Beau Is Afraid (2023) review

Timid Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) lives by himself in a dilapidated city and has plans to visit his wealthy mother Mona (Patti LuPone) on her birthday, but everything goes wrong: he's accused of making too much noise (even though he's silent), the key to his apartment is stolen, he has trouble with his new medication, his complex is raided by lunatics and he has to sleep outside ... and then he's notified by UPS driver that his Mom's been decapitated by a chandelier (... and it gets worse).  The first act shows that Aster is already a master at the technical aspects of filmmaking, with Beau scrambling to stop his life from crumbling to bits and chaos erupting all around him (be sure to check out the funny signs and graffiti everywhere) before he manages - as he's done in the past - to sabotage his own film: when it finally arrives at the sequence with the Orphans of the Forest (a theatrical troupe), the "narrative" starts to really crumble apart and it becomes an endurance test.  There are some truly good ideas in there - the movie is mainly about being struggling to be brave in an uncertain world - and a number of memorably perverse moments (the revelation of Beau's biological "father" and the sex scene with Elaine, played by Parker Posey), but it needed to be done in a more streamlined fashion: surrealism is exceptionally difficult to "make work" ... if it doesn't, you might seem a bit indulgent.