Beau Should Have Stayed Home

Although I'm usually trying to keep my private somewhat out of my reviews, I'll make an exception here as Ari Aster's work touches me on a deep level especially at this point in my life. The review is also highly spoilered for his two works Hereditary and Beau is Afraid and presupposes the reader watched both.

It came as a gargantuan surprise to recently read that film director Ari Aster, in fact, has a really good relationship with his mother. Or at least had, when she was alive, and she was a caring parent and never was the manipulative, evil, foul b*tch he portrays in his movies. It came as a surprise, though maybe it shouldn't. In some cases it is easier to contemplate, analyze and make sense of an emotional mess from a certain distance, without being the one involved and maybe Aster is just a keen observer. A very keen one.

Before Hereditary was first released here (I think in 2018), I couldn't wait to see it; the previews and the marketing announcing this will be the horror movie of our generation were so exciting to me it made me all the more antsy and joyous to finally go see it. Which I did with two colleagues from work who were both as excited as me. We weren't disappointed at all. I can only speak for me, it was one of the single successful cinematic experiences of my life. People in the cinema couldn't suppress their surprised screams at the jump-scary obscured sight of some mother hidden in the dark, the darkness around me forcing me to concentrate on this dread and drama before me, me - heart pounding, the music, the sounds, the bass gradually augmenting my tension, half-hiding my eyes behind my hands while a raging Toni Collette in the role of Annie Graham rhythmically and ragingly banged her head on the attic latch or even musically cut her own head off with a piano wire. I had sleeping irregularities for the two following weeks and I know many people think it's sick, but I loved it. There is a joy in fear, according to Scottish poet Joanna Baillie, and that twisted joy had me in its grip for some time after. After the thrill has gone though, what stayed with me weren't those last thirty minutes which sent me wild. It was that infamous, very realistic dinner scene. When there are so many things going on in a movie which need to settle first – realizing the marketing campaign was nothing but a huge red herring, realizing the real blow will come from an unanticipated corner, that blow will hit very close to home – the audience may be confused first and may need some time to take stock of all the terrors presented.

The biggest terror in this terrorizing movie was to me that scene which hurt my whole chest area, the scene in which Annie has a breakdown during a fight with her son Peter and you could cut the air with a knife, it is so thick. That scene was so successful, Collette's acting so on the spot that it awakened in me a memory, a fear, a feeling I thought I managed to bury and I think probably everyone at least once had a similar experience in their life. I know there are a gazillion sympathetic feminist interpretations of that scene and of Annie's transformation, but I am living through this scene as a child of someone, not as a parent. What Annie later does in the movie is already the stuff of horror legends and an accurate and hopefully a rather metaphoric representation of a parent harming their child, harming them purposefully. Which is also the main concept of Aster's latest movie.

At this point I allow myself a little interruption which will also mark the passage to Beau is Afraid (2023). Watching Beau in a little cinema in a small town in the utmost western part of Germany was an altogether different, singular in its own experience because it was the first movie in my lifetime where I was the only person in the auditorium. I reckon that it wasn't a very big cinema, but admittedly it was still pretty neat to sit there alone and let Beau sink in with a different and still similar dread.

My father died about a month ago. We weren't very close and towards the end of his life the only contact we had was him trying to reach out, apparently and unbeknownst to me, for a last time, trying to find out if he has grandchildren, whom, my siblings with children shielded religiously from him. It isn't very easy to phrase all this, as what is gone is gone and there is no use in talking behind a dead man's back. Yet it would feel like at least some kind of closure, since there will never be a real one for me.

My father was a purposefully harming parent too. Not in the way Beau's mother is – scheming, calculating, manipulating, poisoning; but more like Annie, harming with pure, brute force and anger. The sad thing of being a child of such a parent is that you grow up thinking that you deserve being harmed, that it is your share in life and you continue to harm yourself in various other ways, you self-harm, you numb yourself even as a way of release, or you find similar people who will harm you in similar ways. If your parent's nature doesn't manifest on a behavioral level, I firmly believe that it will nevertheless manifest in your body which does continue harming you anyway and you get sick. Mentally or bodily or even both.

Beau is afraid, that is how his mother manifests in his body, in his fear.

I hope I can give a somewhat accurate reading of the movie, as sitting alone in that auditorium, I wasn't yet aware of my creator's passing and the task of writing about Beau is left to the me in the now, the me who knows.

I think I would see Beau is Afraid as a three part movie, each part roughly an hour long.

I see Beau in his present state at first; his therapy sessions, the changing of his drugs, his fears worsening at the thought of traveling to see his mom, his crippling phobias taking complete control over his life forcing him into situations he does not choose to be in, which he is whirled into, all exaggerated, acute situations with caricature-like characters, almost comical, ridiculous. The news of his mother's death catapulting his anxieties to even more intense heights.

Then I see Beau accidentally going out into the world, ending up in a forest, receiving a chance to dream, mourn the man he could have been, what his life could have been, how it began and how it could have ended if he hadn't been interrupted as a person.

Finally I see Beau frustrated, humiliated, annihilated by his mother. It is clarified how she has always been harming him with lies, harming him by maintaining control over her child's mind and body throughout all his fucking life. Here I see why Beau is afraid and his fear is not the unwanted condition he suffers from in the beginning of the movie anymore. His fear is far from being his biggest problem, actually and in fact his protection, his body showing him the right way to go, which was to not go at all to his mother. Unfortunately, he never reflects and acts on what his fear wants to say to him.

We see Beau in many states; scared, in despair, distressed, but his feelings are always directed towards himself. He is never angry, even though he has been crushed and wrecked by his parent who even goes as far as meddling in the most intimate, most treacherous way, by meddling with his sexual life. She organizes this whole game, fucks with his mind and body, with no sense or interest in how much harm she does. I can't express how intruded, how frustrated, how irate I felt for Beau, while he himself does not. And he sinks down in and with his fear. No justice for him.

You might ask yourself why he never does anything? He keeps returning to such a toxic person. And I can only guess that the answer lies in the nature of the institution called family. I remember watching von Trier's The Idiots, in which, in a heart-wrenching scene one of the members of the "spaz" collective, Josephine played by Louise Mieritz, is being taken away by her family and although she is howling and crying, her romantic interest Jeppe (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) throwing himself in front and above the car that will take her away, she makes no physical attempt to reach back to him, nobody is physically forcing her, yet there is an unseen barrier there. I remember asking my boyfriend at the time "Why doesn't she just get out of the car? Why doesn't she just go back? She clearly wants to." His answer was terse, "That's family". Beau seems bound by the same invisible rope.

Beau's portrayal surely is very simplified and limited, almost archetypal, maybe as a means to caricaturize him too. Seeing his adventure, I felt inside me all my defense mechanisms I acquired throughout my youth being switched on. I see Beau helpless, crushed, subordinate, taking in all the betrayal, all the hurt and I know it doesn't have to be that way. You can leave, just run away. You can choose other role models to help you, artists who will provide you with the ability to humor and wisdom with words, rage and warmth with music, feelings your parent wasn't able to provide. You can create yourself, you don't rely on them. You can and maybe even should harm yourself for a while, and the need stops eventually. Most importantly, you can find friends like you, broken like you.

Beau went down with his ship, tragically just when he had decided to run for his life. His mother succeeded in bringing him down. Whenever I feel like sinking, today still, just like I did in my formative years, I hold on to the words of one of those models I chose a long time ago to pull me out. Someone I still need to scream at me, scream with me, scream instead of me to bring me back to myself when I get too emotional. I'd like to close this admittedly a little bitter and crooked obituary for my father with his spiteful, his defiant words.

He whispers: You didn't hurt me. Nothing can hurt me. Nothing can stop me now.

PS. Joaquin Phoenix kills it as Beau. If I hadn't been in love with him my whole life anyway, I would fall head over heals for him now.