Of all the genre giants that frequent the box office these days, perhaps the single most fearless of them, ironically enough, is the horror genre. Indeed, it’s no unfair statement to say that horror fans eat the best as far as pure creative weirdness goes, and with names like Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and Brandon Cronenberg pumping out such flicks as Nope, Barbarian, and Infinity Pool recently, there’s no end in sight to the fuel for this particular fire.
But Ari Aster is set to bring a whole new echelon of meaning to such a sentiment this weekend, when the world will finally bear witness to Beau Is Afraid, a supremely off-the-chain, psychologically challenging, alleged career-killer of a film that will no doubt have audiences lining up to see where they fall on the “for me or not for me” fence.
By all accounts, Beau Is Afraid is fifty shades of strange even by A24’s standards, and above all, moviegoers should expect to leave the film wondering how something like this could have even been conceived, let alone go the distance to the big screen.
And they won’t be alone in wondering that, because Ari Aster, the creative powerhouse behind the project, is himself dumbfounded that Beau Is Afraid is actually a real movie.
In a recent Reddit AMA hosted by Aster, the filmmaker was asked just how difficult it was to get such a bizarre film off the ground at A24, a question which Aster answered by citing his warm and fuzzy relationship with the studio (after Hereditary and Midsommar, that’s no surprise), but the filmmaker nevertheless couldn’t keep a lid on how surprised he was that the film was happening; an attitude that permeated the set of the film, apparently.
Either way, a great many people are going to be very happy that A24 let Aster do Beau Is Afraid, and a great many people are going to be very shocked, with varying degrees of pleasure, about the same thing. Luckily, Aster has nothing to prove at this point, so we expect to fall into the both camps, with the asterisk that the pleasure levels wind up in the green.
Beau Is Afraid will release to theaters on April 21.
