The Irish Times by Donald Clarke

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.

The Atlantic by David Sims

The film shares some of the unsettling horror of Aster’s first two films, Hereditary and Midsommar, but I’d call Beau Is Afraid a more straightforward comedy—as long as the idea of Looney Tunes crossed with Portnoy’s Complaint sounds funny to you.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz

Its visual imagination is wonderfully unrestrained, compelling in its extremes even when it is so clearly indebted to every movie that Aster hoovered up to get here. Its tone is impressively steadfast in its desire to repel one moment, entrance the next. And its performances are across-the-board astounding in their commitment.

Consequence by Clint Worthington

It’s a huge, huge swing, and Aster skeptics will likely scoff at the egotism of it all. But for those of us who’ve been at the receiving end of a classic Jewish-mother guilt trip, Beau is Afraid will serve as affirmation, cinematic therapy, and the most relatably terrifying thing they’ve ever seen.

The Playlist by Rodrigo Pérez

Ultimately, Aster just unleashes his inner freak and vomits it all on the screen, with anxious flop sweat, jittery bodily fluids, squishy terror, paranoia, and some gut-busting laughs that prove this writer is deeply troubled in the best and most complicated odd way possible.

Collider by Ross Bonaime

Beau Is Afraid is bold, enthralling, and unlike anything you've ever seen before. Whether that's a good or bad thing, well, Aster leaves how we enter this shrieking void up to the viewer.

TheWrap by Tomris Laffly

Admittedly, it’s all a bit much, an exercise in familial grief, inherited burdens and compressed feelings of guilt, but that excess is entirely the point of Aster’s longest and most ambitious film to date.

The Daily Beast by Nick Schager

A true American original, and proof that, while the hype surrounding [Aster] may have been early, it wasn’t wrong.

IGN by Siddhant Adlakha

It’s the kind of movie worth recommending for its ambition alone, merely to witness the audacious result of anxious self-loathing writ large across the silver screen, without an ounce of restraint. That it’s also a remarkably well-crafted horror-comedy is a cherry on top.

Rolling Stone by David Fear

There’s a lot of Big Cinema Energy pouring out of the screen, which alternates between thrilling and exhausting. Mostly the former, thankfully, yet you can feel where this fit-to-burst tableau of trauma takes a detour into Look-Ma-Check-This-Out territory.