Movie Review - Beau is Afraid

 

Yep, time for another A24 film. That company has done really well to establish themselves in recent years. Being the one studio willing to go all out with the risqué films that they are often assigned to distribute and finance.  for the most part, it has paid off for them with so many of their films now, getting nominated and/or winning at the various award ceremonies. And usually when a film wins or gets nominated, more and more people get interested in watching their content. So the last messed up film I saw (which was also A24) was Men. The last most unsettling film I saw (also A24) was The Whale. This film is both messed up and unsettling, but also funny in a dark and twisted sense. Starring Joaquin Phoenix as the title character, this kind of feels like his sort of thing, given his history with playing dark and unconventional characters. So let's see what awaits us in this thing you call a film:

Beau Wasserman (played by Phoenix in the present and by Armen Nahapetian) is a man who is afraid of almost everything (lives up to the name it seems) and is known for blacking out and seeing things that he thinks are real, but may just all be in his head. His mother Mona (played by Patti LuPone in the present and by Zoe-Lister Jones in the past) is a famous and wealthy businesswoman who suddenly dies, which puts Beau into a spiral and eventually leads to a series of bizarre events that have him journey to his mother's home for the funeral, but he may not be quite the same afterwards.

It's a hard one to explain, with so much going on and plenty for us to question. It's quite a long film with parts that maybe could've been cut down, like this one scene that's long and animated, but ends up being very pointless in the end. But it's funny, very messed up and the kind of film that people will remember for a long time. Unlike Fast X which released at the same time, will get people going to see it. But will unlikely be remembered as much as this one. 9/10