em Beau Is Afraid /em Is Already the Year's Most Infamous Movie. Here's What It's Really All About.

In this article, Beau is a-spoiled. In an Ari Aster movie, the best thing that can happen is losing your head. Not literally, of course, although the Midsommar auteur is notoriously fond of literally cutting his characters off at the neck. In 2019, he said that "head trauma will always have a place in my movies," and his latest, Beau Is Afraid, holds true to that promise. Early on, just after Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) cancels a planned visit to his mother, she is decapitated by a falling chandelier. But alongside the characters who get their skulls crushed and faces smashed are ones who desperately need a respite from the buzzing of their brains--who would give anything if they could, even for a minute, just stop thinking. Toni Colette's character in Hereditary comes from family with a long history of mental illness--a mother with dissociative identity disorder, a father with psychotic depression, a brother with schizophrenia--and is plagued by the feeling that she and her family are the object of a sinister conspiracy.