Beau Is Afraid is a three-hour monster of a movie. I wanted to see it when it came out in April 2023 but I was still having eye issues and there was no way I was going to make it through a three hour movie. Well, now that my eye is doing better, let’s see if this is worth it.

Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is an anxiety-riddled man who lives in a rather dangerous part of town. As he gets ready to take a trip to visit his mother, Mona (Patti LuPone), both his suitcase and the keys to his apartment are stolen. He calls his mother to both cancel his trip and figure out what steps he should take. Mona resigns to the fact that he is not coming to visit and hangs up on him. Beau calls back, only to have a random UPS guy pick up the phone. The UPS man tells Beau that his mother is dead. Now Beau has to figure out how to get to his mother’s house for the funeral.

This description barely scratches the surface of what happens in Beau Is Afraid. So much weird stuff happens that I kept waiting for the big twist that explains everything. But that twist never comes. I still don’t know how to interpret this movie. It feels like they were trying to make a movie like Big Fish, where we are supposed to assume the main character’s tales are unreliable only to find out they aren’t. However, we don’t get that sort of sense here. Fantastical stories are told that we are supposed to believe are true. But, seriously, there is a giant penis-monster locked in an attic. Am I supposed to believe that the monster is real or that it’s a allegory for an actual person? There isn’t anything that happened previously in the movie to tell me which way to go.

So, I don’t know. I didn’t hate it but it is way, way, way too long and parts of it were way too boring. I do know that I can’t recommend this movie to anyone. That feels like torture.

Rating: D+