I was going to pass on this since it’s a three hour long film with only middling reviews. Our cinephile friend recommended it though, so I thought we should watch it in order to have something interesting to talk about. Even looking at the premise, I was apprehensive about Joaquin Phoenix taking on yet another role as a mentally ill character and the first sequence set in what looks like a dystopian city even reminded me of the Joker. Fortunately that turned out to only the first of many such sequences, each weirder and more surprising than the last. I concede that it’s enthralling just to see what happens next but there’s no point to any of it at all and so my conclusion is that this is just a plain bad film.

After a strange opening shot which suggests that he may have been dropped by the doctor when born, we see Beau speaking to his therapist. He is supposed to visit his mother Mona the next day and is anxious about it. As he walks back home to his apartment, we see that the city is some kind of insane hellhole, with a corpse seemingly ignored on the street and where homeless addicts roam at will. He has to run back to his building to be safe. That night he is troubled by notes left under his door complaining about noise, yet he isn’t making any sound at all. The next day he wakes up late and almost misses his flight. As he hurriedly packs and prepares to leave, he discovers that someone has stolen his bags and his apartment key the moment his back is turned. Confused and dismayed, he calls his mother to tell her that he might not make it and she sounds disappointed but resigned to it. Yet things only get crazier and crazier and it becomes obvious to the audience many, or even most of the things that Beau sees, are not real. Later, when he tries to call his mother again, a man answers the phone, claiming to be a UPS driver who has just discovered his mother’s headless corpse.

As the title suggests, the overriding theme is that Beau is afraid, constantly, of everything and everyone. He has deep seated traumas about his mother, about what his mother might have done to his father, about sex, and much more. Everyone he meets might transform into a monster without warning, every ally might betray him at any moment, every iota of temporary happiness might turn out to be a barbed thorn. This really isn’t about mental illness at all since it’s such a fantastic, hyper exaggerated version of paranoia as to bear no resemblance to any real world affliction. No one else behaves sanely in this film either but as we only ever view the world through Beau’s warped perspective, it’s impossible for us to judge who they really are and why they act as they do. This is the ultimate unreliable narrator film as absolutely nothing that we see can be relied on to be truthful.

This lack of grounding means that it’s nearly impossible to say that the film means anything at all. I think it’s revealing that Ari Aster is mostly known as a director of horror films. It really is just him giving free rein to his imagination in order to subject Beau to an endless series of trials and psychological torture. There’s a manic energy in this that makes it riveting to watch and you find yourself wanting to know just what will happen next as Aster keeps succeeding in surprising the audience. Visually, it’s spectacular and each sequence is stylistically different to evoke different sets of fears. But Beau episodic adventures never resolve to any moment that brings everything together. The secrets and revelations of the past that he learns are just as empty as everything else. There’s no sense of catharsis and no deeper meaning in anything.

I might have been kinder if it had been shorter but three hours is just too much for something as shallow as this. There is so little ground truth in the film that we don’t even know who the real Beau is and without that there are no emotional stakes and no reason to care about him. It’s bad enough that I found it strange that it could get funded and attract a star of Phoenix’s caliber.