Beau Is Afraid · reception & legacy
2023 · Ari Aster
How Beau Is Afraid has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Landed in April 2023 as A24's biggest-ever gamble and promptly divided everyone — walkouts, rapturous defenses, a soft box office. Three years on it's settled into 'misunderstood magnum opus' territory, the Aster film his diehards insist will be vindicated.
What's debated
The forever-fight: is this three-hour anxiety odyssey a fearless swing or the most expensive therapy session ever filmed — with the runtime as Exhibit A on both sides.
Its footprint
Aster's own pitch — 'a Jewish Lord of the Rings, but he's just going to his mom's house' — became the film's unofficial logline, quoted in basically every review and Letterboxd joke about it since.
Where it stands
A card-carrying divisive cult object: the half-star-or-five-stars film, a rite of passage for anyone working through the A24 catalogue.
Named by the director
Influences Ari Aster has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.
- Playtime (1967) — Aster screened Tati's film for his assistant directors as the model for populating the frame with distinctive background players.
- A Matter of Life and Death (1946) — Aster said he couldn't shake the Powell and Pressburger ending while shaping his own film's climactic sequence.
- Albert Brooks — Aster cited Brooks's neurotic comedy as a key reference point for the film's humor.