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Spoiler alert: This post contains descriptions of key moments from Beau is Afraid.

Beau is Afraid is maximum Ari Aster.

Thanks to the success of the writer-director’s first two films Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster had a $35 million budget to play in his fucked-up sandbox. Beau is Afraid plays all of Aster’s hits—familial guilt, paranoia, drug trips, nude men running around, heads crushed like grapes—and blasts them through a megaphone connected to Dolby speakers for three hours.

Beau is Afraid is a lot of movie, but that’s the point. Aster wants to exhaust you with the anxiety and make you feel like the loser at the center of this wild ride. The mother-son dynamic is the loudest, most unsubtle conflict here, but the movie hints at bigger topics, making it more fascinating with each viewing…if you can stomach watching it repeatedly.

Broadly, Beau is Afraid is about a middle-aged man named Beau Wasserman (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and his failed attempt to visit his mother, Mona. A mere plane ride aboard Air Liotta to acknowledge the anniversary of Beau’s father’s death becomes an odyssey. (Note: Is the airline an allusion to the 1997 Ray Liotta thriller Turbulence used as foreshadowing? As much I want to believe this, it’s a reference to another Liotta movie.) After Beau tells his mom that he can’t make the trip, Mona dies in a freak accident. Now, Beau has to find a way home to go to Mona’s funeral, or so Beau thinks.

On the way to Mona’s hometown of Wasserton, Beau encounters chaos inside and outside his apartment. He nearly drowns multiple times. He’s run over, stabbed, shot at, and chased through woods. He’s adopted by a family, then a traveling theatre company. He reconnects with the love of his life, then meets a literal penis monster that lives in his mother’s attic. At each point along the trip, Beau actively avoids conflict even as he seeks answers.

Beau isn’t a hero; he’s an oaf whose superpower is running away in a frenzy like a frightened Homer Simpson. When push comes to shove, he’ll do anything to get the fuck out of dodge. He’ll run naked through the streets of the city; through a glass window; through the woods barefoot. When he isn’t yelping, he’s distracted by waves of guilt and self-mutilation. He’s not indifferent. He’s just never had to make a decision in his life as Mona is a pervading, intruding force on everything from housing to health. When Beau gets the news that Mona has died, he does his best to avoid that by redialing his mom’s number only to hear the same UPS driver on the other end, confirming that Mona has died. Beau can only begin his trip to his mother’s funeral after he has been pushed out of his apartment by a trespasser who falls on Beau in the bathtub.

Beau’s trip to his mother’s funeral is circuitous by design, allowing Aster to show how Beau isn’t alone in that avoidance. The first stop is the house of Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane), the couple who ran a food truck outside of Beau’s house and subsequently hit Beau as he fled naked from his city apartment. After the crash, the couple adopts Beau, giving him food, shelter and a fresh pair of silk pajamas with his name sown into them.

Roger is a doctor who feeds Beau pills and makes empty promises about getting Beau home. Grace is a doting mother who hasn’t fully grieved the death of her own son, a soldier killed in action. Roger and Grace don’t pay attention to their daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers). Instead, they fill the void by taking in middle-aged, traumatized men like Beau and the veteran Jeeves (Denis Menochet). The latter lives in an RV in the backyard. When Jeeves isn’t asleep, he still thinks he’s on the battlefield, cartwheeling through the yard and avoiding imaginary enemies like some PTSD-addled larper.

Roger and Grace focus more on their adopted sons, sedating the boys when needed. When Jeeves hurts himself playing pretend war, Roger and Grace bicker about if Jeeves was given his pills. After a few bites of food, Roger interrupts Beau’s spaghetti with pills. “Is it dessert time already?” Roger asks. This father figure also tries to be hip by peppering sentences with, “My man!” Grace’s advice to Beau is a quick, handwritten note: “Stop incriminating yourself.”

Empty gestures fill out the couple’s seemingly idyllic life. That sunny disposition toward adopted visitors hides how they haven’t dealt with their son’s death, how they’ve ignored Toni. The couple moves Beau into their daughter’s room, no questions asked, then brushes off her tantrums. When Toni picks up random pill bottles by the door, Roger only advises, “Don’t mix those!” When Toni lashes out at Beau and the lack of attention she receives, it’s too late: Toni commits suicide by drinking paint. When faced with this reality, Grace and Roger become as erratic as Beau. Holding her dead daughter, Grace froths at the mouth and calling on Jeeves to retaliate.

The next stop on this guilt train is a warm, welcoming theatre company that’s set up shop in the woods. When Beau arrives, he’ll become part of a play that might inspire him. This production uses stop-motion animation and practical special effects to show a more typical man’s heroic tale. In this play, Beau learns a trade, builds a house on a farmland where he grows his own food, marries a woman who sometimes looks like a man and has three boys. It’s the sort of tale we’re told as naive kids when we ask parents, “What happens when we get older?” Of course, this story doesn’t satiate our interests, so conflict is added.

In this story, a great flood separates Beau from his family. Beau searches high and low until he arrives at this play, stopping everything to be reunited with his three boys on stage. When the boys ask the question, “Wait, how can we be your sons if you’re a virgin?” Beau snaps back into reality. This intermission was another example of Beau’s avoiding his recent traumas that his mother has died, that he’s witnessed another person die, and that he’s on the run from Jeeves. He wants to do anything but face that. Yet another circumstance comes in the woods when a man reveals to Beau that his father is still alive. Moments later, that man is blown to bits by Jeeves as the veteran raids the company’s set.

By now, Beau has seen his life play out a number of times. While sedated at Roger and Grace’s house, he remembers exactly why he been made into this scared little boy and why he can’t quite bring himself to visit his mother. As a child, Mona told Beau that his father died rather after climaxing, and Mona warns Beau that if he does ever climax, he’ll have the same fate. Before Beau flees the couple’s house, he’s given a remote control that literally plays the next events in his life. No matter what dreams Beau tries to cook up in between at the play, he can’t avoid the cycle of doom.

When Beau finally learns how controlling his mother has been in his life, how Mona is the head of a conglomerate that has dictated so much of Beau’s life, as much as he tries to defend himself, he still does what he’s always done: run. This time, he’s out to sea and locked in a coliseum for everyone to hear his judgment. This time, there’s no running away from this.

During this final trial, Aster loses steam. The nail has been sufficiently hit on the head. Yet, there’s no other possible ending for Beau is Afraid. This oaf must meet his demise, and it’s one without ceremony or pause. No one grieves for him. It’s difficult to feel sympathy for Beau, even as more assholes inflict their will on him because Beau’s response is often, “Uhhh…Ahhh!!”

Therein lies the bleak, horrific view that stays with you. Because as much as Beau doesn’t defend himself, how would or could anyone defend themselves against circumstances that he has faced? And those circumstances aren’t that far-fetched. (Team America voice) What would you do if a guy with a brown recluse spider on his head fell on to you while you were taking a bath? What would you do with a cop deciding to shoot first rather than hear why you’re panicking? How do you respond to people who manipulate you to their will then threaten you when you omit the tiniest bit of discomfort?

In these bigger questions, we’re in the same boat as Beau—powerless people unequipped to reckon with forces out of our control. We’re thrown into chaos, then into traumas we try to avoid but can’t, and we end up capsized by the weight of it all.

It’s such a brutal, cynical view. By the end of watching this all unravel again, you can’t help but let out a dumbfounded response: “Uhh?…Ahh!”

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