Beau Is Afraid

Beau Is Afraid is an American surrealist comedy horror film written, directed, and produced by Ari Aster. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as the titular character, an anxiety-ridden man who embarks on a surreal odyssey home after his mother suddenly dies, confronting his greatest fears along the way. The film also includes a supporting ensemble cast that includes Nathan Lane, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Michael Gandolfini, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Richard Kind.
Beau Is Afraid was co-produced and distributed by A24 as the company's third collaboration with Aster, after Hereditary and Midsommar. It is scheduled to be released in the United States on April 21, 2023. The film received mostly positive reviews from critics.
== Premise ==
The film is described as a "decades-spanning surrealist horror film set in an alternate present", starring Joaquin Phoenix as Beau, an "extremely anxious but pleasant-looking man who has a fraught relationship with his overbearing mother and never knew his father. When his mother dies, he makes a journey home that involves some wild supernatural threats".
== Plot ==
Beau Wassermann is an extremely anxious middle-aged man living alone in a crime-ridden city. At a therapy session, he talks about his plans to visit his mother for his father's death anniversary and a recurring dream about him and his mother. His therapist prescribes an experimental medication for his anxiety and warns him to take it with a lot of water. After being kept awake through the night due to a rowdy neighbor playing extremely loud music through the walls, Beau sleeps through his alarm. After hastily packing, he discovers that his keys and luggage have been stolen from his door and calls his mother to explain the situation, but she dismisses him. Beau takes his medication, but panics when he discovers the building has a water outage. On his way to the convenience store across the street to buy a water bottle, he evades a group of deranged homeless people who break into his apartment and lock him out of his building. After sleeping out on the scaffolding, Beau returns to his vandalized apartment and calls his mother only to be answered by a UPS deliveryman informing him that his mother has died in a fatal chandelier accident. As he processes her death in a bath, an intruder drops onto him from the ceiling, causing him to run outside naked in a panic. After a confrontation with a police officer, Beau is hit by a food truck.
Beau wakes up in the house of the truck driver, Grace, and her husband, Roger. They are caring for a PTSD-stricken war veteran named Jeeves, who was their son Nathan's army comrade after he was killed in action. Beau is tended to by Grace and Roger, and their drug-addicted teenage daughter Toni takes an immediate and intense dislike of Beau. Beau's mother's lawyer Dr. Cohen informs him that his mother's final wish was not to be buried until Beau was present at the funeral. Despite Beau's attempts to leave early, Grace and Roger insist that he stays until he is recovered enough to travel. Toni forces Beau to come on a trip with her and her friend and forces him to smoke a laced joint, causing him to flashback to a cruise trip he took as a teenager with his mother, where he meets his childhood crush and first kiss Elaine. Roger hosts a small family grill as a going-away party for Beau. Grace tells Beau to relax and watch television, quietly instructing him to switch on a live feed of their house and CCTV footage of Beau leading up to the current moment. Toni takes Beau to her brother Nathan's old room, attempts to force him to paint the walls in different colors. When he refuses, she ruthlessly berates Beau for replacing her, opens a can of blue paint and drinks it. Hearing the commotion, Grace discovers Beau cradling Toni's dead body. Grace violently blames Beau, and he flees into the forest. Grace sends Jeeves after him using Beau's ankle monitor GPS. 
Beau wanders around the forest at night and comes across a pregnant woman who leads him to a traveling theatre company called "The Orphans of the Forest." He becomes entranced by the play rehearsal and imagines himself as the protagonist in a lengthy animated sequence. A man approaches Beau and informs him that he knew his father. The troupe is ambushed by Jeeves, slaughtering several actors in the process. Beau evades Jeeves and flees deeper into the forest but is incapacitated after Jeeves activates the ankle monitor’s electric stun. 
At daybreak, Beau emerges on a highway and hitchhikes to his mother's mansion. Upon arrival, staff inform him that the funeral has ended. He enters and sees his mother's headless corpse in a coffin. He naps on the couch and wakes up to the sound of a woman entering the house, late for the funeral. He realizes it is Elaine and they reconnect. They go upstairs to his mother's bedroom and passionately make love. After Beau orgasms, he discovers Elaine has died mid-climax, her body frozen stiff. He is interrupted by his mother, who reveals that she had faked her death by paying off her loyal housekeeper as a body double. She berates Beau and reveals to him that his therapist had been sharing their sessions with her. He demands to know the truth about his father and she takes him to the attic, revealing that Beau not only has a secret twin brother, explaining that his recurring dream was actually a memory, but that his father is a giant grotesque penis-shaped monster. Jeeves breaks into the attic and attacks the monster, but is killed by one of its sharp appendages. In a fit of rage, Beau strangles his mother and leaves the house in shock, commandeering a boat out into the ocean. He drifts into a cliffside cave, when the boat suddenly stalls. Lights come on and reveal that he is in a crowded arena, with his still-alive mother and Dr. Cohen present and that he is on trial. A jumbotron shows footage of Beau's life. A lawyer on a platform on the opposite end of the arena comes to Beau's defense but is overpowered by Dr. Cohen's speech. One of Mona's henchmen drops Beau's lawyer onto rocks below, killing him and leaving Beau to fend for himself. The boat's motor begins to sputter and set on fire. Beau appeals to his mother for forgiveness one last time but then simply accepts his fate. The boat explodes, killing Beau. The audience leaves the arena as Beau's mother and Dr. Cohen shake hands and silently walk out.
== Cast ==
* Joaquin Phoenix as Beau Wassermann
** Armen Nahapetianas teenage Beau
* Patti LuPone as Beau's mother
** Zoe Lister-Jones as a younger Beau's mother
* Nathan Lane as Roger
* Amy Ryan as Grace
* Kylie Rogers as Toni
* Parker Posey as Elaine
** Hayley Squires as a younger Elaine
** Julia Antonelli as teenage Elaine
* Stephen McKinley Henderson
* Denis Ménochet as Jeeves
* Michael Gandolfini
* Richard Kind
==Production==
The film had been in development by Ari Aster for some time, with a 2011 short film entitled Beau, that would later serve as the basis for a sequence in the feature film, and a 2014 draft of the script that circulated on the internet. Aster has described the film in many ways, including initially as a "nightmare comedy,", "a Jewish Lord of the Rings, but [Beau's] just going to his mom’s house," and as "if you pumped a 10-year-old full of Zoloft, and [had] him get your groceries." 
In February 2021, A24 announced the film, then titled Disappointment Blvd., with Joaquin Phoenix on board to star in the leading role. The film's ensemble cast was announced in June and July. Co-star Stephen McKinley Henderson described Aster and Phoenix as "so simpatico ... their way of working together was like they were really old friends. They could get upset and make up in the span of seconds, it seemed. But the work was always the better for it." During a Q&A session on April 1, 2023 with actress Emma Stone, Aster recounted an incident in which, during the shooting of a “very intense” scene involving Phoenix's co-star Patti LuPone, Phoenix suddenly collapsed and lost consciousness as a result of the physical intensity of his stunts, which included breaking through glass. Initially annoyed because "it was a really good take", Aster realized it was serious as "[Phoenix] was letting people touch him and people were tending to him and he was allowing it".
Principal photography began on June 28, 2021, and concluded that October. The film was shot in Downtown Montreal, and Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville, an off-island suburb of Montreal in Quebec, with cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski and production designer Fiona Crombie. Animation for the film was done by Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña. With a budget of $35 million, Beau Is Afraid is A24's most expensive film.
==Release==
Beau Is Afraid is set to be released theatrically in the United States by A24 on April 21, 2023, following a delay from its original 2022 schedule. The film had its premiere with a Q&A moderated by Emma Stone at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn, New York as part of an April Fools' Day event, as the audience attending was originally scheduled to watch a director's cut of Aster's 2019 film, Midsommar. It was released a week earlier on April 14 in select IMAX theaters in Los Angeles and New York, before being released widely — as well as in select North American IMAX theaters — on April 21.
==Reception==
===Critical===
Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 73% from 59 reviews, with an average score of 6.9 out of 10. The site's consensus reads that Beau Is Afraid "is overstuffed to the point of erasing the line between self-flagellation and self-indulgence, but Ari Aster's bravura and Joaquin Phoenix's sheer commitment give this neurotic odyssey undeniable power." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 69 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
== Gallery ==
Beau Is Afraid - Official Trailer HD - A24
Beau Is Afraid - Official Trailer 2 HD - A24
==References==
==External link==
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