Bo is afraid. And Danny. And Annie. Logically, since fear seems to be what drives his every creative endeavor. Ari Aster, “terrible child” of independent American cinema and a worthy ambassador of the name of the (after the Oscar-winning success) of the production company A24.

All this because he himself was once afraid. When he was four, the now 36-year-old director went to see it with his mother. “Dick Tracy” Warren Beatty. One shot from a machine gun was enough for the kid to jump up from his seat and run for several blocks, dodging cars, and his mother ran after him through the streets of New York.

It was Ari Astaire’s first film experience, from any point of view. Since then, he has devoted himself to reviving the feeling that his first encounter with the seventh art aroused in him. Teenager he was watching horror fanatics grew up to be a film student in Santa Fe and start doing his “country business” in film, i.e. short films.

It is these and especially “Strange Things About the Johnsons” which caught the attention of A24, who added Ari Astaire to their roster. The premonition turned out to be true for the studio. “Hereditary”, directorial debut in the horror genre with her participation Toni Collette was voted by many as the scariest movie of 2018 and easily claims the title of the best horror movie of recent years. Something that was also reflected in the box office as it was the studio’s most commercial film until “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”.

This was just the beginning for the director, who continued to improve. “Mid summer” a year later, a pagan folklore journey that illuminates the darkest and most Dionysian instincts with a relentlessly blinding sun, a film meant to be first experienced, then understood. She was also the one who made Florence Pio the absolute “IT girl” among the alternatives, and her image with a flower crown in her hair is a trademark of A24 as well as the Letterboxd kids.

To get to 2023 and Ari Astaire’s biggest project to date. V “Bo is afraid” Currently playing in theaters, the American director tries to combine influences and styles in a three-hour inner odyssey that challenges him. Joaquin Phoenix.

“What else are you afraid of, tell me and I will”

Although Ari Aster shifts each of his works in other aesthetic directions and creates different threatening conditions for his characters, the core of its cinematic reflection remains almost haunting.

Heroes constantly haunted by their past, which, lest we forget what Freud taught us, takes the form their parents. Legacy opens with the funeral of Annie’s mother (Toni Collette), whose death brings her back to the heroine’s life rather than closes the chapter. Dani (Florence Pio) in “Summer Solstice” loses her family and is then called to become part of another “family”, a bucolic sect in the grasslands of Sweden. Bo (Joaquin Phoenix) in “Bo Is Afraid” suddenly loses his mother… to a falling chandelier, and then embarks on an imaginary journey to find the woman who created his deepest guilt, the one that actually castrated him (despite the gigantic phallus, which you will see parade around in the movie).

In the Ahri Aster universe dangers can be guarded in the simplest things, is often a clue to the “elephant in the room”. Thus, a knife that cuts a cake with nuts, a hair in the cake, or the driveway to the hero’s apartment building can be turned into a thriller. Ari Astaire is looking for his MacGuffins here and there to instigate his descent into hell.

Of course, the dangers are sometimes real, and sometimes motivated by the imagination of the characters. Nevertheless, for Ari Astaire, every mental truth is also cinematic. And, like the psychoanalyst of images, he uses all the skills he has to serve them. He’s not necessarily trying to “heal” his characters, he’s more willing to listen to them, to let them face their demons, no matter the story’s outcome.

It doesn’t help them. He allows them to train in an open house. Which, no matter how much they “appropriate” it, it will still retain its characteristics and therefore surpass them.

Dive into Bo’s Mind

Aster’s ambitions are not hidden. The hours in his films have never dropped below two hours, and now they are approaching three. Not only that, but in “Bo is afraid” his intention is to make his first great masterpiece, his own “Citizen Kane” (this is an idea that has been brewing since 2011 and short “Beauty”).

In this endeavor, like any well-read and self-respecting director, comes back to all the big ones. He lives up to his legend Odysseus, but also a few more archetypal heroes, adds the necessary “kafkaesque” ingredient, deeply bows to his theatricality Fellini looking at him from the side “Wizard of Oz” gives a la Tennessee Williams crescendo when needed, while the director himself describes the film “like the Jewish Lord of the Rings, except Bo goes to his mom’s house.”

You can continue count references in the film and look for correlations and interpretations; in the same confusing way that Bo is looking for his home. Something that might interest young moviegoers, who will prove to themselves how much their study of world cinema has paid off by revealing every element of the film, but will probably tire everyone else out.

It’s not that we’re not dealing with a decent effort. The first part of “Bo” turns his surroundings into a gloomy setting where everything looks menacing managed to fix with enviable accuracy what goes on in the mind of a person suffering from any kind of anxiety disorder.

Moving on, however, history also as the hero becomes more and more absurd, the structure of the film is constantly denatured, it breaks into many different nightmares, each one forgetting what the previous one looked like. At its strangest and most uncomfortable moments, “Bo’s Afraid” inevitably reminds “I’m thinking about ending things” film, which, unfortunately, Charlie Kaufman was created in the corridors of his mind.

Most of the episodes in “Bo Is Afraid” are excellent expression studies in their own right, carefully crafted. It seems that but it lacks the binding enzyme that can make the viewer part of Bo’s dark journey. If we agree that this is another Ari Astaire film to be experienced, then it requires too much of the viewer to become an interpreter of symbols at any moment and ultimately falls into the void between “instinctive” and “brain”. As the end credits roll, you’re left wondering how many different films you’ve watched in 180 minutes.

Of course, it doesn’t stop being a particularly demanding track that few directors of Ari Astaire’s age would even manage to pull off today. And if this time he overestimated his capabilities, he continues to build a personal style that allows him to simultaneously build the profile of a “creator”. Enough to get him back to what he does best next time: listen to your heroes first, and his confidence can be left for later.