I have some conflicting thoughts about this movie.

I finally saw Beau Is Afraid and if I had to sum up my thoughts on this film in one word I’d probably use long. As expected the film is incredibly divisive with viewers with a 67% Rotten Tomatoes critic score and a 71% among audiences.

And of course it’s divisive, it was directed by Ari Aster whose last film Midsommar left audiences either confused, thinking it was the best film they’d ever seen, or a pretentious piece of shit. The response to Beau Is Afraid is pretty much along the same lines. A big complaint I’ve seen and one that I hold is that the film is three hours and does not justify that runtime. It really doesn’t.

Beau Is Afraid stars Joaquin Phoenix as Beau (Armen Nahapetian as young Beau), an aging man who lives alone, suffers from extreme anxiety problems, and has a strange relationship with his overbearing mother Mona (Patti LuPone/Zoe Lister-Jones). Beau lives in a shithole city ridden with crime and violent crazy people (it’s Los Angeles wearing silly glasses), and just wants to get home to see his mother. Cue three hours of wacky zany times.

It’s very easy to hate Beau is Afraid and it’s because the movie is grating and purposely so on several fronts. First you have Beau himself, the titular character, who is a whiny, pathetic loser who is balding and fat and has a stupid grating voice. Beau doesn’t do anything for himself, is in therapy for his bad relationship with his mother, and doesn’t grow as a character at all through the entire film. And it doesn’t feel like Ari Aster is doing this specifically to lazily subvert expectations, but it’s frustrating all the same.

The same goes for the other characters in the film who I feel are so out of touch with reality that they run the risk of detaching audiences from the story. Side characters in the film look human, they’re probably human, but they don’t act entirely human. It’s like a film whose cast is full of deeply schizophrenic nutcases, everyone’s personality flipping the asshole meter up to unrealistic levels. The characters reminded me a lot of Sam and Max; just present enough to be part of reality while seemingly existing on a plane that runs parallel but close enough to be touching some of the time.

Admittedly it’s really hard to set a film to three hours and keep the pacing up for the entire time, and Beau is Afraid fails on that front. There are a lot of lulls that don’t seem to contribute, a few points where the film does a complete 90 degree shift into questionably relevant scenes. It’s the equivalent of cleaning your room and realizing in the middle that you need to buy a new snow shovel, but it’s also August. Sure you accomplished something but it took time away from your actual goal and you didn’t need to do that right when you thought of it.

And it’s not for a lack of trying. The cast in this movie is fantastic. Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau so well you forget he’s actually a role. Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane play Grace and Roger, a couple that hits Beau with their car and take him in to nurse him back to health, in their infinite kindness actually hindering him in the end. Their daughter Toni (Amy Ryan) is such a cartoonishly evil bitch and her cohort Jeeves (Denis Ménochet), a psychopathic military veteran, steal the stage for their screen time. Stephen Henderson plays Beau’s therapist and the dude’s smile is one of the must unsettling things I’ve seen in recent history.

Beau Is Afraid is a good movie, but for a myriad of reasons I have a hard time actually recommending it to other people. It’s a film you probably have to watch twice to really get it, and I have a feeling many won’t have the drive to watch it once.

Rating: B+