‘From his darkest fears comes the greatest adventure'. So goes the tagline for Beau is Afraid, Ari Aster’s 179-minute follow-up to his landmark 21st-century horrors Hereditary and Midsommar. With all due respect to the marketing department at A24, rarely has a pithy tagline – and the whimsical, Benjamin Button-esque poster it adorns – done a greater disservice to the substance of a film it purports to represent.
That’s because Beau is Afraid is an extraordinary rendering of severe clinical anxiety, using the language of horror cinema to visualise the paranoid nightmare that something as simple as stepping foot outside can turn into. At points, it’s a stress-watch to rival the Safdie bros' nerve-shredder Uncut Gems. But it’s also a deeply funny Freudian head-shag, laden with Jewish guilt and unresolved mummy issues. Try selling that on a poster.
