Beau is Afraid

Beau Is Afraid

Writer & Director – Ari Aster

2023, United States-United Kingdom-Finland-Canada

Stars – Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan

 

If my reservations about ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommer’ was that the brilliance on show relied ultimately too heavily on tropes whilst suggesting something even better or wilder was possible, I thought aster would just do more of the same (which would still be a good thing) or something off-the-rails might be on the cards. (I’m thinking in the same arena as Brandon Cronenberg?) Certainly wilder, with ‘Beau is Afraid’ making no concessions: it’s all tease-the-meaning, a picaresque odyssey for a shambling, injured and anxious protagonist. Indeed, it is anxiety that leads the narrative, rather than just the nightmare logic on display, so there is lot of promise and irresolution, and it does gel a little, eventually, but not in any way that is bound to satisfy. WTF? you’ll say, both amused and frustrated, both positively and negatively.

 

It's overlong and the indulgence is the point, but where ‘Midsommer’ felt appropriately paced (I never felt the 3 hours was overlong), ‘Beau is Afraid’ just keeps going, a series of sections that all offer treats, but it’s true that the first is perhaps best. Because perpetual anxiety is the goal, not answers: not really. If ‘Uncut Gems’ ran on audience anxiety, this film runs on Beau’s, and the feel is something between, say, David Lynch (those creepily smiling medical men!), Lars Von Trier’s trolling and ‘Mother!’: that is to say that it won’t be everyone’s cup-of-black-humour-coffee, and he’s sure to lose a few fans built on his more conventional horror tropes, but it’s a film that will click even more on a second watch when knowing what it is.

 

 

Joaquin Phoenix is reliably great, schlubby, and a little weak-willed but personifying our perpetually apprehensive side that rarely takes centre stage or guides narratives. Especially in the first section where he must try and navigate the farcical piling on from an aggressive outside world (yes, prop the door open with the book; that’ll be okay…).  Slightly unkempt, slightly whiny, slightly defiant, worn down by his paranoia and neurosis. In fact, it’s the first section that best displays this. It moves from its start in urban dread and home invasion, it heads into benign/sinister imprisoned, Freudian confrontation, horror in the attic, folk setting, and autobiography as animated folklore, being theatrically judged… All satirical and verging on the wilfully baffling. Throughout, Phoenix projects intelligence and suffering. How afraid should Beau be?

 

A chief narrative of cinema is the reassurance of overcoming, so this adventure to always being thwarted goes against that, but always with the hint that Beau might be to blame himself, that this is all unreliable narrator stuff; but even this manifests the self-recriminatory side to a worrying personality. Even the black humour is less from schadenfreude than from relating to his misfortune or the absurdity of his humiliations.

 

Yes, it tests patience, and it’s brilliantly rendered and just when you find yourself opting out it will likely so something to drag you back in. Too wilfully abstract, perhaps, and happy to frustrate, which will lose many early on. But if you do click with the black comedy, the amusement of discomfort, and the slapstick of misfortune – and the audience I saw it with laughed many times – or if you enjoy trying to decode puzzle-boxes of symbolism and discomfort, then it will offer many joys and highlights.

 

Enys Men

ENYS MEN
Writer/director – Mark Jenkin
Stars – Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe
2022 – UK

Mark Jenkins’ ‘Bait’ was a sensation in its DIY formation. His follow-up ‘Enys Men’ (Cornish for “Stone Island”) is similarly constructed with a clockwork Bolex camera, and an even more audacious post-production sound design comprised of often sharp diegetic sound and blaring drone. (If any more evidence is needed that lazy jump-scares are simply a result of volume, see if you jump at innocuous Cornish landscapes because the of blasts of musical stings.) The feel is of a 70s folk horror with bold colours, some print flares and speckling which are intrinsic to the success of its feel. And ‘Enys Men’ is a full-on mood piece, where narrative gives way to wilful abstraction and hints of meaning.

What seems to be the tale of a volunteer on an unpopulated Cornish island (“Enys Men” is Cornish for “Stone Island”) taking the temperature of some flowers and dropping a stone down a mine shaft gradually evolves into something inscrutable, fascinating and disquieting. Past and present seemingly overlap increasingly and, for me, her world becomes a lost continent of ghosts generated by the stone. Or is she just going crazy in isolation? Or is she overwhelmed by and trapped in the uncanny? But don’t go looking for narrative and answers. It’s all hints and symbols.

Mike Muncer (Evolution of Horror) calls it ‘Penda’s Fen’ meets ‘the Lighthouse”, and that’s a fair description. A film of still images almost,  accumulating empty atmosphere, detractors say; certainly Keri O’Shea sees the aesthetic as free-floating to condescending aimlessness. If it hits your buttons, it’s a superior horror-inflected ambient genre piece of nightmare logic and the uncanny, with just a touch of body-horror. 

 

Grimmfest Easter Horror Nights: 'The Night', 'The Barcelona Vampiress', 'Imaginary Portrait', ''Echthaar'

 THE NIGHT

Director: Kourosh Ahari

Writers: Kourosh Ahari, Milad Jarmooz

2020, USA-Iran

‘The Night’ opens with an excellent set-up with a party of friends, effortlessly conveying relationships that are obviously long-term and no inclined to punctuation for the audience; these are people who have known each other a while, are perfectly aware of one other’s foibles. And this continues when the focus narrows to the couple Babek (Shahab Hosseini) and Neda (Nioushi Noor), and Iranian couple living in the USA. Their marriage feels lived-in, no room for niceties, the underlying love taken as a given, the selfish traits and admonishments casual rather than argumentative. He, a little boorish; she a little needling. In this way they feel real. And of course, they have secrets, albeit ones that are well telegraphed. 

So when they decide to stay in a hotel to resolve a marital disagreement, they are prime material for supernatural forces to exploit their human weakness. A hotel at night is always going to be evocative: pretty but impersonal. There’s a lot to enjoy in the slow-burn and perhaps ‘The Night’ is less riveting and more conventional when the situation is revealed, but the mundane fall-out of secrets and trauma are more convincing here for being organic as opposed to high dramatics. And there is enough creeping dread and surrealistic touches to keep this intriguing. 

[Spoiler alert:] However, the final note that you can never escape purgatory unless you face yourself is elegantly rendered and speaks of horror of a deeper, personal nature: one where you can’t escape your self-denial. 

THE BARCELONA VAMPIRESS

La Vamipra da Barcelona

Director: Lluís Danés

Writers: Lluís Arcarazo, María Jaén

2020, Spain

IMDB says “In early 20th century Barcelona, little Teresa goes missing shocking the country. When police start investigating Enriqueta Martí, the "Vampiress of Raval", they cover a much more sinister affair.” But that isn’t quite the plot. This is the story of a troubled but apparently gifted journalist Sebastià Comas (Roger Casamajor) mired in the case of Enriqueta Martí, motivated by personal guilt at the death of his sister. But, like Alan Moore’s ‘From Hell’, and films such as ‘The Limestone Golem’ or Lang's ‘M’, Arcarazo and Jaén’s script is more interested in cultural context, commentary and corruption. Comas’ journalism is soon mutilated to fit an agenda and he crumbles even as he tries to cling to a truth he is told no one wants. The people want the “morbid”. 

With strong themes and despair established, Danés goes out to play with aesthetic: black-and-white and vintage cinema quirks launching into colour for the nightmarish, or red dresses; there are real sets and cut-out sets. Sometimes sets drop into Derek Jarman minimalism even as the affectations of Guy Madden comes to mind. But this is not to compensate for a lack of script and plot, which is always intriguing even if Comas’ doesn’t see the depth of corruption that the audience has long guessed. In fact, on first watch, the post-modern visuals may distract from how solid the characterisation and thriller elements are. It’s premise that unreliable narrators and biased storytelling and corruption make the truth an almost impossibility to reach is timeless.

It’s a fascinating film where all the artifice isn’t allowed to get in the way of a solid, sad tale of scapegoating.

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The advantage of short films is that coherence is not necessarily as predominant a requirement as with long-form. Felipe Martinez Carbonell’s ‘Imaginary Portrait’ and ‘Echthaar’ by Dominic Kubisch and Christopher Palm both capitalise on the nightmare logic that short horror films can excel in. Both are often gorgeous to look at and a little open-ended that will not frustrate a briefer tale.

‘Imaginary Portrait’ is a picture of a girl trapped at home under the oppression of her father and grandfather. It’s often elegantly presented but not afraid of a monstrous figure walking in the background. It easily conjures outrage and creepiness. 

'Echthaar’ has gorgeous monochrome photograph and some vintage pop songs to distinguish it. It packs a Fifties setting, hairdressing and the eeriness of display dummies and jukeboxes into a tale that doesn’t have to make sense, simply beguile. It has a little of that dark, surreal humour that reminds of ‘In Fabric’. 

Xtro - and excess

Harry Bromley Davenport, 1982, UK

This was one of those VHS covers that promised so much when you held it in your hands as a youth in the video store. And it didn’t disappoint, having many moments that you could relish telling your pals about in simple gleefully shocked sentences. Not least of all a woman being raped by an alien and giving birth to a fully grown man. But there’s also the eating of the snake eggs, the panther, the… Well, ‘Xtro’ seems to pack so much random stuff in its primary location of an upmarket flat – even a naked Maryam d’Abo – that this is what makes it special: the idea that even on a limited budget and location, all is possible.

The inspiration seems to have been not only to cash in on the extremism agenda of the contemporary horror movement and the fad for Scott’s ‘Alien’, not only to present a counter-‘E.T.’ (“Not all aliens are friendly”), but (according to Davenport) also to mimic some of the spirit of ‘Phantasm’. Davenport long disliked ‘Xtro’ and certainly, when reflecting upon its genesis, seems very much to have conceded with whatever leftfield idea was asked of him (“A panther? Sure…”). Now, having seen that fans are happy to follow its waywardness if not see it as welcomingly unpredictable, he seems to have made his peace with it (with Second Sights’ wonderful new release).

‘Xtro’ justifies its nightmare logic by having random psychic powers as the reason for anything and everything unsystematic that happens. Some find it confusing and messy, but when you accept that psychic powers mean that anything goes, there arguably isn’t a thorough need for logic, just inventiveness. In that, it follows the psychic terrors of films like ‘The Fury’ or ‘Carrie’ or especially ‘Harlequin’; but its Eerie Child angle also hints at ‘The Omen’. As a kid, I was particularly taken with psychic horrors like ‘Harlequin’, ‘The Shout’ and ‘The Medusa Touch’ where the imagination seemed to bend reality to its will. I found that scary (and perhaps The Twilight Zone’s ‘It’s a Good Life’ provides a great epitome of this). And if this sounds as if it’s strayed from an ‘Alien’ rip-off, the joy of ‘Xtro’ is watching it mash everything together in the kitchen sink and to go wherever the hell it wants. Apparently the producer wanted a panther in the flat, so there it is, and it doesn’t seem ridiculous but simply a highly evocative part of the madness (Davenport notes the panther in the white corridor as the film’s best shot, but there are many). Certainly the seemingly arbitrary built on the peaks of odd moments were the kind of narratives my undisciplined teenaged brain was making and that’s how I read ‘Xtro’, but rarely does such random plotting work as successfully as it does here: it’s a fun-ride of surreal horror and contemporary excess underpinned by a kitchen sink drama. It works as a portrayal of reality breaking down along with the family unit.

And beneficial, as usual in these B-cases, is that the lead actors Philip Sayer and Bernice Stegers take it all seriously and deliver above-average performances to ground the absurdities and accentuate them. Perhaps Simon Nash as the boy just waiting for his alien abducted dad to come home isn’t particularly good, his ‘Grange Hill’ volume and working class accent puts him at odds with everyone else’s naturalness. Nevertheless, he fits the special grubbiness and low-rent British Eighties-ness that can’t be affected and only gives a solid foundation for the outré incidents. It’s an example where that particular low-rent feel becomes an asset. The soundtrack by Davenport is at once unforgettable, a little hokey, quintessentially Eighties synth and somewhat resembles the Dr Who scores of the time (and included in Second Sight’s release; a real bonus). The effects are both tacky and vivid: yes, the man-sized birth is appropriately icky, horrid and in bad taste, but no less memorable are performers Tik and Tok as the Action Man come to life and as the alien – the alien that wastes no time in being seen, a simple, slightly stiff but unforgettable.

There are two endings to ‘Xtro’ and although Davenport thinks that the ending with the clones of Danny doesn’t work, I disagree: surely it fits the nightmarish and haphazard tone and provides more motivation for the alien visit; the other ending is more just an ‘Alien’-style shock that leads nowhere. So no, I can’t really say ‘Xtro’ is “good”, but it reaches places other more prestige films don’t and exists totally in its own realm, however much of a B-movie rip-off it was intended to be. I have always been very fond of it.