Opiniões dos críticos

Beau has been engineered to make indifference an impossibility. It’s a movie whose flaws are not only at least as interesting as its strengths, but may actually be the better reason to see it... Aster serves his neuroses straight up, and the result is a paradox: a film that’s suggestive or derivative of a dozen other titles yet unfolds as an original vision. It’s a movie that we haven’t seen before.

bar a few solid laughs along the way courtesy of its morbidly dark sense of humour, the writing comes across as overly self-indulgent... It’s difficult not to feel that there’s a better film lurking within that might have been rescued by a bit more red ink and a more ruthless re-think in the cutting room.

Beau Is Afraid enters a world that already has an adequate number of trauma plots about inert adult men who feel alternately menaced and mommied by all they encounter. As such, it’s a surprisingly uninspired effort for a director whose prior work was strongest when it explored the nuances of interpersonal toxicity.

Viewers are sure to be impressed by Aster's prodigious imagination and technical skill... But whether they will be enthralled by the film is another matter. It's clear from the start that Beau Is Afraid is set in a heightened alternate reality where our rules don't apply, and the impression that none of it has any internal logic or tangible consequences can leave you feeling as if somebody is recounting a weird dream they've had – and doing so for three long hours.

Beau Is Afraid is never boring, but yet still manages to be tedious. It's endlessly inventive, but lacks the narrative or conceptual discipline to turn those inventions into something functional. It's rare to watch a film so constantly rip defeat from the jaws of victory, and vice versa.

Beau Is Afraid is less satisfying not because it’s a departure from horror but because it feels like it’s revisiting the same elements without any structure or center... Ditching the genre framework doesn’t make it feel more honest — its self-deflating comedy is, ironically, that of someone afraid of being taken seriously.

[Beau Is Afraid] is a complaint without a complainer, because its protagonist... has almost no voice or discernible inner life... The film depends on this blankness, on letting viewers know almost nothing about what Beau knows about himself and about his mother. To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.

If you can get on its strange wavelength, [Beau Is Afraid] one of the most fascinating films of recent years, a layered epic that delights in continually complicating the audience’s understanding of the main character.

[Aster] has always been a funny guy. His excellent, trauma-filled dramas “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” may be packed with the horror of relationships, but it’s the cruel joke underneath that provides their driving force... [Beau is Afraid] is Aster’s funniest movie yet.

“Beau Is Afraid” gave me the unsettling feeling that, owing to some administrative error, I had stumbled upon an extended therapy session instead of a movie—looking on, or scarcely able to look, as the director digs deep into who knows what private funks. So punishing is the film that it deserves its own motto: Per Ardua ad Aster.

[Beau Is Afraid is] an ambitious, three-hour nightmare comedy that is delirious, hysterically funny, deeply disturbing, and profoundly traumatic and f*cked up... “Beau Is Afraid” might be a little overstuffed in spots... and may feel a little drained by the end. But it’s a deeply artistic and ambitious odyssey.

Despite [the film's] attractions and in spite of Phoenix’s aura and his focus — and how he plays with the character, opening Beau up a wee bit with flickers of yearning and teasingly humanizing fissures — it is tough to care about a mouse who matters so much less to the filmmaker than the shiny mousetrap where he’s imprisoned you both.