oedipus-like attachment to her son.
  • She's also revealed to be delusional, blaming Beau for a multitude of problems and believing that he doesn't care about her due to being late for her funeral, despite the fact that she would have known that Beau was held up by Roger and Grace due to the fact that they work for her and had set up cameras recording that he was in their house.
  • Then there's what she did to his twin, her other son, who she angrily forced up into the attic and had locked up there alone in the dark with his monstrous father for the rest of his life. All because as a little boy he threw the most minor of tantrums at bathtime refusing to get undressed and wanting to know where his father was. The twin seems to have at least been given enough food and water on Mona's orders to keep him alive and grow into adulthood, but that's the only kindness this supposedly saintly mother allowed him. He appears to be shackled to a wall and utterly unresponsive to Beau's sudden appearance in the attic, suggesting he's long since given up and accepted the fate his mother decided for him, much as Beau will in the end. Despite what she'd say, Mother of the Year, she isn't.
• Actor Allusion: This isn't the first time Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely mentally ill man downtrodden by an openly hostile society and has severe mommy issues.
• Alternate Universe: The film's version of 2022 contains a number of differences from our reality, including the existence of a US city and state named Corrina, the US being involved in a military conflict with Venezuela, Moviefone still maintaining its now defunct call-in service, and there being no references to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Ambiguously Evil: Roger, the husband of the family that accidentally ran over Beau outwardly seems like a very affable guy. However, small things pop up that make you question how good he really is. He is never seen taking the mysterious pills that he makes the rest of the family take; he's casually dismissive of Beau having reopened his stab wounds despite ostensibly keeping Beau under his care so he can recover; and his insistence that Beau cannot leave gradually begins to take a sinister tone. Then there's the fact that his "helper health monitor" is later revealed to be a Tracking Device (which allows Jeeves to track him down later), complete with a stun option that electrocutes the wearer. Then there's also the fact that Grace slides Beau a secret message that she is clearly hiding from Roger, and then later whispers to Beau the TV channel that lets him know there are cameras hidden in the house that are monitoring him. His face is also on the poster of Mona's employees towards the end of the movie, all but confirming that he was just another agent in Mona's attempts to control Beau's life. If you take it completely literally at least.
• Ambiguously Human: Beau himself, and his twin brother revealed toward the climax. Considering their father is a massive penile monster (and that Beau is capable of killing a woman by having sex with her), neither probably counts as pure Homo Sapiens.
• Ambiguously Jewish: Beau and Mona are both clearly based on Jewish stereotypes, and there are some strong allusions that suggest they're meant to be Jewish. Mona has a rabbi at her funeral (though it's not a traditional Jewish funeral), and Patti Lupone is frequently typecast as Jewish characters ^note though she's not Jewish in real life; Mona is an exaggerated version of a Jewish Mother complete with a Sizable Semitic Nose; Beau is a suffocated only son who is deeply neurotic.
• Antagonist in Mourning: After Beau dies, Mona can be heard weeping and screaming "my baby".
• Apartment Complex of Horrors: As part of the Crapsack World, Beau lives in a crappy apartment building where he's repeatedly accused of Loud of War, which causes his neighbor to bang on his wall and keep him awake. He then oversleeps, nearly misses his flight, and goes outside with his luggage, where he's met by a guy who screams at him, "You're fucked, pal!" It gets stolen from the hallway, he can't find his key, so he has to leave it open, and when he goes outside, a lot of homeless people flood his apartment and take it over. When he gets back in, it's been trashed and a man is still hanging from the ceiling.
• Asleep for Days: When Beau awakes after getting hit by a truck, Grace tells him that he has been sleeping for two days.
• Asshole Victim: Toni. After the needlessly cruel shenanigans she puts Beau through while he stays with her family, you're kinda glad she finally kills herself with the paint can, although her death ends up making things much worse for him.
• Benevolent Monsters: Played with. Beau's dad, a.k.a. the Penis Monster, isn't actually malicious against him and even express happiness upon their encounter, saying "Beau? My beautiful boy!", albeit in a very creepy voice. It doesn't make Beau any less scared of him, though.
• Big Damn Reunion: In Beau's mental play, there is a heartwarming reunion between him as an old man and his three sons.
• Big Fancy House: Mona's lakeside mansion is an isolated, high-ceiling, mid-century estate with an indoor garden. It's huuuuuuuuuge!
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: It's established right in Beau's first scene with his therapist that he doesn't have the best relationship with his mother, but why is not explained due to Beau's reluctance to speak badly about her and he is genuinely torn-up by news of her death, enough that he must have some love for her. The movie is long enough that by the time you see her on-camera in flashbacks, she comes off as a normal enough parent spending time with her son and offering advice, her love for Beau is emphasized by Dr. Cohen's phone call and eulogy, and Beau has been trying so hard to reach her funeral, it's almost enough to make you forget anything might have been amiss... And then he does reach the funeral, where it's revealed Mona faked her death and put him through all this to "test" him, guilt-trips him about coming "late" to her funeral while casually having Elaine's body disposed of (with the air of having had more than one body disposed of by her household before), and plays audio of his private therapy sessions she's been listening to.
• Blackmail: Toni makes Beau take a drag from her drug cigarette by threatening to claim that he harassed her.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Two of each (mostly the younger and older versions). The older and young Elaines are brunette, the older and younger Monas are redheads, and Grace and her daughter Toni are both blondes.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter:
  • Toni takes an immediate and extreme dislike to Beau, due to believing her parents are using him as a Replacement Goldfish for her deceased brother.
  • Even young Elaine to an extent, but she has a soft side for Teen Beau, which veers her more into Jerk with a Heart of Gold territory.
• Breather Episode: The night Beau spends with the Orphans of the Forest, a traveling avant-garde theater group. They welcome him kindly, and he spends most of the time in a haunting but harmless fantasy as he loses himself in their play.
• Butt-Monkey: Beau. The plot does not let up from basically putting him through the wringer every chance it gets.
• The Cameo:
  • Bill Hader has a vocal and later from-the-back cameo as a UPS delivery man who discovers Mona's body.
  • David Mamet as the rabbi for Mona's funeral service.
• Can't Have Sex, Ever: Beau believes that having sex would kill him, so he remains chaste all the way to his forties.
• Ceiling Cling: After finding out about his mother's (apparent) death, Beau tries to take a bath in his overflowing bathtub, only to find an intruder clinging to his ceiling directly above him.
• Chekhov's Gun: At one point, a notice for a loose brown recluse spider can be seen taped to everybody's door in Beau’s apartment complex. Later, Beau tries to take a bath and finds an intruder clinging to his ceiling. After a long beat of the two staring at each other and the intruder slowly losing his grip, the spider crawls onto his face out of nowhere, at which point he freaks out and falls down onto Beau.
• Childhood Brain Damage: The opening birth-giving scene suggests that baby Beau was dropped to the floor by the doctors which led to mental deficiencies in him.
• Classical Anti-Hero: Beau is far from your typical strong heroic protagonist nor is he even smart, he's a neurotic and extremely anxious man who's constantly filled with self-doubt, but he isn't really a bad person either, and you can't help but root for him.
• Country Matters: There are three pointed uses of the word — first used by Elaine to describe her mother, used again by Elaine to ask Beau if he would call his mother a "cunt," and then used later on to absolutely devastating effect by Mona to really make sure Beau knows how little she cares about their relationship:
  Mona: Even when you were a baby, you rejected me and refused to breastfeed while every other smug cunt on the street had happy, docile babies sucking their tits dry!
• Crapsack World: The city and state of Corrina seem to be a cartoonish exaggeration of American cities as portrayed in fiction, with deranged homeless people stabbing strangers in the streets and crowds urging suicidal people to jump off buildings, and Beau is at the center of it all.
  • What little we learn about the broader world isn't much prettier. Among other things, there was apparently a major military conflict between the US and Venezuela.
• Creator Thumbprint: This film has a lot in common with Aster's previous works, including:
  • Protagonists with intense family trauma and anxiety issues that prove insurmountable.
  • Extreme violence against people's faces.
  • Full frontal nudity Played for Horror and Fan Disservice.
  • Villainous Incest.
  • People's lives and misfortunes being hinted or revealed to be entirely dictated by a greater manipulative conspiracy.
  • Cheerful, too-friendly Bitch in Sheep's Clothing antagonists who were in on the Evil Plan all along.
  • Lots of symmetrical wide shots.
  • A very bleak ending.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: And how!
  • The catalyst that sets off the plot is when Beau's mother is killed off-screen by a Falling Chandelier of Doom.
  • Jeeves is killed by a penis-shaped monster stabbing him in the head with one of its appendages.
  • Toni drinks an entire can of paint in the midst of an emotional breakdown and promptly drops dead from poisoning.
  • Beau at the movie's end; the motor on his boat explodes, flipping the boat and trapping him underneath, causing him to drown.
• Dark Reprise: The pop ballad "Always Be My Baby" by Mariah Carey, the song that plays while Beau and Elaine have sex, takes a much more sinister tone considering it reflects Beau's relationship with his mother Mona, who takes the My Beloved Smother trope to the extreme.
• Death Faked for You: Mona's housekeeper agreed to pose as her headless corpse.
• Decomposite Character: In the 2011 short movie, it's revealed at the end that Beau's mother is not only the one who stole his keys, but she's also some sort of weird furry monster. In this movie Mona is also conspiring against Beau, but there's nothing monstrous (literally speaking, at least) about her. The monster this time is his alleged father.
• Denser and Wackier: Much more eventful, chaotic, and unrelenting than Ari Aster's previous works that explored horror, surrealism, and abuse in much more pensive and downbeat ways like Hereditary and Midsommar.
• Despair Event Horizon: At the ending trial, when his lawyer is killed, Beau is left to fend for himself. He tries to appeal to his mother and her lawyer, but they refuse to accept any apology. Beau loses all hope and simply accepts his fate.
• Disinherited Child: Despite being the child of a successful billionaire entrepreneur, Beau lives in complete squalor in a run-down apartment in a crime-ridden city, and is flat broke.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Mona relentlessly abuses and eventually kills her son Beau for his "misdeeds" and because he has shown himself to supposedly not care about her by not coming to her funeral, even though Beau has been shown to be a neurotic mess and not intentionally malignant in any way, and by the fact that he was trying his very best to make it to her funeral despite the absurd misadventures and roadblocks he kept facing — misadventures and roadblocks Mona put in his way to begin with.
• The Ditherer: Beau's weak will and indecisiveness lead to him being pushed around and outright bullied for most of his life. Meeting up with Elaine at the dessert buffet and kissing her was one of his few moments of outright agency until the events of the movie force him to make some life-or-death decisions.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The "helper health monitor" Beau is made to wear eerily resembles an ankle bracelet worn by parolees. That's because it more or less is.
  • In the end, Beau goes through a cave that leads him into an oval-shaped, flooded arena where he dies. This is essentially a symbolic representation of a birth in reverse.
• The Dog Bites Back: Subverted, not that it does much good in the long run. After a great deal of physical stress and injury since the car accident, and a series of shocking and traumatic revelations getting dropped on his head by Mona with little breathing room, Beau snaps. He clamps his hands around Mona's throat and begins strangling her with a cold look of rage on his face, but comes back to his senses and lets go, only for her to keep staggering away and fall through a glass display, seemingly dead for real this time. Beau wanders out of the house in shock and finds a boat to set off in, seemingly about to end the movie free from his mother's control and surveillance once and for all. However, it then turns out that Mona didn't die — but any remaining affection she might've had for him sure did, though. Now that she feels fully justified in her resentment, she watches him panic, plead to her for his life, and die, all with a look of Tranquil Fury.
• Downer Ending: Beau is ultimately murdered by the mother he has spent the entire film, and all of his life, desperately trying to please. After being put through a lengthy series of one horrible event after another, he is "rewarded" with mass public humiliation and an undignified death, with almost every moment where it looked like he'd catch a break eventually being ripped away and substituted with something even worse.
• Dramatic Drop: Beau drops his phone after realizing that his mother is dead when the UPS delivery guy answers her phone the second time.
• Dream Sequence: A lot of them, revisiting old memories and acting as interludes between each of the four acts. The most prominent one is after Beau is invited to watch a play in the forest, he is entranced by the plot and imagines himself as the protagonist in a lengthy animated sequence.
• *Drool* Hello: When Beau tries to take a bath, he feels a few drops of something land on him from the ceiling. He looks up and finds an intruder hiding there, with the drops having been from his anxiety/overexertion-induced sweat.
• Elemental Motifs: Water is a consistent part of the film:
  • It makes an appearance just before or as something bad happens (the intruder over the bath, Beau desperately gulping water just as the strangers break into his flat, the flood in the play, and the trial are just a handful of examples).
  • The first time we see Beau, he is standing in front of an aquarium.
  • Beau's surname is Wassermann, which literally translates as "water man", but is the German name for Aquarius.
  • Beau's therapist stresses that he must take his medication with water.
  • All of Beau's flashbacks with Elaine take place on a cruise ship, specifically near its pool.
  • Beau is taking a bath when he sees the intruder, which ultimately drives him out of his flat.
  • In Beau's fantasy during the Orphans of the Forest's play, he's separated from his wife and three sons by a huge ocean wave.
  • Beau's trial takes place in a flooded arena, and he meets his death by drowning.
• Empty Bedroom Grieving: Grace and Roger have been keeping their son's room untouched after he died in the Venezuelan war. Toni is furious that Beau gets to sleep in her room instead of her brother's.
• Establishing Character Moment: In the first few scenes we meet Beau at the therapist's office where he clearly has issues discussing his relationship with his mother.
• Evil Is Petty: Mona's examples of why Beau is a bad son are so ridiculously petty it's nigh-on comical that she's using them as a direct justification to have him killed.
  • Something that deserves special mention is the way that she responded to Beau not being able to come see her the day he was scheduled because his apartment keys were stolen in the unsafe neighborhood he lived in and he's been getting threatening notes. Refusing to believe his reasons were legitimate, she convinced her maid to let herself be killed and beheaded to fake Mona's gruesome death to guilt-trip Beau for not coming, then has her lawyer beat Beau over the head with more guilt-tripping to make him hurry up to the funeral after he got hit by a car and stabbed. All of which Mona knows about because she's watching him. It's monstrously petty for two reasons: first, she faked a gruesome death for herself and watched her mentally ill son's reaction to it to see how he reacted, deciding in the end it wasn't good enough and he doesn't return her devotion despite how she's seen all the pain he goes to try to make it to her the same as the viewers have; then on another layer, Beau's brief flashback shows that the particular maid she used in her ploy spent time tucking him into bed as a boy and he responded to her in a much happier, affectionate way than with Mona. Mona had enough money to arrange for a convincing fake body or even find someone outside her household to use, but given how entitled she feels towards Beau's unconditional love for taking care of him and how outrageously vindictive she gets, it comes off more as her killing her son's old babysitter out of spite as another way to "punish" him.
• Evil Matriarch: Again, Mona. In her monologue in the final act, she even describes her own mother as being abusive.
• Extreme Doormat: Beau, who is perpetually anxious and meek, never says anything unkind to anyone no matter how they've treated him, and does all he can to keep his head down and make nice with others at his own expense. Part of it is him being a Nice Guy who doesn't want to rock the boat, but most of it is clearly from growing up under the thumb of his clingy, controlling, hard-to-please mother.
• Face Death with Dignity: Downplayed with Beau. After he desperately pleads for his mother to help him in his trial and gets no response, he stops fighting and stares off into the distance moments before his boat capsizes. Judging by his glassy, weary expression, he's not exactly at peace about his fate, but he does seemingly finally accept how utterly hopeless he is.
• Fan Disservice: Beau's childhood crush Elaine dies while climaxing on top of Beau, and we see her stiff naked body with a mid-orgasm expression on her face.
• Fat Bastard: Beau's rotund therapist, who turns out to have been manipulating him at Mona's orders the entire time. He spends the entire climax smiling, apparently amused by Beau's humiliation.
• Flashback B-Plot: Flashbacks are shown of Beau's memory as a teenager taking a cruise with his mother and meeting his childhood crush Elaine, who basically shows him how to be alive and fearless in the face of uncertainty.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The first thing Beau's therapist writes down in his notebook is "guilty." This completely foreshadows the trial ending.
  • The Madonna and Child statue Beau buys on the street as a gift for his upcoming visit to his mother is a bite-sized copy of a much larger version found at his mother's house's front lawn.
  • As Beau walks down the street before he buys the statue, a worried mother snatches her son playing with a remote-control boat toy in a container of water, which flips upside down as he leaves, and chastises him for running off. This is basically a condensed version of the ending.
  • When Beau desperately asks the Janitor if he's seen who stole his keys and luggage, the Janitor contemptuously replies that Beau is "fucked" before walking off. Beau has inadvertently set off the chain of events that will lead to Mona having him killed.
  • The first time Beau calls his mother, he's answered by the family housemaid, who quickly hands the phone to Mona. The second time he calls, it is instead answered by a UPS delivery man who wandered into the house and found a headless body he believes to be Mona. This is the first hint that the body is actually the housemaid's and that Mona had faked her death.
  • When Beau climbs into the bathtub, the audience gets a lovely shot of Beau's literally massive balls. Later, at Roger's house, Roger informs Beau that his testicles are dangerously distended. At the end of the film, Beau discovers that his dad is literally a gigantic, 10-foot-tall cock and balls.
    • After Grace re-enters the house to the commotion going on in her son's old room, the TV is paused on an empty arena, which is ultimately where the big ending trial happens.
  • Another instance foreshadowing the ending; moments before Toni kills herself, she remarks how Beau has already failed his test.
  • At Mona's funeral, her headless body is laid to rest in a dress with her hands folded on her chest. Beau stops and pauses to stare at it for a while, which on first viewing you'd assume is him naturally needing time to process the sight of his mother's body. Beau later reveals to Mona he figured out when he saw it that she wasn't dead because the birthmark on "her" corpse's hands, which he remembered as being on the hands of the maid who helped take care of him and treated him kindly.
  • When Beau sees the hobos starting to take the elevator to get to his apartment, one of them briefly turns back and looks straight at him. This exact same hobo can be seen among the poster of Mona's employees, heavily implying that she was already conspiring against Beau back then.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The signage throughout the first act really hammer home the surreal, hilarious and debilitating reality that Beau is living in.
  • The sex shop on the corner of Beau's building includes services such as "Knife Dick (Stab Other Man)" and "Pussy Smoke Cigarette". Another sex shop across the street is called Asstral Projections. The convenience store across from Beau's Building, Cheapo Depot, is also revealed to be owned by MW during a wide shot. There's also posters for services like Cheap Divorce and Dental Homeopathy.
  • When all of the vagrants from the street take over Beau's apartment, they're shown repeating the exact same actions they were doing outside, most noticeably the tattoo'd man dropping soup that's too hot; the dancing man in his boxers; and the guy gouging another man's eyes out with his thumbs (apparently, they continued from where they left off on the pavement.)
  • When Beau arrives at his mother's house and looks at all the pictures, he comes across a photo of his mother that's a collage of all her employees and everyone he has ever interacted with is on there.
• Full-Frontal Assault: "Birthday Boy Stab Man" is a psychotic butt-naked homeless man running around stabbing people on the street.
• Funny Background Event: When Beau calls his mother's lawyer to inquire about the funeral, we see the wife and her husband in the background struggling to administer sedatives to the PTSD-stricken ex-soldier.
• Gag Penis: One of the more disturbing examples of this kind, combined with Our Monsters Are Weird. Beau's father is some kind of non-human entity that's a living set of a penis and balls several times bigger than a grown human with a nasty little face on it, a creepy inhuman voice, and Combat Tentacles that can easily pierce through bone and brain. It's... not clear exactly how Mona conceived the boys with this thing. It's so bizarre that on seeing it the first time and realizing that's what it is, after the classic horror movie build-up to a scary reveal of something spooky in the dark attic, it's probably going to pull a laugh as a knee-jerk reaction out of shock and the absurdity of the situation if nothing else. Fitting the horror-comedy tone of the movie, the unsettling aspects of the creature, it killing Jeeves, and realizing this thing is the only company Beau's brother has had for decades, keeps it from being too silly, and more surreal, gross, and upsetting.
• Gainax Ending: Not only is it revealed that Beau's father is a giant penis monster, and his mother was alive the whole time, but just when he thinks he's finally escaped on a boat into the ocean, he is literally put on trial in a giant arena by his own mother (who he had just strangled to death) and her lawyer for his life's misdeeds according to his mother. The boat he escapes in also explodes when he accepts his fate and loses the trial.
• Grave Humor: The marker in Mona's house that describes where the chandelier crushed her.
• Heroic BSoD: Beau has one after discovering his mother has died.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal:
  • During their confrontation in the third act, Beau's mother admits that she hates him. This leads to him trying to strangle her.
  • Played with for Beau towards his abusive mother. He has a deeply troubled relationship with Mona and struggles to admit to any resentment, the worst he says being that if she wasn't shown love and devotion the way she wanted it, she didn't believe he loved her. His therapist tries to goad him into admitting he wishes she were dead, but Beau emphatically denies it, is shocked and distraught on finding out that she did die shortly after he last spoke with her, and weeps and dreams about her often. After she forces him into an attic to see his imprisoned twin and grotesque inhuman father, Beau is at first apologetic and begging for forgiveness, but then on her giving a Motive Rant about her hating him on top of all that, Beau finally snaps, grabs her by the throat, and starts strangling her with a cold, hard look of fury on his face. He stops after a minute or so and then seems shocked by her apparent death (again), but it definitely suggests that the "repressed feelings of resentment and hate" thing is indeed mutual, only buried far deeper in Beau, who's been conditioned all his life to apologize, obey his mother, and be an Extreme Doormat.
  • Played straight with Mona. While giving her Motive Rant about how hard she has tried to take care of Beau and force herself to love him despite her own (supposed) less-than-stellar upbringing and what she had to do to conceive him with his disgusting inhuman father, while ranting Abusive Parent Mona seems to come to the realization herself that she does in fact hate Beau and tells him as much to his face. This leads into the above-attempted choking, and the choking and hate epiphany together suggests Mona came to Beau's "trial" with her mind already made up to have him declared guilty and executed.
• Honor Thy Parent: Beau's dedication to Mona. His relationship with his mother is strained, to put it mildly. He is reluctant to answer her calls, has recurring bad dreams about her, and his therapist zeroes in on his issues with her for the bulk of their sessions, but Beau pushes down his own discomfort to visit Mona on a monthly basis, never says a bad word about her, grieves terribly when he learns she's dead, and on learning her body won't be buried and laid to rest until he comes, Beau does everything in his power to go to her funeral and pay his respects. He's sincerely distraught to the point of tears at the idea Dr. Cohen plants that Beau is "humiliating" his mother and not letting her go to rest by not being there for the funeral. To a lesser extent, Beau shows the same filial respect for his Disappeared Dad: he never knew his father, who died the night Beau was conceived, but has a photo of the man in his apartment that he greets like it was the genuine article. Neither turns out very well for him in the end: the man in the photo is not his father, his dad is alive but a giant terrifying penile monster that reduces Beau to hysterics. His mother is also alive and at first presents herself as loving him despite everything she's put him through, but is unimpressed by his devotion to her and keeps a long, petty catalog of reasons he's a bad son. In the end, she repays his attempts to honor her by having him literally put on trial and drowned before her and a stadium of onlookers, and never shows any flicker of remorse or doubt about the execution or her own actions that brought them to this.
• Horrible Housing: Beau is living in a rundown apartment building in a dodgy neighborhood. The elevator is hardly working and the water seems to cut out on a regular basis.
• Horror Comedy: Ari Aster initially wrote and described this movie as a "four-hour nightmare comedy", and he stuck with that. The humor in this comes from the especially dark and morbid situations Beau finds himself in. Even with him clearly being a Nervous Wreck and Manchild, he's somehow simultaneously the Only Sane Man of the film, with every other character acting so off-the-wall strange and unrealistic in dream-like worst-case scenarios, it's somehow both hilariously weird, and off-putting and creepy.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Exactly how did Mona conceive the twins with that thing in the attic? It's penis-shaped, but so much bigger than her that trying to do it the obvious way wouldn't be feasible, and it doesn't seem like she would survive the appendages it uses to kill Jeeves, either. She implies the act was so vile, it forever tainted her feelings on her Half-Human Hybrid sons.
• The Immodest Orgasm: Elaine is making loud noises when she climaxes.
• Incest Subtext: Implied with Mona's relationship with her son. In flashbacks, she noticeably feels threatened by young Beau's infatuation with Elaine, and Mona is overly attached to him.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: The sign outside the Erectus Ejectus, the strip joint Beau lives above. Supposedly, it's taken from an actual sign the supervising art director had seen while on vacation.
• I Will Wait for You: infatuated Beau and Elaine make this promise to one another when Elaine's mother takes her from the ship prematurely. Beau has been keeping a Precious Photo of Elaine in his bedside drawer ever since.
• Jewish Mother: Mona is an exaggeration of this already-exaggerated stereotype. She's manipulative, guilt-tripping, and suffocating to the point of implied sexual abuse. She complains constantly about how Beau has slighted her in a thousand ways, she's a massive Control Freak (even listening to his therapy tapes), and constantly finds reasons to justify her hatred of him.
• Kafka Komedy: The entire film's premise is a Kafkaesque journey with some pretty dark humor.
• Kangaroo Court: Beau's trial is clearly set up to be one. With Dr. Cohen being given more or less complete control over the entire event to condemn Beau. When Beau's attorney tries to defend his client against the ridiculous accusations being made about him, Cohen simply has him thrown to his death.
• Karma Houdini: Mona and every single person who helped contribute to her scheme to gaslight Beau into insanity receive zero retribution for what they've done to him.
• Kick Them While They're Down: After Beau gets hit by a car, the nearby Birthday Boy Stab Man takes the opportunity to try and knife him to death while he's still lying prone on the street.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After the credits start rolling, the arena's In-Universe audience begin filing to the exits, mimicking the real audience leaving the movie theater.
• Leave the Camera Running: The entire end credits hold on the shot of the empty arena after Beau's trial. In what may be the first time in A24's history, the image only fades to black after their closing logo appears, not before.
• Logging onto the Fourth Wall: The MW Corporation has real-world social media accounts that interact with fans and encourage them to be "brand ambassadors" with exclusive merch and newsletters to screenings of the movie.
• Logo Joke: A particularly meta example that's easy to miss on your first viewing. During the standard reel of all the production companies that helped produce the film, one is a company called "MW," and it even is listed before the last real production company listed. When Beau finally reaches his mother's house near the end of the film, he sees a display of everything her company has done. At this point, you might notice that his mom's company logo looks rather familiar. It's "MW," for Mona Wassermann, his mother's name. The message is that Mona's hold over Beau is so great that it extends to the production of the very movie he is in.
• Long-Lost Relative: Beau's dream about his mother forcing a younger version of himself up in the attic is revealed to not be a dream, but a traumatic memory of her locking away his identical twin brother as a small child. Beau was young enough that he repressed all memories of having a brother, and when he tries to bring up the dream in therapy at the beginning his therapist (a crony of Mona's) doesn't want to discuss it with Beau, implying Mona went to some lengths after the incident to Unperson the twin. His name is never mentioned. When Beau temporarily reunites with him in the attic, the twin is so broken and Beau so terrified with so much else on his plate, that they don't even exchange words with each other.
  • Likewise, the monster kept in the attic with the brother, who is the true father of Beau and his twin. The monster seems capable of speech and greets Beau in a nightmarish voice before Beau gets a good look at him, then kills Jeeves when the latter breaks in to try to kill him (after tracking Beau to try to kill him). As you might expect, Beau is not thrilled to learn any of this.
• Love Martyr: Mona believed she was this for Beau, taking care of him all his life and feeling he didn't love her enough in return for all she did. Beau plays it straight in how he constantly tries to please her and make her happy despite her controlling behavior and passive-aggressiveness towards him.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Beau's twin brother, locked away for life and left to rot for pissing Mona off for the horrible crime of wanting to meet his daddy and live with him instead of her. Mona forced him up there to spend the rest of his life with his "daddy", a Gag Penis monster. Arguably made worse by the fact Daddy recognizes Beau and calls out to him in a creepy voice (in a Call-Back to how Beau greeted the photo of his "dad" in his apartment). What the hell is this thing?
• Male Frontal Nudity: Plenty, from the aptly named "Birthday Boy Stab Man", to Beau himself, and even a giant monster penis.
• Marijuana Is LSD: Zig-zagged. Toni and a friend of hers force Beau to smoke weed, and he enters into a pretty nasty bad trip for the rest of the day. Toni claims that the joint she gave him is laced with "three things", but she doesn't specify what, and she and her friend, who also smoked it, are apparently fine afterwards.
• Mind Screw: The surrealist nature of the movie, especially with what the plot considers to be comedic.
• Mistaken for Afterlife: When Beau wakes up in Toni's bedroom, he wonders if he is dead.
• More Dakka: Jeeves' primary method of dispatching his targets is a submachine gun, and does not care about conserving bullets. This backfires on him twice — once when he falls on the submachine gun and turns his shoulder and a person who grabbed him into a pile of gory mush, and again when he encounters Beau's father and tries to use it to no avail.
• My Beloved Smother: Beau's mother has a horrible, nearly incestuous, relationship with him that is full of guilt and manipulation to keep him in line. It extends to a meta-level that a viewer could easily miss upon first viewing: one of the production companies that is shown during the pre-movie credits is Mona's company "MW". Mona has power over Beau on an even higher level than the narrative itself. Another line that's easy to miss occurs during the opening birthing scene, which is shot from Beau's perspective: Mona is heard screaming "You made me have him!" to the doctor, implying she wanted to keep Beau inside of her, in a way she could control everything for him, forever.
• Naked People Are Funny: Played for Horror; first by the Birthday Boy Stab Man, then by Beau, who has a confrontation with him shortly after fending off an intruder in the bath.
• Never Give the Captain a Straight Answer: When Beau asks his mother what actually happened to his father, she doesn't answer but leads him to the attic where he gets to experience the Awful Truth for himself.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The first trailer creates a rather different impression of the movie than what you'll actually get. While it definitely displays the surrealism the movie holds, it implies a rather more upbeat adventure than the movie proper, which is just as bleak and hopeless as Aster's previous films.
• Nice Guy:
  • Roger and Grace are affable people who try to make up for accidentally hitting Beau with their car by opening up their own home to him and acting more like Doting Parents towards him right off the bat than mere caretakers, which, while really weird, at least makes them likable in this exaggerated world of strange people. Considering how rough Beau's had it up until they take him in, you almost appreciate it for his sake. This ends up being a subversion; it's implied Roger is Faux Affably Evil (or at least Affably Evil), and in Mona's pocket, and while Grace sympathizes and is trying to covertly help Beau at first, she turns on him completely when she loses her last child in a way that implicates Beau as the murderer.
  • The pregnant lady in the woods also helps Beau very kindly, and unlike Roger and Grace, she does so in a way that's not overtly weird or potentially sinister.
  • Beau is not too bad a guy, either.
  • For the little he's seen on screen, Beau's attorney during the trial seems to really be keen on defending him against Dr. Cohen's insane accusations, too bad the acoustics of the arena doesn't favor him and he ends being killed by the crowd.
• Nightmare Face: The twisted facial expressions on Toni and Elaine's corpses.
• Not So Omniscient After All: There seems to have been an outright lapse in Mona's otherwise constant surveillance of Beau as she genuinely didn't believe that he'd lost his keys and luggage, leading to a series of events that caused him to miss out on his flight to visit her.
• Offing the Offspring: Rewatching footage of Beau's "betrayals" of her after realizing she hates him, Mona becomes so furious her grip breaks the metal railing and she ignores Beau shouting desperate appeals to her, coldly allowing her own son to be executed and slowly drowned to death under a boat.
• Off with His Head!:
  • In true Ari Aster head trauma fashion, Beau's mother Mona dies after a Falling Chandelier of Doom crushes her head, and we get to see the headless corpse at the open-casket funeral. Though it isn't actually his mother but his babysitter who died.
  • The head of a homeless man's corpse lying on the street is crushed under a truck after it runs over Beau.
  • Beau's lawyer at the trial is thrown off his platform by Mona's henchman, and his head is split open by the rocks below.
• Old Retainer: Mona's housekeeper has been serving her loyally and devotedly for 37 years and eventually agrees to be beheaded to fake Mona's death.
• Out with a Bang: Beau's mother tells him that his father died the night Beau was conceived because of his genetics, at the instant he climaxed in her, and that as his grandfather and great-grandfather died the same way, the same may be true for Beau. When he has sex with Elaine, he's relieved to find that he's still alive after he orgasms — it's actually Elaine who dies immediately.
• Pinball Protagonist: Justified. Beau plays a very passive role in the film's entire chain of events, as he'd effectively been brought up to all his life.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Mona's off-screen death by chandelier.
• Police Are Useless: When Beau runs out on the street naked screaming for help, the policeman he encounters is busy flirting with a prostitute and then threatens to shoot Beau unprovoked.
• Poster-Gallery Bedroom: Toni's bedroom is full of Asian pop-culture posters.
  • Her deceased brother's bedroom is a more subtle example, being a generally tidy room but with a wall full of posters, pictures and framed certificates. Unlike the fictional East-Asian idols depicted in Toni's room, her brother's posters are of real bands and musicians, such as Mike Kinsella's solo project Owen.
• Properly Paranoid: Beau is extremely neurotic and insecure — but who can blame him, given the whole world is genuinely out to get him?
• Psycho Psychologist: Beau's therapist. He not only breaks several ethical boundaries, such as patient-therapist confidentiality by recording their sessions and sending it to Mona, but he also seems really amused while doing so.
• Puff of Logic: A variation and played for drama. When reencountering his sons in his fantasy during the Orphan's play, Beau wonders out loud how he has children since he never had sex. He returns to reality upon this realization.
• Race Lift: Beau (and therefore presumably his mother) are both black in the short film (Beau) and the original script. Here, they are white.^note This is presumably because the actor who initially played Beau in the short, Billy Mayo, passed away in 2019.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Beau's mother Mona gives him a particularly venomous one when she confronts him at her house in the third act, as well as her lawyer Dr. Cohen prosecuting him at the trial.
• Recurring Dreams: From the opening session with his shrink, we learn that Beaua has a recurring dream of him as a child in the bathtub watching his mother struggle with his brother.
• The Resenter: Mona towards her son, many times throughout the movie. Solidified by her "The Reason You Suck" Speech in the final act.
• The Reveal: The entire final act.
  • The photos on Mona's walls in her mansion.
  • Beau's mother is still alive.
  • Everything involving the attic.
• Rewatch Bonus: The reveal in the final act calls to question just how much of the adversity Beau faces is serendipitous and how much has been orchestrated by his mother as part of her trial against him.
• Rich Genius: Mona. She's the mega-billionaire owner of the MW Corporation that takes over Beau's world.
• Running Over the Plot: Beau is run over by Grace and Roger, which leads to them taking him home.
• Scenery Porn: Fiona Crombie's production design is immaculate, and every act feels so distinct from the last.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Mona, being the billionaire evil mastermind that she is, paid off her loyal housekeeper to be her headless body double — and quite handsomely, too, enough that "her entire extended family quit their jobs on the same day and won't ever have to work again."
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Beau does this four times, all at the end of each act.
  • When the intruder hiding in the bathroom ceiling falls on Beau as he takes a bath, sending him running out naked onto the street.
  • Immediately after Toni kills herself by drinking a can of blue paint, causing her mother Grace to discover her body and mistakenly attack Beau thinking he did it to her.
  • When Jeeves ambushes the Orphan theater troupe and tries shooting at Beau, causing him to flee deeper in the woods.
  • Right after Beau strangles his mother, he leaves her mansion in shock and takes a motorboat out to sea.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Jeeves served with Toni's brother in Caracas and is shown prone to sudden attacks of rage, implied to be from PTSD. He's introduced punching the window of his trailer and also tries to attack Beau when he was having a bad trip, with Roger having to subdue him with several syringes of tranquilizers. After Toni's suicide, Jeeves spends the rest of the movie trying to hunt down Beau, likely believing him to be responsible for it.
• Shout-Out: The Reveal towards the end about the attic calls to mind the "family" from The Dunwich Horror.
• Silent Credits: After Beau is killed at the end, there is no music to accompany the credits rolling — just the sound of waves and the audience leaving the arena.
• Sinister Surveillance: While Roger and Grace seem like the ideal people to be taking care of Beau at first, Beau finds signs that they have cameras inside their own house to keep their family under tight monitoring. The ending reveals that this is actually because they were working for Mona the whole time and she was observing Beau's every action during the movie to see how he behaves after the news of her "death." He's actually been under observation by Mona his whole life like a specimen under a microscope, as she goes looking for ways to justify how he doesn't reciprocate her love and obsessively archives anything she can spin as incriminating. No doubt she had the boat under observation too and had Elaine thrown out after she tried to get Beau to call Mona a cunt (and maybe more upsetting to Mona, who is shown in the next scene sharing Beau's bed with him, kissed him).
• Something Else Also Rises: Ari Aster has confirmed that Beau's boat explosively capsizing in the end was crafted as a metaphor for ejaculation — a thematically fitting end to a character with decades of sexual repression.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • Beau and Elaine have sex that ends up killing Elaine to Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby". The lyrics of the song take a specially dark meaning considering it mirrors Mona's obsessive relationship with Beau.
  • As Beau walks home amid the chaotic environment of Corrina, a cheery opera song plays in the background.
• Stacked Characters Poster: The movie poster shows Beau at vastly different ages, including kid and an old man versions stacked upon one another.
• Stress Vomit: Beau does this after he discovers Elaine worked for his mother in a news segment about his mother's death — projectile-style, on-screen all over Toni's laptop.
• Stunned Silence: From Beau after he strangles his mother and walks out of the house with a hilarious shocked expression on his face.
• Symbolic Glass House: Mona's house is a gigantic mansion with large glass panels on most of the walls. Befitting a woman who has suffocated Beau since he was a kid and continues to obsessively watch him including faking her own death so that she could continue to spy on him, and kept the penis monster that's apparently his father in the attic.
• Tap on the Head: Beau runs into a tree branch after fleeing Grace and Roger's house, and wakes up seemingly fine.
• Teens Are Monsters: Toni and her friend are teenage girls who are callous, self-absorbed, unstable, and cruel, threatening Beau while driving him on a ride he doesn't want to be on, and forcing him to smoke an unknown substance for their amusement.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Beau has one after he gets the call his mother has died, and it's the last expression he makes before he dies.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: After his keys and luggage are stolen, Beau vividly imagines a knife-wielding intruder barging down the hallway and kicking his apartment door open. Also defied. With the surreal, dream-like tone of the movie, how off the characters act, and the strange new drugs Beau is taking, it's easy to think some or all of it is in Beau's head as hallucinations or paranoia, like the strange warning he gets slipped by Grace that she doesn't acknowledge and the secret channel on TV that's revealed to be watching him that no one remarks on. It turns out to instead be a The Truman Show-type elaborate conspiracy by Beau's manipulative, gaslighting mother, who faked her death by having her maid killed and nearly all the major characters turn out to be working for, blindsiding poor Beau with the extent of Mona's cruelty and manipulations.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Beau has a child-like innocence about him, granted what his own mother put him through. The original script even describes him as "touched by angels."
• Trailers Always Spoil: Besides all the other scenes it teases, the first trailer briefly showcases the Jumbotron from the very end of the film.
• Trauma Conga Line: Poor Beau cannot catch a break.
• Undignified Death:
  • Elaine dies mid-orgasm while having sex with Beau, her body apparently having instantly stiffened in rigor mortis, before being casually carried out and disposed of by Mona's house staff.
  • Jeeves is impaled through the skull by Beau's father, a giant penis monster.
  • Finally, Beau is trapped in a motorboat whose motor explodes, causing the boat to violently capsize and flip over, trapping him underwater. He unfortunately doesn't die instantly from this, as we then see the boat shake for about a minute until it finally stops.
• The Un-Favourite: Toni struggles with living in the shadow of her deceased brother, so much so that she can only bring herself to partially vandalize his room before committing suicide.
• Universal Remote Control: Grace tells Beau to turn on Channel 78 on the television, which shows CCTV footage of Beau which, when he fast-forwards it, shows scenes and settings from the final act.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Beau's restless neighbor, who plays loud music during the night, ends up causing Beau * Given what we learn at the end of the movie, it's hard to say if the neighbor was really "unwitting".
• Watch Out for That Tree!: Beau bumps his head on a tree trunk while being chased through the forest by Jeeves.
• Wham Shot: Beau discovering his father is really a giant, grotesque penis monster.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After Beau strangles his mother, seemingly killing her, he escapes her house and commands a motorboat out into the open ocean. You'd think he finally escaped all the insanity of his past life and put an end to the source of all his trauma. He is so wrong.
• You Remind Me of X: Toni's bullying of Beau is shortly followed by Beau remembering his brazen, foul-mouthed second impression of his childhood sweetheart Elaine which is given an extra layer when Mona narrates over the juxtaposition, citing that Beau seems to be drawn to certain types of women.

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"I just need to get home."
"I know."