Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Beau Is Afraid
2023 · Ari Aster · Beau Is Afraid on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how centered and calm the frame stays. (camera)
Pawel Pogorzelski composes frontally, places the camera precisely, and moves it slowly or not at all while the events inside the frame come apart. The composition is not panicking. Everything in it is.
Payoff: The gap between a calm image and hysterical content is exactly where the laughter comes from.
Watch what the street does while Beau stands still. (staging)
He rarely crosses anything. The city arrives at him. Extras, traffic, signage and architecture do the moving, and Aster stages Beau as the object that aggressive worlds arrange themselves around.
Payoff: His passivity is not a hole in the writing. It is the wall holding the film up. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this movement of world: the figure goes still and the world around it supplies all the motion.
Read the signs, graffiti and product labels in the background. (setting)
Each act is a built world packed with information: the decayed city, the too-bright suburb, the storybook forest. You could take an inventory of any frame. Beau never reads a word of it.
Payoff: Every frame is legible to you and illegible to him. He is the only thing in the shot that cannot read the shot. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). The reading calls this the readable image: a picture you have to decipher rather than simply follow.
Listen for threats you can hear but never locate. (sound)
Bobby Krlic's score shades the fear without letting it settle into horror. The design keeps menace off screen: a bang down a hallway, a voice through a wall, a hum under the house.
Payoff: A danger with no address keeps you scanning the room. That is Beau's ordinary condition, handed to your ears. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls this the absolute out-of-field: a threat that sits nowhere in the space you can actually see.
Watch Joaquin Phoenix apologize. Count how often he does it. (performance)
Phoenix builds Beau almost entirely out of reaction: flinching, saying sorry, absorbing. Around him Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan and Parker Posey play broad grotesques, pitched well past ordinary behavior.
Payoff: The caricatures are not loose acting. They are the shapes a frightened man's fear gives to everyone he meets.
Once you have seen it
Track how each of the four worlds is joined to the next. (cutting)
City, suburb, forest, arena. Each has its own palette, lighting and rules. Aster does not bridge them with logic. He installs a gap between them and lets the gap do the talking.
Payoff: The film is not muddled about its geography. It is built out of the seams between its places.
Count what has changed in Beau by the last act. (structure)
The picaresque here has its transformation removed. He travels, suffers, arrives, and comes out the same man. Lucian Johnston holds scenes long past comfort so you feel every unproductive hour of it.
Payoff: The question was never whether he gets home. It is how completely the world confirms what he already believes about himself.
Watch the animated life the troupe performs in the forest. (staging)
Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina's hand-made animation plays out a life Beau might have had, staged at him by strangers in a wood. It is more vivid and more textured than the life he is standing in.
Payoff: What he cannot do gets performed for him. After this you stop expecting the film to say which parts are real.
Carry this in: Stop waiting for Beau to act. Watch what the room does while he doesn't.