Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

I knew that Beau Is Afraid would be my Southland Tales or Under the Silver Lake.

Ari Aster made two movies that generated a lot of hype: Hereditary and Midsommar. Like the two films I mentioned above, Beau Is Afraid is very much a movie being made by a creative who has that rare moment of being able to get anything they want and going wild.

Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) hasn’t had the best of lives. His father died while making love to his mother (Patti LuPone), and he’s waited his whole life for Elaine (Parker Posey), whom he met once on a cruise ship. Now, he’s trapped in a crime-filled city, shoved out of his apartment, hit by a truck and stabbed by a serial killer. He’s saved by Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane), but things fall to pieces, as they do throughout, as their daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers) tries to get him to drink paint, angry that he’s replaced her dead brother. She dies instead, and her mother sends a vet, Jeeves (Denis Ménochet), after him. Roger had promised to take Beau to his mom’s funeral, but now who knows? As it is, he’s lost in the woods, watching a play by The Orphans of the Forest, which he takes on as part of his real life; then Jeeves shows up and kills everyone.

He finally makes it home and gets to make love to Elaine, who dies, and then his mother appears, taking him to an attic filled with his twin brother and his father, a penis monster who kills Jeeves. Yes, I just wrote that. Beau tries to escape, and he finds out that he’s on trial. His mother has records of every visit to his therapist (Richard Cohen), and no matter how much he defends himself, his mother refuses to listen. His boat exploded, and he decided to give in, drowning. The end, as the audience leaves.

What does it mean? Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski said that Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life were all films that influenced this. There’s also a realization that Mona has controlled Beau’s life all along, and everyone, even Emily, was all his employees, paid enough for their family for years to be happy as long as they were in his life. It also feels like a piss take on the audience, who are expecting a great adventure and are given strange journeys through someone’s life that go nowhere.

Is it about anything? Does it have to be about anything in particular? Maybe it’s about ambition and what you can do when you can do just about any movie you want. It speaks to a big vision, so much grander than his past films, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

John Waters said, “A superlong, super-crazy, super-funny movie about one man’s mental breakdown with a cast better than Around the World in 80 Days’: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Parker Posey, Nathan Lane, and Amy Ryan. It’s a laugh-riot from hell you’ll never forget, even if you want to.”