Beau Is Afraid (2023) dir. Ari Aster
I believe Social Horror is one of the more underrated, underappreciated horror subgenres. Whereas most horror films focus on a specific figure or community as villains, social horror focuses on reframing the world so that you unexpectedly become the villain. Protagonists can wake up one morning to find the world’s gone insane, targeting them for no good reason. ‘Dream Scenario’, for example, alienated and tormented its protagonist by having the world dream nightmares of him. ‘Midsommar’ mentally destroyed its characters through culture shock, claiming ritualistic killings and underage sex as their community’s ways and because of that, shouldn’t be disrespected or discriminated. It’s the justification that truly horrifies in social horror, even if there’s no explanation.
‘Beau Is Afraid’ is yet another A24 film I never got to see in theatres because apparently Event Cinemas doesn’t want to show it at my local. The trailer was intoxicating, the world shifting at the click of fingers, Joaquin Pheonix acting erratically as ‘Goodbye Stranger’ by Supertramp plays. The 3-hour-runtime excited me even more, I had to see it. As soon as it came out on Blu-ray, I snagged it and it went beyond my expectations.
Beau is on his way home to see his mother, he has problems with anxiety which keeps him terrified of the world right outside of his apartment. When she suddenly dies, however, he has to face his fears and take any and all paths home. Along the way, he encounters an extremely passive-aggressive family with a veteran hunting him, a forest theatre group who pulls him into a hypnotic play and his childhood girlfriend. As he gets closer and closer to home, it becomes harder and harder to keep his sanity, especially when he’s forced to confront the truth about his childhood and family.
Joaquin Pheonix plays Beau in possibly the greatest performance of his career. His dominance over anxiety, fear and polite submissiveness is absolutely brilliant. All those moments when we never want to complicate anyone else’s lives, when we’re proud pushovers who would reschedule an entire day off because one person didn’t show up at work are beautifully represented here. There were times when his fear became my fear, his anxiety became my anxiety. Patti LuPone plays Mona, Beau’s mother and like Pheonix, perfectly matches the tones of a passive-aggressive or disappointed mother. You remember those times your mother asked you to do a chore politely but you refused? That exhausted response from your mother which always made you feel ungrateful is LuPone’s strength. The last act is where she really shines, exerting all her emotional baggage she’s left inside because of Beau’s innocence.
All other actors/actresses show up for a few scenes, but that’s not to take away from their golden performances. Richard Kind as Dr Cohen was a pleasure to see, especially in a more dominant and aggressive role. Nathan Lane plays Roger, who takes care of Beau after a stabbing and wonderfully brings a warmth to a depressing plotline. Amy Ryan plays Grace, his wife, and her final scene is perhaps the most hilarious I’ve ever seen her (until I watch it again). Denis Menochet plays Jeeves, the veteran who chases Beau through the entire runtime. His physical performance was always hysterical, the way he ran with a dead focus (almost like the groundskeeper from ‘Get Out’).
If you’re looking for a truly bonkers film, this is it. From the opening scene you’ll be asking yourself “what the f***?!”. When films dare to dream of worlds gone mad, they tend to take it beyond with totalitarian regimes forcing women into pregnancy for infertile couples or secretly turning citizens into a green synthetic food source, but ‘Beau’ stays grounded, turning the negativity of the everyday just up enough to actually think about the world around you. We could think about how many years it would take for the government to bring out Soylent Green, but you could be scared sh**less today of what the neighbour’s going to do to you as he blames you for loud music or the shopkeeper threatening to call the police as you desperately scramble for a few more cents for the bottle of water you sipped from. With ‘Beau’, Ari Aster forces you to rethink how dangerous the world is and how easy it is to be wound up in a losing fight.
Mason’s Top 3 Reasons to Watch ‘Beau Is Afraid’
- The most weird and hilarious sex scene I’ve ever witnessed
- The most captivating 20-minute scene, capturing an entire life, your past, present and future
- A film that really plays with form, when all other films today play with story. A film that dares to do something different.
The Thing (1982) dir. John Carpenter
“I know I’m human. And if you were all these things, then you’d just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn’t want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It’ll fight if it has to, but it’s vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it’s won.”
The most terrifying movie I’ve ever seen is John Carpenter’s 1982 horror opus, The Thing. It is a masterpiece of atmospheric storytelling where the tension and paranoia ratchet tighter and higher as every word is uttered, as every snowflake falls in the icy arctic wasteland. There’s no other movie like it. Although adapted from John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella Who Goes There? – which had previously seen the big screen treatment with 1951’s The Thing from Another World – Carpenter’s telling alone exudes a particular potent form of dread. For all our strengths as humans, we are inherently weak. We are weak to the cold. We are weak to heat. We are weak to things with sharp teeth and we jump at loud noises in the dark. We are weak to the unknown. We are weak to our most primitive urges. We are weak to our fears.
Fortunately, in our daily lives we never have to face any of these weaknesses, not really. In our world the cold is something resolved by adding another layer or turning on an air conditioner and the unknown is easily avoided. At a research facility in the arctic there’s nowhere to go and when the walls crumble and fall away, there is no amount of heating that can keep the cold out. When everything inevitably goes wrong in The Thing, the ensemble, led by the scruffy Kurt Russell as helicopter pilot Macready, are exposed to humanity’s weaknesses and one by one they fall to them.
The film opens with an innocuous shot of space, stars flickering, then something moves on the left of the screen and flies toward the camera, not too dissimilar to the U.S.S Enterprise during the opening credits of the original series. Like the Enterprise, this object is a ship, but there is nothing grand about it. The saucer rocks side to side and hurtles through the vacuum toward earth, its engine emits a vicious crackling splutter, an ominous warning to the audience that the being on the ship is unstoppable. The saucer disappears and the blackness of space bursts to life as the title card seemingly burns through the film: JOHN CARPENTER’S THE THING.
Cut to the present day (1982) and the inhabitants of an arctic research facility are going about their day. There are men playing table tennis, some are reading magazines, one is fiddling with nobs on the radio, trying to get a hint of a signal. Russell’s Macready is working his way through a bottle of scotch while losing to a chess computer. Their peace is broken when a pair of crazy Norwegian scientists in a helicopter approach the facility shooting at a fleeing dog. They scream something to the Americans, but neither they nor the audience can understand Norwegian. The Americans rescue the dog.
The cast of this movie is truly one of the greatest collection of character actors ever assembled, up with the likes of 12 Angry Men or any Coen Brothers movie. Wilford Brimley as Blair, Keith David as Childs, Richard Masur as Clark, Donald Moffatt as Garry. The problem with listing character actors like that is most people don’t know character actors by name, so take it from me, if you’ve never seen The Thing before you will certainly recognise some of these people. They’re what really make the movie work. The set feels like a lived-in place and all the people are imperfect. If the place was filled with movie stars it wouldn’t work, even Kurt Russell had to cover up his movie star grin with a mop of hair, beard and an enormous yet glorious hat which would border on ridiculous in a Looney Tunes short.
Ennio Morricone’s haunting, droning score underlines the whole movie. From those first moments of thumping, heartbeat-like synth the audience is never at ease. The strings, which really come into the score in the second half of the movie, set teeth on edge and rattle bones. Of course, since this is a John Carpenter movie, the man himself added to the score. Those synths are undoubtedly the work of Carpenter, and the strings Morricone and the combination of those two styles of score lead to a final work nothing short of extraordinary. I wish they had collaborated more.
Any writing on The Thing would be incomplete without mentioning the absolutely incredible practical effects. Rob Bottin’s work in this movie is the linchpin holding it all together. The tension is great, acting and directing and score too, but if the effects fail, if they look cheesy or unbelievable everything falls apart. It took Bottin over a year to create all the creature effects for the movie and the final result is nothing short of chilling. The only movie to come close to The Thing in quality of practical effects is Jurassic Park with models built by Stan Winston, who helped Bottin with the dog transformation in The Thing (if you know the scene I’m talking about, your stomach just did a back flip.) Bottin deserves all the praise he gets for his work here. This already great movie is worth watching for the effects alone.
I sometimes consider the greatest movie taglines of all time: An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making; Just When You Thought it was Safe to Go Back in the Water; In Space No One Can Hear You Scream. The tagline for The Thing is Man is the Warmest Place to Hide. It’s difficult to express the terror I feel simply from those seven words. After more re-watches than I can count, the core concept of The Thing has never gotten old and is always terrifying.
The Thing is a horror movie I’d recommend to anyone. It is a perfect blend of tension, gloriously grotesque practical effects, a haunting score, incredible performances filled with some of the best line deliveries of the 20th century, and the best directing John Carpenter has ever done. So lock your doors, make sure the windows are closed, get cozy, then turn on The Thing and wonder if your doors really are locked. Then have a great time, because The Thing is not just one of the greatest horror films of all time, it’s one of the greatest films of all time.
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