You know what I'd love from Ari Aster? A story about pain being survivable.
Beau is a mentally ill anxious man who has to return home to visit his mother, but irrational misfortunes pile upon him.
For most of the film, I was game and often enthralled. It depicts the paranoia, fear, and confusion that occur with certain mental illnesses like anxiety or potentially schizophrenia, like a waking-nightmare dissociative narrative through those eyes. At points, the film can feel AI-generated in its uncanniness. The elements of comedy were often strikingly absurd and felt in place for a surreal film. Beau is confused, accused, used, and abused throughout a fairly epic-toned journey of vignettes, and the film ultimately unpeels a ludicrous narrative where worst fears come true, standing for the all-consuming harm certain upbringings may lead to. It's hard for me to engage in stories with detached leads who lack agency, and Joaquin Phoenix was often unintelligible, but under the lens of a vulnerable person tossed around by a society and a mind he can't trust, I was fine. But the film doesn't pan out much like a film.
Beau has no business being three hours and tends to wear out its ideas, such that what reinvigorates the film soon turns into the next tired act. But pacing can't fix how the film defies comprehension and emotional development. There's an almost Funny Games aesthetic sense, as if the film rejects investment from its audience. Its sweet points are yanked away and its plausible drama turns to absurdism in ways that feel like Aster stories' typical emotional disconnection and rejection of healing have gotten outright spiteful to the audience.
The pessimistic depiction of improbable manipulation and no healthy relationships is becoming grating and stale now. By the end, I just wanted Aster to find some joy in the world to write about because the overwhelming bleakness isn't working anymore. Find the will to write positivity! The sheer repetitiveness of theme here makes Aster feel like a one-trick pony. We could have at least had a harrowing trauma film without coming to the conclusion it's insurmountable...again. I do think the full narrative is pretty thought-out and interesting when unpacked, but it comes to the same depressing end when it genuinely didn't have to.
But maybe he's mocking the idea this is all he can do? He is brilliant, and this film is almost blatantly self-destructive; it's too Ari Aster to be functional. At some point you have to wonder if it's parody because it's so repetitive of his other work and so exaggerated in every repeated aspect. I feel like I could now predict all of the next film Aster makes because this seems to cement him as formulaic...enough for the formula to to be self-aware here.
The movie is half compelling and genuinely artful, but it punishes you for trying to buy in. Whatever choices governed this product, his next story needs new ideological bones.
Film Reviewer Is Exhausted
You know what I'd love from Ari Aster? A story about pain being survivable.
Beau is a mentally ill anxious man who has to return home to visit his mother, but irrational misfortunes pile upon him.
For most of the film, I was game and often enthralled. It depicts the paranoia, fear, and confusion that occur with certain mental illnesses like anxiety or potentially schizophrenia, like a waking-nightmare dissociative narrative through those eyes. At points, the film can feel AI-generated in its uncanniness. The elements of comedy were often strikingly absurd and felt in place for a surreal film. Beau is confused, accused, used, and abused throughout a fairly epic-toned journey of vignettes, and the film ultimately unpeels a ludicrous narrative where worst fears come true, standing for the all-consuming harm certain upbringings may lead to. It's hard for me to engage in stories with detached leads who lack agency, and Joaquin Phoenix was often unintelligible, but under the lens of a vulnerable person tossed around by a society and a mind he can't trust, I was fine. But the film doesn't pan out much like a film.
Beau has no business being three hours and tends to wear out its ideas, such that what reinvigorates the film soon turns into the next tired act. But pacing can't fix how the film defies comprehension and emotional development. There's an almost Funny Games aesthetic sense, as if the film rejects investment from its audience. Its sweet points are yanked away and its plausible drama turns to absurdism in ways that feel like Aster stories' typical emotional disconnection and rejection of healing have gotten outright spiteful to the audience.
The pessimistic depiction of improbable manipulation and no healthy relationships is becoming grating and stale now. By the end, I just wanted Aster to find some joy in the world to write about because the overwhelming bleakness isn't working anymore. Find the will to write positivity! The sheer repetitiveness of theme here makes Aster feel like a one-trick pony. We could have at least had a harrowing trauma film without coming to the conclusion it's insurmountable...again. I do think the full narrative is pretty thought-out and interesting when unpacked, but it comes to the same depressing end when it genuinely didn't have to.
But maybe he's mocking the idea this is all he can do? He is brilliant, and this film is almost blatantly self-destructive; it's too Ari Aster to be functional. At some point you have to wonder if it's parody because it's so repetitive of his other work and so exaggerated in every repeated aspect. I feel like I could now predict all of the next film Aster makes because this seems to cement him as formulaic...enough for the formula to to be self-aware here.
The movie is half compelling and genuinely artful, but it punishes you for trying to buy in. Whatever choices governed this product, his next story needs new ideological bones.