Truth in advertising: Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is afraid, of nearly everything, including his domineering mother (Patti Lupone), whom he plans to visit very soon; sex (he was told his father, who had a heart murmur, died immediately upon his conception); accidentally drinking mouthwash; and much of the world outside his apartment, in the large fictionalized city of Corrina where he lives. To be fair, in Ari Aster's audaciously perverse jet-black comedy, Beau is shown over and over again to be fully justified with his many apprehensions.
The entrance hallway of his building is littered with garbage, scrawled graffiti on the walls ("Shoot the pope!"), and violent mayhem constantly going on just outside the front door. When Beau does leave -- say, for a meeting with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) -- he has to sprint down his street, hoping to avoid a deeply tattooed man who has it in for him for an unstated reason. The tattooed man isn't alone: Nearly everyone seems to have it in for poor, shy Beau, who does his level best to navigate these treacherous waters as best he can, even if it seems he can't escape peoples' fury and disdain.
The night before Beau is meant to fly out, he has trouble getting to sleep, exacerbated by an unseen neighbor who, with increasing anger, keeps slipping notes under his door telling him to turn down the music in his absolutely quiet apartment. This causes him to vastly oversleep, such that he wakes in a panic, trying to make his flight. One small mistake leads to another, and suddenly, he loses his suitcase and keys and inadvertently lets in a teeming mob of violent sociopaths into his apartment. He pitifully tries to sleep outside on a scaffolding, as his apartment and worldly possessions are actively being destroyed inside.
You could say the film roughly breaks into three acts: the first act is dark, inspired comedy (sample news headline: "Birthday Boy Man Stabs Three More"); the second, as Beau begins on a quixotic quest to get to his mother, whom he fears has died, a kind of Odyssian spiritual journey; and the third, a dark meditation on the corrosive nature of pervasive guilt and self-loathing.
Unifying the three pieces is the sense that the whole contraption could actually be an unruly nightmare (the idea of "dreams" and "dreaming" are introduced both subtly and in more direct ways), capturing the essence of an existentially haunted man riddled with passivity and ambivalence, on the cusp of having his life slip away past him.
It's a difficult film to assess, almost by definition, as the slippery nature of the narrative never quite establishes a firm baseline from which to move forward. We see what happens to Beau, time and again, as one thing or other conspires against him -- at one point, he gets hit by a car, and gets taken out of the city by a kindly couple (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane), who sort of adopt him, to the consternation of their young daughter (Kylie Rogers), who responds by drinking paint and framing him for her death -- but we can't be sure how reliable of a character he is, nor whether the narrative itself is about him (things happening) or by him (things he's enacted).
This ambiguity allows Aster ("Hereditary," "Midsommar") all the space he needs to plumb poor Beau's depths in a myriad of ways, some more bewitching than others. At one point, after he escapes the couples' house, with a crazed, mad-dog former Army veteran, Jeeves (Denis Ménochet) dispatched to tear him apart, he ends up with a traveling theater troupe in the middle of the woods, who help him envision a potential alternate life as an elderly, grizzled man in search of his three lost sons -- a sequence that utilizes Aster's beloved stagecraft and animation of various types to conjure up an emotionally fulfilling future for Beau that could never have actually happened.
Once he finally arrives at his mother's house, things only get more perplexing. He runs into Elaine (Parker Posey), his lost childhood love for whom he's been waiting his life to return to him, but their coupling, one of the few moments of pure joy for Beau in the film, quickly results in a series of even more damning revelations that eventually leads him to face his accusers in a large stadium court, a trial of his failures that can only possibly have one outcome.
In some ways, Aster's film works on similar lines as Darren Aronofsky's "Mother," a similar nightmare tableau that blurs lines of waking dystopias, but with a far more cryptic intention. The closing sequence, as Beau's various crimes (entirely against his mother, unsurprisingly) appear on a giant video scoreboard above his head, calls to mind Alan Parker's closing sequence in "The Wall," at least conceptually, but the film's dark humor blends in with its horrors such that the whole thing has a palpably disconcerting vibe.
There is also a sense, in the film's various particulars and details (such as Beau's adherence to dental floss, which ultimately leads to him losing his keys and luggage) of autobiography -- if not Aster's, per se, then someone's -- that keeps the hapless protagonist from becoming an empty symbolic vessel for the filmmaker's continuing course of punishment. It's a sort of dark-comic hero's journey that keeps lapping itself. There are some echoes of the Coen brothers -- filmmakers who perpetually put their protagonists similarly through the ringer, though not at the demonic pitch that Aster does here.
There is a natural linkage between the absurdism of pitch-black comedy ("Confessions of a Teenage Llama Queen" on a book jacket, say), and the subversive jolts of deep-seated horror (a hovering figure emerging above you as you take a bath); but also, in a film that features peculiar combinations of both (Beau eventually is forced to go up in the attic crawl space of his childhood home, only to find a monstrous representation of his dead father that plays like a combination of "Eraserhead" and "HR Pufnstuf"), a kind of emotional purity.
In the end, it's not a film about all the things that actually happen -- or, maybe, don't happen -- as much as it's a film about the feelings these events conjure up in us, the way they stir and poke at our own subconscious' terrors. Everyone's trip is different, the film suggests, but everyone's is also the same.