As he reaches adolescence, the ads shift to acne treatments, and there’s Beau, applying a patch to a pesky blemish. When Beau is a child, he’s featured in gauzy ads for allergy medication, inhaling the scent of a flower with no sign of a runny nose or bleary eyes. (MW’s logo, which looks a little like an infinity sign cut in half lengthwise, is also the logo for the film’s production company, Mommy Knows Best.) The company is almost exactly as old as Beau himself, and its business seems to have evolved alongside him. Basically, if you can think of it, and especially if it is something that touches on Beau’s life, there’s a good chance MW is involved. Mona Wasserman, Beau’s mother, is the architect of a “super-business” called MW, a pharmaceutical company, according to the earliest ads displayed on the timeline in Mona’s office, that also has sidelines in TV news, real estate, navigational systems, and convenience stores, among a potentially infinite array of other areas. Midsommar’s Florence Pugh is already taking medication for anxiety before her sister kills herself and their parents, and after that she’s wracked with grief and haunted by visions of her dead sister and mother. Toni Collette’s character in Hereditary comes from family with a long history of mental illness-a mother with dissociative identity disorder, a father with psychotic depression, a brother with schizophrenia-and is plagued by the feeling that she and her family are the object of a sinister conspiracy. (One observer says it’s as if her head just “evaporated.”) But alongside the characters who get their skulls crushed and faces smashed are ones who desperately need a respite from the buzzing of their brains-who would give anything if they could, even for a minute, just stop thinking. Early on, just after Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) cancels a planned visit to his mother, she is decapitated by a falling chandelier. In 2019, he said that “ head trauma will always have a place in my movies,” and his latest, Beau Is Afraid, holds true to that promise. Not literally, of course, although the Midsommar auteur is notoriously fond of literally cutting his characters off at the neck. In an Ari Aster movie, the best thing that can happen is losing your head.
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