Beau is Afraid
Joaquin Phoenix plays the role of the tragic Beau, a kind yet paranoid man who sets out on a journey to his feared mother.
Beau Wassermann, an anxious, Jewish, middle-aged man, lives alone in a city apartment. A genetic condition has kept him virgin all these years. His life is a sequence of plagues and nightmares. His regular psychologist prepares him for an upcoming visit to his mother, but on the eve of his envisaged trip, everything goes wrong. Beau goes anyway. What follows is a surreal, Kafkaesque journey through a crazed America, an odyssey full of horror and fantasy. At last, lonely Beau has to face life.
The idea for BEAU IS AFRAID predates HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR, American director Ari Aster’s breakthrough films. Thanks to the success of those films, Aster had an awe-inspiring budget for BEAU IS AFRAID, resulting in a grand visual spectacle. He considers it to be the film that defines his authorship to date: ‘This movie is more me than anything I’ve done before. My personality and humour are embedded in it.’