Writer/director Ari Aster exploded onto the scene at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018, his domestic drama Hereditary drawing comparisons to such masters as Stanley Kubrick and Ingmar Bergman even as it pivoted into becoming an occult horror movie, and a truly terrifying one at that. His 2019 follow-up, Midsommar, was a sun-drenched folk horror that torched toxic masculinity to the ground. Both films were instant classics. And both exhibited a vision that was personal and uncompromising.
But now Aster is going for broke with Beau Is Afraid, a three-hour ‘nightmare comedy’ that fixes its twitchy eye on paranoid, superanxious Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) as he journeys to his mother's funeral. Already dividing critics between the ‘masterpiece’ and ‘self-indulgent’ camps, Aster's third feature veers from discombobulating to discomfiting to outright distressing as it persistently takes unexpected left turns, both narratively and stylistically. A full-bore Freudian nightmare, it's sometimes funny, sometimes messedup, usually both at once.
‘It's very satisfying to finally get over the finish line,’ smiles Aster, who wrote the first draft of the
