Beau is long: in praise of the expanded movie runtime

It might be tempting to call Ari Aster’s new movie Beau Is Afraid a therapy session. It clearly addresses the writer-director’s parental anxieties, allowing him to vent and visualize a series of dreams-turned-nightmares related to guilt, repression and inherited trauma. (It is an A24 sort-of horror movie, after all.) But ultimately, describing Beau as therapy would be inaccurate, or at least incomplete: therapy sessions are rarely this…