Joaquin Phoenix’s new, dark comedy is a long, strange trip about mothers and the children who disappoint them.
For writer-director Ari Aster, the biggest compliment from people who see “Beau” is that they feel inspired to text their parents afterward out of pure anxiety and panic.
“I’ve heard a couple times that it’s activated a lot of guilt in people,” Aster says. “I think that’s great.”
“Beau” follows a timid middle-aged man (Phoenix) who suffers from extreme anxiety and rarely leaves his dilapidated, crime-riddled apartment building.
But when he learns that his mom (Patti LuPone) was involved in a tragic chandelier accident, Beau warily ventures out to go see her.
On his odyssey, he encounters bizarre obstacles such as a hippie theater troupe, a sinister suburban family, and at one point, a giant penis monster.
Aster wrote a version of the script roughly 12 years ago, but lacked the finances to make it. The film had been in development, with a 2011 short film entitled “Beau,” that would later serve as the basis for a sequence in the feature, and a 2014 draft of the script that circulated on the internet.
After the critical and commercial success of his horror movies, Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), he decided to revisit the story, which contains elements of absurdist humor.
“This character came from my guts,” Aster said. “I was just trying to make myself laugh. I wanted to make something that’s both funny and sad.”
Later on, when challenged to explain, Aster has described the film in various ways, 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 and him get your groceries.”
