For those of us who weren’t lucky enough to have caught the surprise Beau Is Afraid screening at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse last weekend, worry not (or, worry a lot) as A24 have today revealed a brand new trailer for Ari Aster’s latest anxiety-inducing epic.
The long-awaited third feature from the Hereditary and Midsommar mastermind is a three-hour long horror-comedy that the director himself has described as a ‘Jewish Lord of the Rings’. The film follows the titular Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) as a paranoid man who embarks on an epic odyssey to get home to his mother, or, as Aster more eloquent puts it: “If you had a ten-year-old pumped full of Zoloft and had him get your groceries, that’s like this movie.”
Nathan Lane (Only Murders in the Building), Amy Ryan (The Office), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Dune), Hayley Squires (In the Earth), Denis Ménochet (The Beasts), Kylie Rogers (Home Before Dark), Armen Nahapetian (The Orville), Zoe Lister-Jones (The Craft: Legacy), Parker Posey (Blade 3) and Patti LuPone (Penny Dreadful) also star.
The new trailer certainly showcases some of those Aster trademarks we’ve come to know and love: tense, uncanny and with a huge helping of unsettling parental issues. We also get some great moments of a clearly shook Phoenix, whose performance is being widely praised by those who were privy to the already-legendary April Fool’s screening.
At said screening, Aster said working with Phoenix was a ‘career highlight’ and shared an anecdote about the actor fainting from exhaustion on set due to his sheer level of commitment to the role. He also revealed more about Phoenix’s intensity as a method actor, from falling off ladders to crashing through windows in his own stunts:
“He’s so beyond committed…He really makes decisions carefully because when he takes something on it’s his whole life. Every dangerous thing that Beau does, Joaquin did.”
We’re sure it’s already very much in your diaries but just in case: Beau is Afraid hits theaters on April 21. Check out the new trailer from A24 below:
