Beau is Afraid Explained (Spoilers)

I thought the movie insinuated that Beau's psychosis was a result of his Mother using him as a guinea pig for all of the drugs that made her rich. The whole film I was confused to how she was so successful and he was living in the gutter. Then you see the scene of him walking through the house and seeing himself in all of the framed medicine ads for all of her drugs. And you realize his mother is a monster who used him, drove him crazy (drugs and mentally abusive), and you see why Beau is afraid

A lot of people are missing out the main symbolism in the whole movie: The WATER It is everywhere all the time in almost all the scenes Psychologically water represents the feminine aspect and also the unconscious. The first scene is Beau being born and you can hear and see the water he is coming from. He dies swallowed by water. He is afraid of the bathtub when kid. He needs water urgently to swallow the pills. There is a flood in his dream. There is a constant aspect of there being TOO MUCH WATER and sometimes NO WATER, which for me indicates the overwhelming and smothering aspect of being swallowed by a narcissistic mother which love bombs you(too much water) and then denies you (no water) which is a trauma by itself for an infant. The devouring mother is represented constantly in this movie as the water. Watch it again and notice that

I'm always intrigued by how Ari Aster utilizes mental health in his storytelling. Yes, the movies could be seen as just horror, but at their core, there is a very stark exploration of trauma and how it manifests. Thank you for your insight!

Love the ending. There are people who need and ask for help like Beau, but instead we judge them, then just watch them, again like Beau, drowning and died.

I feel like I need to see this movie a few dozen more times before I've even started to understand it. I love how it relates to Ari Aster's other movies. Hereditary and Midsommar highlights the devastating effects of losing family, and Beau is Afraid shows the devastating effects of holding onto family no matter how much they hurt us. I think Aster's work is at its most horrifying when it shows that the people who are supposed to love us are also the most capable of destroying us.

I think Amy Ryan’s character could possibly play a role symbolizing someone in Beau’s life who can see what’s going on with him and try to give him understanding. But yet Beau is so deeply confused and controlled by his mother that he can’t recognize it. The scene where she passes him the note and the scene where she sits next to him on the couch and tells him “I can never understand what you’re going through but-“ and she gets him to switch to channel 73 shows this. I also think people like Beau, who have others in his life try to help him, tend to be too difficult to deal with and end up hurting others by accident which leads them to turn their backs on him. Very much like the paint scene where Amy Ryan ends up sending the Veteran to hunt him down.

To me the movie is largely about emotional incest. The mom shared a bed with Beau when asking him about the little girl he likes. It has a sexual romantic tone to it that is abnormal

To me, the first hour felt like the EMBODIMENT of what ptsd felt like to me. Violent flashes of images. Paranoid, irrational fear of the people around you. Nonlinear understanding of the events around you . Everything feels fuzzy and jumbled together. General sense of confusion and dissociation. Disconnection from body aka the body and self feel very separate from the events occurring around you. The lines of mental fear blurred with physical reality. Then, in the family’s house, that character, whatever his name was, was literally a war veteran and had a scene where he ran after beau shooting a gun. I was like omg.. yeah many war veterans have ptsd. My assessment of this resonating with my experience of ptsd must be correct.

Another big theme I took from the film was gender dynamics. Beau is shown to be subconsciously impacted by the absence of a "masculine" role model in his life, through his obsession with his missing father. The picture of his father he keeps shows him as a "builder", which is what Beau imagines he could strive to become if he could escape the chains of his mother. Mona seeks to punish/discourage all of Beau's "masculine" urges (not to be essentialist myself, just going with the themes of the film). It is clear that Mona has deep insecurities about men/masculinity, implied by the penis monster in the attic. It may be that her own mother instilled this in her, or perhaps Beau's father mistreated her in some way as well. It's not entirely confirmed in the film. With that said, I think it is very intriguing that Amy Ryan forced Beau to take Toni's room. Beau is this "emasculated" male character, who when "adopted" by this new family, takes the place of their neglected daughter. To me, that part alone speaks volumes about each of the characters' psychology. Beau is being crammed into this feminized box against his will, due to not conforming to the masculine role model (the dead son). Toni is so devalued by her parents for not being a boy (perhaps even hinted that they thought she would be by her name), that a literal man replaces her as the family's surrogate "daughter." Beau and Toni sort of mirror each other, in a cruelly ironic way. Ultimately, I think the film is very critical of both gender paradigms. Beau is a fundamentally incomplete character, with one part of himself (the part that stood up for himself & defied his mother) trapped and malnourished in Mona's attic. I don't think we're ultimately meant to see what remains of Beau as "feminine" but perhaps the film questions why we label these behaviors as masculine or feminine. The implication being that there is a "wholeness" of character that is deprived from each of us by the rigid gender roles we inhabit.

My interpretation is that beau who spolier Was dropped on his head as a baby as they say in the opening scene then goes on to have some sort of developmental disorder. The symptoms would assume some low level autism and/or schizophrenia (the paranoia, the psycho sexual artwork sene in the beginning of the film). On top of this his mother is extremely emotionally abusive (possibly even sexually). Everything that happens before the call from his mother is his interpretation of the world and the dangers in it due to his condition. Everything afterwards is in his head because he took pills and died in the bath tub. The final scene is commentary on society watching as people who are suffering from mental health issues are literally drowning in their own minds as we and our governments and the world are silent and do nothing.

This guy gets it. There are freudian and kafkaesque themes in this movie. And the ending was brilliant. Almost an allegory of the cave theme. The way he enters the cave and the images are shown to the people as a representation of beau. And beau can’t see the screen from the angle. Shows he entered the cave and died rather than escaping it.

Beau is Scared is 3 hours and exhausting to the viewer. I think the Director successfully simulated a hallucinatory nightmare with a constantly evolving construct. I definitely had a sense of being trapped in theater similarly to being trapped in a long grueling nightmare. In a deep long nightmare the dreamer is not self aware and helplessly being swept along in the narrative. After a runaway nightmare we wake up tense and exhausted. It is hard to tell when the nightmare narrative plot starts. It could be the entire movie, it could be where Beau fills up the bathtub, it could be when he was hit by the car. After reflecting a bit, I decided the chaotic street scenes in Beau's neighborhood could be exaggerated hyper-reality as perceived by Beau's anxious, hyper sensitive (or schizophrenic) mind. In other words even Beau's conscious perceptions are a form of unreliable narrative as shown to the viewer.

One of my takes: The image of him on the spiral stair case is when he was on the phone with the UPS man receiving the news about his mothers death. His mother was capturing the moment that he was supposed to be utterly destroyed by her supposed loss of life because it made her feel control, which is how she has been managing her reception of love due to generational trauma established by her own mother.

This whole movie is just so good. Ari and Joaquin made magic.

Mona is not just the domineering force in Beau’s life but seemingly everyone around him (including us). During the opening credits, among the production company logos (A24, etc.), the MW (Mona Wasserman) logo is among them, letting us know that she produced what we are about to see. This is reinforced near the end, when the photo mosaic of Mona’s face is made up of her employees (Nathan Lane among them, and once it comes to Blu Ray, I’m sure when paused, we’ll see many others who have joined Beau on his journey; he just stood out with his glasses and mustache). This photo mosaic is very similar to a promotional poster for The Truman Show. Rather than being a picture of Ed Harris, the puppet master of that movie, the photos make up the image of Jim Carrey, who was the victim of a lifelong social experiment wherein he is being surveilled 24/7. Mona, in that regard, sees herself as a victim of Beau being such a horrible child, a projection of her own abuse toward Beau. She has made every attempt (successfully) to make sure that Beau is, indeed, afraid. He soon watches the evening news, in which the stories are so ridiculous that they’re barely an exaggeration of real news (Birthday Boy Stab Man, described as a circumcised white male, will stab you in the neck and guts). Onto the mental health theme: I believe Beau was conditioned to be have a litany of mental health problems by Mona, or that, at the very least, stemmed from her abuse. When Elaine and Beau are in the buffet line as kids, and he’s talking about this food being bad for that reason and that food causing cancer, it seems a direct result of Mona’s conditioning that ejaculation will kill him (seemingly among other things). Beau lives in an apartment building owned by Mona, eats food with the MW logo on it, and takes meds that have the same logo, provided by a doctor who whose only job seems to be breaking his Hippocratic oath by giving every recording of their sessions to Mona. Beau is literally surrounded by his mother, even when she’s not around, even when she “dies.” I think it would be easy to say that Beau is a psychotic hypochondriac who suffers from anxiety and depression, but I think this film, more fascinatingly, shows us that these mental conditions are the result of conditioning, not necessarily a chemical imbalance or something physical like a TBI. Mona is clearly a narcissist who is heading up a lifelong Munchausen experiment. She is also the personification for what is flawed in the way we consume media. Her disappointments concerning Beau at the trial sequence are silly and genuinely out of context, at least from what we’ve seen, showing that we can’t always believe what we see in videos because the media will not contextualize their meaning and at even edit the videos so that we can’t contextualize their meaning. For instance, we see that Beau, after what appears to be a hide and seek prank, did not come out of hiding, even when his mother was injured. A man in the crowd during the trial (sounded to be his defense attorney, whose voice was not magnified like the prosecutor’s) comes to Beau’s defense and says that he was just young and scared, and that’s why he didn’t come out, not because he’s evil. For this logical reasoning, the defense attorney is thrown from the balcony onto the rocks below a la Midsommar. Compare this to real life out-of-context videos. Remember those Covington Catholic School kids? It would appear this little shit in a MAGA hat was disrespectfully inching toward a Native American with a cocky, condescending smirk on his faces as the man performed a drumming ritual native to his people. This was the media’s trickery. MAGA had years of being given a bad name, whether one supports Trump or not, so anything this kid did was already thought to be guilty, and it was viewed that way by pundits, late night hosts, etc. until the context came out that the Native American man had not only instigated the standoff but was the one inching toward the boy and the not the other way around. The media had the full video at the onset but only played the clip that made the kid look bad. Even though the kid sued various networks for their dishonest coverage, his defense had already been thrown over the balcony. The out of context story was already much more amplified than the the real one. People had made up their minds, some of them people who could’ve helped this kid out, but chose to go with the narrative that confirmed what they already felt about people in MAGA hats, and many of them paid a price for it. But no one remembers any apologies or news stories dedicated directly to this boy’s unfair trial in a court of public opinion. They remember that horrible image of the smirking boy in the Trump hat, much like the audience at the end of this film remember that horrible image of Mona hurting her ankle as she fell in distress. That horrible Image of Beau peeking out from behind the pillar because he was horrified of the trouble he now faced. Same thing with Beau’s gift of the For the Boys soundtrack and how he’d gotten it for her two years in a row. Slight side note that will make sense: my own mother had this soundtrack and she loved it. She went through a range of emotions while singing along with Bette Midler. Some songs were upbeat and fun, others were somber, and she sang along accordingly. But my mother more or less hated the film because of one scene: Bette Midler’s character watches her own son get killed in Vietnam and holds his bloody corpse in her lap while she screams and cries. Perhaps Mona and Beau watched this film together. Perhaps Mona loved the music and Beau actually watched her go through a range of emotions while hearing the music. Snapping and clapping to the fun ones, crying at the sad ones, etc. He thought the album was meaningful, like watching the movie with her all over again. But, perhaps the same with my mother, she was in love with the soundtrack but absolutely horrified of the film for the same reason. Maybe Mona stopped listening to the soundtrack just to wipe the image from her memory of a mother violently losing her son. Perhaps young Beau thought she’d lost the album or maybe he just wanted to remind her to start feeling something, anything again. We don’t know because the only context we get is Mona opening the same gift twice and feigning joy the second time she gets it. I don’t know the reason Ari Aster chose the For the Boys soundtrack as Beau’s seemingly thoughtless gift, but I do know a lot of people, women in particular my mother’s age and older, who wouldn’t watch it again or would never watch it a first time when they heard about that scene. The prosecutor goes on to say that Beau made horrible excuses not to visit Mona. I think having your apartment invaded and destroyed due to a lack of a means to lock it (the missing keys) and not having any luggage to take with you is a good enough reason to stay home until things can be settled. Beau doesn’t appear to have much, so having his clothes, toothpaste, toothbrush, etc. stolen is a big deal. That brings me to my interpretation of the pink/blue. Beau’s almost complete lack of anything masculine due to no father or father figure in his life seemed intentionally set up by Mona. Likely she knew what a lack of a strong male presence would do. Beau’s apartment shows no evidence of hobbies or interests. No deer head on the wall below the rifle that killed it. No tool chest with a near-finished project nearby, no model airplanes or cars. Just a couch, bed, TV, and microwave. Very bland and empty, save for the blurry image of Beau’s “father,” in which Moan’s face is superimposed, also blurry but definitely there when I watched it a second time. No one with a male perspective to talk girls with. No one to inspire a love of sports. Due to this overwhelming female presence his entire life, Beau may question his sexuality. In the play sequence, for reasons that seem unknown, sometimes Beau’s wife “will look like a man,” much like the portrait of Mona’s mother hanging in her house. The lines are blurred for Beau, masculine or feminine, fat or straight, etc., perhaps why Toni wrote his name in pink on the wall of someone who typified masculinity, a handsome, chiseled soldier, a war hero who has a sword hanging on his wall. Beau cannot distinguish between who he is attracted to, if anyone other than Elaine, until he meets the pregnant orphan of the forest. She is a mother to be and treats Beau very much like a caring mother. This is why he projects her outfit, her look, into his version of the play. She bears his children because he knows she can. He raises the children with her because she is more caring and nourishing, much better maternal instincts than Mona. Ari Aster has done it again, possibly the best he’s ever done in terms of getting people talking and interpreting his work. I’ll see it a third time at some point, and I’m sure there’ll be even more to discuss. Until then, thank you for this review/analysis.

Haven’t seen any other videos explaining the movie. Saw it yesterday and was interested to see what everyone else was thinking. Glad that you posted this as soon as possible!

I think the last scene was a nod to Freud's personality theory, where Beau is this tiny little helpless ego that can't save himself. And it's like his mom is his inner critic. Her voice is instilled as the critic in his head that he can't escape, and his wise mind is completely overpowered. In the end, he just succumbs to her and his unconscious (the water).

This video is wonderful and made me think about this movie it a completely different way. I thought the scenes in this movie were all visualizations of his fears and anxiety. Not hallucinations, just visualizations for the audience to understand whats going on in his mind. This might be me projecting because I have an anxiety disorder and often think of surreal situations happening that frighten me. But those thoughts are often rooted in a past memory that did happen or trauma. Similar to when Beau’s friends as a kid raided his mothers room which he felt guilt for and the scene when the people from the street raided his home. 👀

Loved this video so much I peeped your channel and saw this was the only video. If this was your first video…damn, did you hit the ground running. Please please please make more videos where you provide a psychoanalytic critique of a film. Very few channels successfully do this and most of them only give a general, shallow take. This was great!

Congrats on your first vid! Excited to see this channel grow. Amazing video btw