Film review: Beau is Afraid film starring Joaquin Phoenix

**

Hollywood is, and always was, an open all-hours meat grinder luring in talented individuals and then systematically smashing the vision and wonder out of them, flattening out their aspirations before setting them to work on the shop floor, cracking the whip over the seegeeye merchants.

And the heartbreaking thing is that in most cases, it is for their own good.

Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommer) made a name for himself in the banging-you-head-against-a-brick-wall field of intelligent, innovative horror movies with, a 21st Century Wicker Man. For his third film, he has been given the opportunity to let his imagination run wild in a way that few directors do.

Beau Is Afraid (horrible title) is an epic, surreal black comedy; a singular, free-flowing, free-associating, beautifully sculpted artistic vision that is repetitive, reductive, infuriating and borderline insufferable.

Beau is Afraid (Image: A25)

Its chief appeal is the chance for audiences to go into a film with absolutely no idea what to expect. Trying to reveal as little as possible, let's just say that it is basically about a man trying to take a trip home to see his overbearing and controlling mother, (Lupone) but being thwarted and met with extreme, unwarranted hostility at every turn. His apartment is situated in an urban warzone where just crossing the street is to be menaced by tattooed muggers or naked sociopaths.

It's undeniably imaginative. Aster's surrealism doesn't make you think of other people's surrealism, it's not Lynchian or Fellini-esque. The visuals are low-key, organic and realistic; the effects look like they were done in camera rather than digitally. He has a great sense of dark humour and the film raises lots of laughs, without getting you to side with its protagonist or his dilemma.

Beau is Afraid (Image: A24)

Phoenix's Beau is maddening, passive and meek. Very quickly, the audience twig that whatever the situation, it will go badly for him and in the most extreme, excessive, unreasonable way possible. He's the ultimate stooge, a Kafka Mr Bean, or maybe just a Kafka Sid Little. His meek acceptance of all these setbacks doesn't stop them being funny, but it does stop you caring about them. Phoenix is a phenomenal actor, a protean force, but his effectiveness in playing a simpering punchbag works against the film.

For all its visual gravitas, all it has to offer is the recurring joke about castrating Jewish mothers. And because there is no grounding in reality, because every situation is pushed to caricature, there’s absolutely nothing at stake.

Directed by Ari Aster. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Patti Lupone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey and Denis Menochet. In cinemas. 179 mins.

Go to http://half-man-half-critic.weebly.com/ for a review of the Criterion Collection release of Polanski's Repulsion.