I’m going to keep this in draft form until I remember the proper spelling of the writer’s name and until I can actually figure out what I saw. I read a Times review which I think was pretty accurate. Horror films are usually about waking up in a relatively normal state. Something might be off, but you go about your day, then suddenly something happens and your day either immediately turns into a nightmare, or does so gradually. The monster comes out of the closet or from under the bed. Jason starts killing her friends until he finally turns his sights on Jamie Lee Curtis. This movie flips that concept over. Beau is living in a nightmare, where there is a dead body in the street which no one has bothered to collect, some naked man is going around stabbing people to death, another bum seems to be caught in an eternal fist fight with another bum, and a gay guy is samba dancing, endlessly, to an audience of no one.
He has no friends and the only person he seems to visit is a therapist (Stephen McKinley Harrison — who was so good as a Catholic teacher in Lady Bird.) But he’s also a completely unreliable protagonist and you don’t know if what you’re seeing is “real” or not. I don’t think gets in the way of the film but it leaves it open to interpretation.
One thing you must know if you’re going to watch and Ari Aster movie is that it’s very possible that every character will die.
In an early scene, because he’s been prescribed some pills that ABSOLUTELY MUST be taken with about a half a litre of water, Beau has to run across the street to get some water from the deli because his building’s water has been shut off. While in the deli, drinking the water that will prevent him from dying, almost everyone on the street enters his building through the door he propped open, and they all go up to his apartment and have a party, fuck, fight, burn things, cook and the two bums continue to choke each other.
When they are done, he returns to his apartment and gets a call with the news that his mother has died. His mother, it turns out, is key to his predicament, but he doesn’t know this. And then he begins on one of those nightmares you have where you can’t get to someplace, like an airport, because so many things keep getting in the way, and then you finally wake up, relieved to no longer be frustrated. There are 4 major settings after he leaves his house: a suburban home where a surgeon and his wife have rescued him — I can’t recall what happened that he ended up unconscious, but it’s not important. This suburban couple is going to take care of him. One thing we notice when he gets into a bath is that he has enormous testicles — like the size of grapefruits — and the doctor (Nathan Lane) mentions this.
The second major setting is in a forest where some people who call themselves faerie people (they’re just hippies) welcome him and invite him to watch a play. The play triggers some memories.
The third but not last setting is his mother’s near mansion. It’s clear that she’s an accomplished and powerful woman. He has his first sexual experience with Parker Posey (who is really one of the most talented comedians), a childhood sweetheart for whom he has never lost his desire. She makes an absolutely brilliant face when he orgasms and his grapefruit sized nuts explode into her, but then wants to finish herself. She does while she’s still on top of him and then immediately dies. (This mirrors a lie that his mother had told him all his life — that his father died the moment he orgasmed the sperm that would become Beau.)
But it turns out that she’s not dead, but that her maid had died for her — to fool her son to see what he would do. See she’s been listening to recordings of all Beau’s sessions with his therapist, and through him, has learned that her son hates her. Through some sort of accident, Patty Lupone ends up dead as well.
He gets in a boat, goes through a cave (symbolizing, I think, the vaginal canal, which, I forgot to mention, opens the movie. His birth is depicted as first a heartbeat and darkness, and then glimpses or reddish light and then finally the camera is pushed out of the uterus and we see a baby’s bottom being spanked. As he putters through this cave in his little boat, he comes to the center of a large arena or stadium that is filled with people. This is his judgment room and there is a prosecution and a defense. The defense “lawyer” if that’s what he should be called, is thrown over the edge of the stadium and killed on a rock at the bottom of it. So there is only the prosecution. The engine of the boat starts sputtering and sparking and Beau, standing in the boat, finally realizes that it’s over. The engine explodes, the boat capsizes, traps Beau underneath, and after some struggle where we see the boat rocking a little, it subsides and Beau is dead. The audience starts to leave as the credits roll, eventually leaving a completely empty stadium.
What this is all about I can’t tell. But it’s very hard to tell with Aster’s movies what exactly he’s trying to accomplish. I’m fairly certain that this movie is about how an overbearing mother’s “love” can cripple a person. But I’m not sure if there’s much more to it than that. Just as at the end of Midsommer (another disturbing and genre defying movie by Aster), Florence Pugh decides to burn her boyfriend alive as he’s dressed in the skin of a bear (by force, by a crazy Swedish cult), it doesn’t really come to mean anything, except perhaps something rather simple. In that instance, it was something like, “Don’t take your girlfriend for granted.” In this it’s, “Don’t smother your children.” I don’t know. But the genre is horror and I think it can be forgiven for not having big and possibly unnecessary themes. The title tells us the theme. Beau is afraid. He’s afraid of his mother. That’s what the movie is. But like his other two movies, it’s fascinating and watchable.