It’s official: Empire is afraid. Because when a new Ari Aster film drops, it not only tends to be excellent (just see his astonishing career-opening gambit of Hereditary, followed by Midsommar), but also somewhat existentially harrowing – a trip into the deepest, darkest depths of the soul. And while it seems his third film, Beau Is Afraid, isn’t exactly another straight-up scare-fest, it does look like it’ll be another all-encompassing, head-scrambling cinematic concoction – a trippy, paranoid, otherworldly psychological odyssey that centres on Joaquin Phoenix’s central Beau. Watch the off-the-wall trailer here:
If you crossed Aster’s previous work with the reality-warping existentialism of Charlie Kaufman, or the hand-crafted maximalism of Daniels, it seems like you’d get something close to Beau Is Afraid – and yet, in true A24 style, we still don’t know really what this one is about, on a pure-plot level. What we do know is that we’ll see Phoenix in various stages of aged-up make-up, joined on screen by the likes of Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Zoe Lister-Jones and Armen Nahapetian – with the cast list also set to include Parker Posey and Patti LuPone.
The biggest question? When will we see it? American audiences will get their chance to bask in the unease of Aster’s latest vision when Beau Is Afraid hits cinemas in April – but whether UK audiences will have a longer wait remains to be seen, with A24 titles often taking a significant amount of time to reach these shores. (Case in point: Marcel The Shell With Shoes On and Pearl are still yet to make their way to cinemas this side of the pond.) Here’s hoping the scariest thing about Beau Is Afraid won’t be how long we have to wait for it to release over here.