Saw Beau is Afrai, a film directed by Ari Aster, of Midsommar and Hereditary fame. I enjoyed those films a lot, however this one is more inscrutable to me - it's both mostly clear what's going on but is far more confusing as to why, in a broad sense, this is all happening.
The film is billed as a horror/comedy. I'm generally apt to see the sad things in life, so often in comedies I feel bad for the poor bumbling characters who are being harassed for our amusement. Likewise in horror, the essentially unpleasant thing in the horror film is often something very prosaic and accessible: loss of a loved one, loss of control over your own life, fear of death, etc. This film gets its horror from taking normal, unpleasant circumstances and amping them to 11. Not only have you lost your keys to your apartment, but they have been stolen right out of your keyhole. Not only that, but this will make you late for a flight to visit your mother who clearly does not believe your story. Not only that but you live on a street which is packed so full of violent addicts that you have to sprint to your door ahead of them every night. etc etc. It's very Synecdoche, New York.
I guess from the genre description that it's supposed to be funny and there are indeed a few scenes I laughed at (the main character has his computer monitor destroyed. He finds it with a shoe bashed through the screen. He gamely plugs the monitor in and navigates around the shoe.) but there were precious few such moments. There's a whole set of jokes around the main character's balls that seem incongruous and strange. Usually, the misery just piles on so hard and so high that I get the sense that you're really supposed to laugh here, but it's all so real and so serious that I find it hard to laugh at so easily. I mostly just felt bad for the poor main character. It felt more triggering than silly to me.
The main character has an anxiety problem which leaves him uncertain and quivering through most scenes, uncertain of what to do. Rather than receiving any sympathy, everyone treats him with suspicion and hostility, either insulting him and blaming him for accidents beyond his control or seizing control over his life and making decisions for him. We discover that he is entirely dependent on his family and has lead a shadow-life, always cringing from the world. This supposed to be ridiculous.
One thing I really liked about both Midsommar and Hereditary is that they took fear and horror seriously: being startled by a bang or grossed out by a corpse or a monster or something is not actually that bad. Corpses can't actually hurt you. What hurts you is your love for the person that that corpse used to be; the knowledge that one day that corpse will be you. That's the real thing we feel revulsion for. Cheap horror focuses on the revulsion, but good horror gets you to feel the loss, the pathos of injury. I think that in making this film into a comedy, it looses that thing behind the thing - the emotions that make life hard to bear.
I certainly enjoyed watching this film. It provided a veritable cornucopia of intertwining themes and had strange visuals galore. I didn't find it scary or funny however, and I suspect this is because Ari Aster and I have wildly different senses of humor.
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