The critics agree: Beau Is Afraid is a Freudian farce, a nightmarish horror-comedy, a tragicomic Oedipal odyssey. But what does all this mean—that it’s about mommy issues? That it’s funny and scary? That the protagonist takes a long journey; that the film itself is long? Ari Aster’s latest begins in a birth canal and ends with a passage through a murky birthlike tunnel. We cut from newborn Beau’s perspective of the birthing room to his spot on a therapist’s couch. This is a movie in which everything is expelled and nothing is left out.
