A24’s “nightmare-comedy” Beau is Afraid fails at both undertakings. The nightmare aspect is supposed to derive from the depiction of protagonist Beau’s sensitivity to his surroundings. Depictions of sensitivity in cinema have been on my mind since viewing the Kiyoshi Kurosawa masterwork To the Ends of the Earth, in which Kurosawa utilizes his horror background to lend palpability to protagonist Yoko’s anxieties as she struggles to navigate a foreign, unknown land and culture. The film’s depiction of sensitivity resonates through a genuinely overwhelming atmosphere that allows for the heightened emotions of the character to connect, genre conventions used to pull Yoko and the audience close to each other, her sensitivity felt and therefore understood. To the Ends of the Earth is not a genre film, but even Kurosawa’s straight horror films are born out of an incredible sensitivity i.e. masterpiece Pulse in which something as seemingly mundane as loneliness is rendered apocalyptic. Given director Ari Aster’s previous horror hits, one would think he would utilize horror in depicting Beau’s extreme sensitivity to his surroundings, but unlike Kurosawa, Aster has never actually understood genre. He is actually praised for this lack of understanding, a contemporary audience’s idea of freshness is his debut Hereditary being “actually a family drama” as if a film cannot be that and also actually a horror film. Of course there’s no horror here.

Beau’s sensitivity isn’t even significant dramatically. The film doesn’t seem to want you to care about what happens to Beau or any of the other characters. Beau’s surroundings are overwhelming, but neither his feelings towards them nor his well-being actually matter. The film operates on a “surreal” logic where literally anything can happen at any moment, but it never actually matters what happens. Beau could drop dead at any moment within the film’s three hours, and it would not make any emotional difference. Yes, Beau is afraid, but who cares? Evaluated on its own, Beau is inert, but contrasted with bygone masters of sensitivity such as Cassavetes and Altman (who was so attuned to sensitivity that he could break you with a zoom-in), the film is laughable. It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe the works of these two artists as “nightmarish” due to their careful constructions of sensitivity and brutal violations of it in films such as 3 Women, Husbands, and A Woman Under the Influence. The horrific timbre of these films stems from the sense that the even smallest of events change the fundamental nature of the characters, the complete opposite of the philosophy in Beau is Afraid. The only way Aster’s film resembles a nightmare is in the fact that weird things happen. Given this, one must wonder about the point of even depicting Beau’s sensitivity. Cassavetes and Altman were also geniuses in their examinations of American culture and psyche that went into their depictions of sensitivity. It is due to this that their films work as remarkable portraits of time and place. Beau is Afraid, however, has no psyche. Aster’s attempts to evoke “the times” either feel disingenuous (attempted satire of police brutality), downright objectionable (those teen girls and their false rape allegations), or simply devolve into incoherence. The film’s attempts at comedy are also pitiful, stemming from skewed, misanthropic approximations instead of actual understanding. For example, Schrader and Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead proves you can do dark comedy based around the anxieties and absurdities of city life and its miscreancy, but it only works because that film actually understands the city. The failure of Beau is Afraid’s cartoonish portrayals is not that it hates homeless people (or family units, teen girls, etc.), but rather that it doesn’t engage with the specifics of people’s actual behaviors. The film’s wit is equivalent to the words “am I right?”

Pop is another concept among the sea of them that Aster does not understand. The film’s use of Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” during a pivotal moment between Joaquin Phoenix and Parker Posey mirrors a similar moment in Scorsese’s After Hours in which protagonist portrayed by Griffin Dunne plays Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” on a jukebox and asks Verna Bloom for a dance. In the song, Lee describes her house burning down as a child and her unimpressed reaction, asking “Is that all there is to a fire?”, proclaiming “If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing”. The song’s use is ironic, the protagonist’s life has been burning down around him all night, and he’s not unimpressed, he’s exasperated and at his wit’s end. He feels the exact opposite that Peggy Lee does, but he decides to dance anyway. The song’s inclusion in the scene speaks to pop’s universality and resonant power while simultaneously working as a bit of humor. Aster’s use of Carey is much less creative than that, boiling down to banal juxtaposition meant to highlight situational absurdity, draining the song of all its beauty. It works as a dull punchline in a three hour train of dull punchlines, no different than the graffiti of an ass with fart lines coming out seen earlier in the film. It’s reduced, like everything else in the film, into something to condescend to.

It may seem like the divide I’m drawing between Aster and the other filmmakers mentioned is that of quality, that other guys are good filmmakers and Aster is a bad one. While certainly true, the even bigger difference is that unlike Aster, the other filmmakers actually respect the audience. When did extreme condescension become conflated with sophistication? How did we get here? This is nothing more than a bitchmade ass nigga bitching about how bitchmade he is. And if this is a “nightmare” for you, you’re bitchmade too.