The Hereditary director, never a horror guy, has left the genre behind for Beau Is Afraid — so why does his new film feel less open?
, he went the vague route when questioned about his seemingly inexhaustible interest in maternal dynamics, answering only that “it’s where everything starts for everybody.” I don’t think Aster is being coy, and whatever the details of his childhood might be, he certainly doesn’t have an obligation to share them with the world — biography, while tempting, is rarely the skeleton key to opening up art that it seems like it should be, anyway.
But 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.is, in its barest terms, about Beau Wassermann, who lives alone, but who remains hopelessly, resentfully in thrall to his mother, Mona . After missing a flight home to see her, he learns that she’s been killed in a freak accident , and struggles to get back in time for her funeral.
Mona, who’s appropriately terrifying when played by LuPone and unsettlingly sultry-steely when played by Lister-Jones, is the culmination of all the disturbing mommies Aster has put onscreen, in his features as well as in the shorts that preceded them. Like the mother played by Bonnie Bedelia in Aster’s satirical 2013 montage, who poisons her son rather than let him leave for college, Mona would rather her son not become a full adult being if that means being out of her control.
The proximity to someone with severe mental illness, the victimized or absent father, the all-consuming mother, the iron-clad familial ties that are a source of dread more than warmth, the fear that you’ll pass the damage you’ve accrued on — Aster always made it clear that he glommed onto horror as a strategy, and one reason he’s been so good with the genre is that he channels so many raw and sometimes ugly emotions surrounding these topics into outlandish stories.
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