So far in his short career, filmmaker Ari Aster has become an indie auteur in the vein of Jordan Peele in just two short films. His films may not be of the same scale—yet—but they are just as ambitious. So far, Aster is known for freaky, distressing horrors like “Hereditary” (about dysfunctional, toxic families) and “Midsommar” (about poisonous relationships). Still, his latest, “Beau Is Afraid,” is more of a twisted dark comedy, an existential comedy about a life spanning several lifetimes and decades.
And Aster bagged a massive star for this enormous undertaking in Joaquin Phoenix. The movie centers on an anxiety-ridden man (Phoenix) who embarks on a surreal odyssey home after his mother suddenly dies, confronting his greatest fears along the way. And yes, if you’ve seen the original trailer, you know it definitely looks wild, surreal, strange, weird, and nightmarish. Or as Aster says in the new bts trailer, “It’s like a Jewish ‘Lord Of The Rings’, but he’s just going to his mom’s house.
Yet, as dark as it looks. Aster insists it’s really funny. “It began with me just trying to make myself laugh,” Aster told the New York Times in a recent interview. Aster once believed it would be his debut and even shot a short sequence in 2011, during graduate school at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The screenplay “grew into this receptacle for all sorts of ideas, things that struck me for maybe reasons I didn’t quite understand,” he said. “I built out something that was this comic, Freudian odyssey, very episodic and, I thought, very funny.”
Even Florence Pugh, who starred in “Midsommar,” calls him “a stand-up comedian at heart.” She explained, “Once you laugh at one thing, he will try and make you laugh at all the other things. He’ll keep going, and everybody will be crying in fits of laughter.”
Here’s the short and pity official synopsis:
A paranoid man embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother in this bold and ingeniously depraved new film from writer/director Ari Aster.
Produced by Lars Knudsen and Ari Aster, on top of Joaquin Phoenix, the film features Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Denis Ménochet, Kylie Rogers, Armen Nahapetian, Zoe Lister-Jones, with Parker Posey, and Patti LuPone.
While it strangely has no festival bow, many predicted it for Cannes or Venice, “Beau Is Afraid” opens in theaters on April 21, 2023, via A24. Watch the new behind-the-scenes trailer below.