In short order, indie filmmaker Ari Aster has become one of the most exciting writer/directors on the planet. Following the one-two punch of two amazing, psychologically bruising horrors, “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” the filmmaker returns with his most ambitious film, “Beau Is Afraid” which stars Joaquin Phoenix, is a dark, surreal, black comedy nightmare odyssey. In a recent behind-the-scenes featurette, Aster described the film as “Lord Of The Rings,” in its epic scope, but the quest is that it’s a Jewish New York guy going to find his mother (lol).
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The film has been 10 years in the making, and Aster tried to make it his debut ages ago (he made a short based on the story about a decade plus ago during film school). “It began with me just trying to make myself laugh,” he told the New York Times recently, detailing how he made the short 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.”
So nightmarish but bleakly funny, and Joaquin Phoenix apparently fainted on the set of the film; it all adds up. Here’s the official synopsis:
A paranoid man goes on an epic odyssey in order to get back home in this bold and ingeniously depraved new film from writer/director Ari Aster.
“Beau Is Afraid” stars Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Denis Ménochet, Kylie Rogers, Armen Nahapetian, Zoe Lister-Jones, with Parker Posey, and Patti LuPone.
“Beau Is Afraid” will now open exclusively in New York & Los Angeles on April 14. In theaters everywhere April 21. Watch the new trailer below via A24.
