Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid (formerly Disappointment Blvd.)

So a rewatch of Hereditary the other day (A24 did a $6 for 6 horror movies deal via its streaming setup -- I was very happy to catch Saint Maud at last) made me wonder "Well what's Aster up to now anyway" and that's how I learned that this is his next film's title, it's due next year, and what the hell at this cast:

Joaquin Phoenix
Nathan Lane
Patti LuPone
Amy Ryan
Kylie Rogers
Parker Posey
Stephen McKinley Henderson
Denis Ménochet
Hayley Squires
Michael Gandolfini
Armen Nahapetian
Zoe Lister-Jones
Richard Kind

...is it a musical? Aster allegedly calls it a horror comedy, which, how would I be able to tell the difference, really. Filmed in Montreal, and I guess this was a short promo clip from earlier this year though it's supposedly a fan edit from something else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t9-oNRjwqY

Yeah, that looks like clips from You Were Never Really Here.

That makes a lot more sense.

Changeup in title!

https://www.indiewire.com/2022/12/ari-aster-a24-beau-is-afraid-joaquin-phoenix-poster-1234791453/

And we have a poster.

https://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Beau-Is-Afraid-810x1200.jpg

Oh.

“Midsommar” director Aster previously said his next film will be a four-hour-long “nightmare comedy” when “Disappointment” was officially announced in February 2021. While the plot remains under wraps, the film was described as an “intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.”

Yeah, fuck you. Congratulations in advance on your awards, though.

And indeed per that description:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CnCahSBL344/

Trailer on Tuesday.

*scratches chin*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuiWDn976Ek

The use of New Yorker font feels like a warning. "If you proceed beyond this point, it's on you."

"The Mind behind"

damn, dude is making movies just with the power of his mind now

The New Yorker font makes the rest seem very Walter Mitty. But good to see Nathan Lane do a big movie role.

hahaha this looks fuckin wild

good to see the critics of ilx getting hung up on fonts and ad copy

Big Charlie Kaufman vibes here.

Big Charlie Kaufman vibes here.

Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, the New Yorker...all items very high on my "oh, FUCK OFF" list.

we know, don't see it

wow unperson, I gather you do not like anything about this movie. perhaps you'd like to post more about how much you hate this well before it ever comes out.

Hey this looks neat

Feels like a weird direction for him to go in, but I'm cautiously optimistic. I've liked all of his other stuff so far. I suspect a big Kaufman influence here. Based on Aster's prior work I'd expect this to have a lot more rough and interesting texture than Gondry's work, that feels like an unfair comparison.

this looks very fun

hoping more richard kelly than charlie kaufman

I’ve not seen his other movies but this looks fun

Per a report: "rated “R” for “strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use, and language.”" Another day at the office!

Got some "I Heart Huckabees" vibes from that trailer.

Reviews are all over the place. Sounds akin to a few other infamously bonkers batshit indulgences, like "Southland Tales" or something.

hoping more richard kelly than charlie kaufman

― imago, Tuesday, 10 January 2023 17:43 (three months ago) bookmarkflaglink

if it can remotely step to that towering masterpiece we're in for a treat

lol, it scans like "Southland Tales" plus Charlie Kaufman.

I have never seen an Ari Aster movie! Maybe this will be the first.

I think I've read three reviews now that use the phrase "big swing."

Well I saw it.

In sum:

https://media.tenor.com/U3GSJNoPsM8AAAAC/elmo-sesame-street.gif

Oh and BTW I am not kidding when I say this -- it's three hours long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psV-DcsnU1Y

great picks

hoping i love this bc the negative reviews are clearly out for revenge

This movie has arcs like it's an anime or something. The first arc really threw me off at first, I was like "wtf, is this movie super reactionary!?" It's like an exaggerated rural Republican fever dream of a dangerous big city. I mean, it had to be satire, though, right? But it goes so far with it I don't know if I could really say it earned it.

Mm, yeah. Being here in SF and all I can’t say that made me very sympathetic to the film out of the gate, precisely for the reasons you mention.

Beau is afraid, where do his intentions lay

This was a very silly and tiresome movie.

Finally saw this yesterday. I was the only one in the theater! Many laugh out loud while cringing moments. The four acts (urban hellscape, suburban family, woodland theater troupe, and mother's house) varied so widely in tone that they seemed to me like four separate movie ideas stitched together. And I thought the epilogue was a letdown. But overall I liked it, more or less. Preferably less, it didn't need to be three hours long.

The partially animated sequence is visually stunning, but the whole woodland theater segment seems superfluous.

The PERFECT film for Mother's Day. See it with a female relative you resent!

Not seen this yet but I'm told by a cineaste friend (and sometime poster) that this is the darkest and scariest film they have ever seen, and to approach it with extreme caution owing to Ari Aster being a master of psychological terror and a 'prick'

Friend has not seen Hereditary obviously.

They have! But they say this one goes way further into fiendish primal psych terror idk

Been dragging my heels on this, down to three more days in the theatre, and I don't think I can get out to see it.

hoping more richard kelly than charlie kaufman

it's much more charlie kaufman. basically synecdoche new york

I'm told by a cineaste friend (and sometime poster) that this is the darkest and scariest film they have ever seen

it's a comedy. quite dark at times, but not scary at all

I mean, it had to be satire, though, right?

it was obviously satire

Ari Aster being a master of psychological terror

sorry to knock on your friend but they are extremely psychologically weak if they think this is true

hoping i love this bc the negative reviews are clearly out for revenge

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Friday, April 21, 2023 12:52 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think you'll like it. i understand people hating it, but i can forgive a movie with a few "bad" scenes if the good ones are extremely good, and the high points made it worth it. joaquin phoenix's performance is incredible

also the way this movie uses nathan lane and richard kind was just genius

music was amazing too... mariah carey "always be my baby" during the parker posey sex scene had me dying

lot of 30rock style prop jokes in this one:
https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/wye3crgnvj4.PNG

please laugh

Blue Jasmine was the last one I saw (it was good). I was done after that.

Wait wtf is this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PpEpK4Ko-g

Given the direction this thread has taken I've decided this is the new Woody Allen movie

i said this somewhere on ilx but the first 3/4 of this was like the best wes anderson movie i've ever seen. the sets and design were amazing really and i can't imagine how much time they must have taken with it considering nobody watched this movie. the apartment. the crazy house. the woodland set. but then it turns into a charlie kaufman movie and i didn't like it. when he gets to his mom's house. but i did like her house. and the wall of her old ads. which was also very wes anderson. and the sex scene was insane and funny. but the end sucked. i even liked the flashbacks on the ocean liner. also very wes anderson. but more hypnotic than wes anderson.
but mostly i just can't believe that he had to make his face look like that for an entire movie. imagine how many takes they had to do! that must have hurt. he should have at least won a Most Painful Face award or something.

it lost me in the woods scene but up until that it was amazing

i liked the woods!

I turned it off somewhere around the woods stuff. Combination of “it’s getting late” and “I’m not feeling this”. I meant to finish it out later, but never found the motivation.

Idk what to think about it. I respect the big swing at least.

to be honest, it took me a week or more to watch the whole movie. i would watch, like, 20 minutes at a time.

I don't even know if I liked the end or not, I felt like I started the movie trying to watch it thoughtfully and it just kept punching me in the face until I had to stop thinking and just let the movie play out in front of me

yeah its best to just drift with it. actually, the woods stuff was the part that i just kind of drifted along with the most. i just liked the vibe. it definitely reminded me of dreams i have had.

even the city stuff felt like that to me. dreams i've had. bad dreams. i thought the tub thing was inspired. spider poster on the hallway wall. gets in tub. insanity ensues.

i was surprised that there was very little talk about the movie on this thread. eephus, your old post above somewhere is the longest about the actual movie. and i like your post. but maybe everyone just shrugged like ned and moved on.

DRINK PAINT WITH ME

that was a humdinger. that scene.

I was more than a little hi while watching this

i can't imagine seeing this in a movie theatre. that must have been torturous. but in a way it would make sense to be tortured while watching the whole thing. you can feel a little of what is on joaquin's face. this was probably the best thing i've seen him in. i'm not a big fan in general. he's never been in a movie i love but he has made a TON of movies that i've never seen. i did like Gladiator a lot. he was pretty good in that. as a slimy snake of a thing. he looked good in that movie too. he's a total ham. don't let him do shakespeare. he'll ham that shit up.

it was painful! i was mostly onboard until the last act, though, i'm with you on that. jp is a ham, but i don't count that against him when he's entertaining. he's pretty good in the james gray movies i've seen. his sadsack loser in two lovers was a practice run for beau is afraid

I liked him recently in You Were Never Really Here which isn't completely different from this character (and probably Joker, but I haven't seen that one).

i always meant to watch YWNRH because i heard good things but i was never in a bleak enough mood. it looked bleak.

It is very bleak, but good.

knife dick (stab other man)

I legitimately think this was hilarious and worthwhile while also feeling that the entire 1/2 hour woodland interlude probably should have been dropped, if only for the sake of digestibility.* I wasn't particularly fond of the dude's previous films, so was in no particular rush to see it before now. But it's definitely lingering in my head and getting more unsettling the longer I dwell on it.

'Not scary' complaints seem odd. Though I guess it could be significant that I had a fever all weekend.

*Or maybe released as a short. A cinematic equivalent of a LP+7" package?

Amidst all the negative-to-tepid reviews and lolling over financial disaster, I see Slant concluding, by the end:

It’s as deeply personal and unsettling a vision as we’ve seen from an American filmmaker in some time—the capstone of an exhausting, wildly inventive cinematic exorcism of personal demons.

At the very least, if this is the sort of thing obscene budgets routinely produced it wouldn't have been a decade since I visited a multiplex lol.

I think the last 1/2 hour is the one I'd want dropped, or maybe revised. rest of the movie was great

Here we go, with some real zeitgeist vibes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIpxO4KRV98

Plus, Emma Stone and Pedro Pascal, and Joaquin again.

Eddington rips

...unevenly.

yeah I thought it was really bad. it felt like Aster just took every culture-war topic from the past five years threw them all in a blender and then filmed what poured out. all of the characters were absolute caricatures. certainly you could argue that millions of people are exactly this brain-polluted, but I don't see what's to be gained from just putting that whole-hog on a screen. I didn't learn anything or think about anything differently, none of my assumptions or preconceptions were questioned, basically it just felt like an excuse for those of us who try not to just regurgitate dogma or conspiracy theories to laugh at all the fools who do (maybe I'm overindexing here based on the crowd in the movie theater who guffawed at all the white virtue-signaling, which believe me I agree is often totally farcical but again in this movie the satire of it was so limp and on-the-nose). SPOILERS SPOILER SPOILERS I thought Phoenix's character had at least a little bit of complexity for a good chunk of the movie, but the ending was just embarrassing, and his fate wasn't even the dumbest one, that prize definitely going to the doofus who spends the whole movie flagellating himself for his whiteness (just to impress a girl, of course) and then turns into Kyle Rittenhouse. and speaking of ladies, holy shit talk about wasting Emma Stone, she was an utter nonentity in this movie. again, maybe I'm overindexing for the fact that I hate movies/TV shows without any redeeming characters, but utterly everyone is this movie was an absolute piece of shit except for a couple of people who get shot in the head or maimed.

I thought it was really bad. it felt like Aster just took every culture-war topic from the past five years threw them all in a blender

One thing I really liked about Eddington was that — for the first 90 minutes or so — it were barely satire, it was just... what happened. It felt like Dr. Strangelove or Repo Man or Sorry to Bother You but with the hyperbole knob turned to almost zero. It's like a dystopian western but the dystopia is all around us. Like the Amazon van honking for a homeless man to get out of the road is one of the most believable metaphors for our current time as I've ever seen and it's not exactly like something that you couldn't believe happens every day of the week

One thing I keep thinking about is *SPOILER* I couldn't tell if the black ops machine gun crew was supposed to be a George Soros-funded Antifa foot soldiers or a Republican-funded false flag operation to sow dissent, and it's cool that its intentionally ambiguous and you sort of project your own political biases and expectations on it and that's how conspiracy theories start.

I gotcha, but personally I thought it was clearly the latter, though of course that's what I WOULD think.

It's possible that just not enough time has elapsed for this stuff to be effective. Like obviously we all lived through this shit, and more than that, these fights are still going on every day; if anything it's been cranked into overdrive. I don't know anything about Aster's political diet but I'm guessing there's a good chance he didn't expect Trump would be president again when he was filming this thing.

I really would love a world where we turn the ship around on all the stuff in this movie and I get to watch this with my incredulous grandchild 40 years from now going, "Yeah.... that's actually what it was like."

Eddington did rip, it’s gonna bomb so hard tho. My theater was almost empty tonight and one couple walked out. Can’t imagine a lot of people wanna revisit its cultural moment rn

A lot of people on the internet are gonna get mad at it

Can’t imagine a lot of people wanna revisit its cultural moment rn

Quite the opposite for me -- I want to watch a movie about COVID.

Though guardedly positive, Chaw's review makes this sound kind of insufferable to me: https://filmfreakcentral.net/2025/07/eddington-2025/

Considering how overstuffed this film is, it's remarkable how boring it also is. But it all feels so flat. Every five minutes there's another thing thrown into the mix, and then Aster can't really think of anything to do with it, and then there's another thing thrown on top of it. So much talking, four jokes repeated endlessly, boring tracking shot after boring tracking shot with no real sense of filmic space (the film is called 'Eddington', but there's no feel for the city-space here).

Hard agree.

i liked beau is afraid and hated eddington

i wanted to like eddington and i think whiney’s description of it sounds like a good movie, i just found it super boring until it abruptly became hyper violent, which was exciting but also, in a way, boring

Nice interview with Ari on last week’s Office Hours, he def made this politically ambiguous though he’s “hard left” in real life, also said “The Trial of Tim Heidecker” was the greatest piece of art ever made so you know he’s a real one

There was a film critic (don't remember his name but he's Canadian) who talked about the film on The Watch (Ringer podcast) and said some things I thought were really interesting. Like that it's a movie full of bad faith -- not just "about" bad faith in some abstract way, but actually partaking of bad faith, wading into it, and weaponizing it. Like how the teenage protestors are made to look so pathetic and whiny and self-righteous, when they are also correct about everything (the land *is* stolen, the cops *are* violent racists). And also, that it's a very authentically New Mexican movie.

Me, I loved those awful moments when the flash of Joe Cross's high powered rifle appears framed in the window, a split second before we hear the shot and breaking glass. And I realized most movies don't show that because they stay with the perspective of the shooter. But there's a sort of Cormac McCarthy quality to that interval between muzzle flash and bullet impact, where the course of its flight is already fixed.

Also I think it's hilarious that Phoenix's character is named "Joe Cross." Not because of the religious iconography, but because of how close it is to Joe kr

Like how the teenage protestors are made to look so pathetic and whiny and self-righteous

ah yes def bad faith to depict teenagers in this way

i interpreted the satire of the woke protestors as coming from a place of genuine anti-wokeness and figured ari aster is economically far left but more centrist on social justice (jokes where the punchline is someone saying the r-word, jokes about white activists, the whole homeless people are zombies sequence in beau is afraid). it felt similar ideologically to the sweet east. eddington felt like a movie made by someone who reads adolph reed and watches brad troemel videos. the subplot surrounding the data centre felt like its most genuine political statement, whereas it was very cynical about all the blm/covid stuff

The data center isn't a subplot though, it's the invisible motor that drives the whole movie.

The mayor tells his kid that the coronavirus can live for five months on a piece of paper. The numerology YouTuber in the film's opening scenes says that the Wuhan lab was established in 1956. Deputy Cook says "nobody hates bad cops more than cops." Sheriff Cross insists that one of his deputies died from touching fentanyl. It's not like the protests are the only place where people repeat laughably stupid things. The internet has cooked their brains.

i interpreted the data center as more of an ai thing. but i agree the movie is about being too online

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/08/adam-curtis-ari-aster-eddington-interview-covid-politics

If you have a world in which everyone is encouraged to be a total individualist, they tend to get trapped in that mindset. It’s wonderful when things are going well, because you, your own desires and thoughts are the centre of the world. But the moment things go wrong, you retreat into yourself. And the only thing you can trust is your own ideas. You come to believe in them intensely, because that’s the only thing that makes you feel safe.

Yes this (from the link) is basically my read. In the film and in life, we constantly see people respond to distress by leaning away from the exterior world and into their own interior realm, except that it's no longer a real interior, it's a sham interior that's been colonized by algorithms. No more mental woods where we might stroll, but pastures of thorns where graze the monstrous goats, seven-headed and ten-horned.

It's Adam Curtis who says that, isn't it?

That's correct. Should have noted it in my post.