Beau Is Afraid: Joaquin Phoenix bosses this vast, hilarious film. But you may well hate it

The last time we found it impossible to avoid “swinging for the fences” – a critical cliche that deserves its own place in Hades – Damian Chazelle was urging Margot Robbie towards performative regurgitation in Babylon. Responses to Ari Aster’s current for-the-fence swing have, so far, been closer to the gaping mouths that greeted Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Are these fellows all right? Could a doctor form a diagnosis on the basis of the films alone? Indeed, it feels as if Aronofsky may have deprived the younger man of an ideal title. One exclamation point is barely enough for this phantasmagoria in the key of Oedipus. Beau Is Afraid. But of what? Of everything. And everything is Mother!!!

The baseball-related cliche implies abandonment of control, but, if the ball makes it over the fence, the batter surely confirms his professional wisdom. Beau Is Afraid is all clatter and stress and movement, but the director is in control throughout, engineering both comic set pieces and existential show trials with equal invention.

His story is as simple as his plot is complex. We begin with Beau Wasserman – Joaquin Phoenix owns the film as Cate Blanchett owned Tár – being born to theatrical misery. Some decades later he is holed up in a shabby apartment with little else for company bar a circling bestiary of neuroses. Early on he learns that his enormously wealthy, psychotically domineering mother (Patti LuPone, seen fleetingly) has been decapitated by a falling chandelier. Beau embarks on an odyssey towards a home that promises no great comfort. He encounters travelling players. He is taken in by a kindly but weird couple played by Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan. On at least one occasion he thinks he might be dead (maybe he is) and has mixed feelings on being told he is still among the quick.

Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster’s first two films, managed the impressive feat of combining full-on horror effects with emotional austerity born in the European art house. With Beau Is Afraid he adeptly juggles the sort of laughs you get from Samuel Beckett with the sort you encounter in Mel Brooks. Early on, Beau sets out to take medication that, a doctor warns, absolutely must be accompanied by water. Of course the taps aren’t working. And, after fighting his way to the shop through feral street people, he discovers he has no money for bottled water. A quick search on the internet for the results of waterless consumption brings him fleetingly to an obituary. Perhaps the best comparison is to the Swedish comedies of Roy Andersson. It’s not that the laughter is set against the despair. It is the despair itself that is so funny – so absurd, so pointless, so pathetic.

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[ ‘You embrace the idea of people being alienated’: Ari Aster on his divisive comedy Beau Is Afraid ]

The film encounters four differently styled modes on the way to our hero’s unwelcome reckoning. Sound design and cinematography shift to the moods as it becomes clear we are moving through a largely allegorical space. The low-level wash of urban menace that underscores the opening section is particularly effective. The shift into animated backgrounds gestures towards the bad childhood that still squats invisibly on Phoenix’s shoulder. That actor has already perfected the art of apparently inhaling his more fearful snatches of dialogue, but he has never before been quite so terrifyingly on edge. The performance is a jagged improvisation in just one sombrely played octave.

Yes, the film tries the patience a tad as it meanders through three picaresque hours. Those already immune to the Aster aesthetic – and there are many – will groan at the architectural self-reference during that final act. But nobody can doubt his commitment to the bit. This is a vast, generous, properly hilarious entertainment that will spawn debate for years to come. You may well hate it.

Beau Is Afraid opens on Friday, May 19th