"I'm very neurotic and I'm obsessed with worst-case scenarios," Ari Aster explained at a Q&A for Hereditary, his feted – and truly frightening – debut feature, when asked about his exhaustive pre-production process. "That's how I end up writing stuff like this."
No kidding. The writer-director's analyst surely has their work cut out for them with his latest film: Beau Is Afraid is a cruelly absurd saga of sexual repression in which a slump-shouldered Joaquin Phoenix, as the emotionally stunted titular character, bears the brunt of Aster's spectacular catastrophising – realised here on a budget substantially roomier than that of either Hereditary or his 2019 follow-up, Midsommar.
