A year later, Aster, who is the director of Beau is Afraid, as well as audiences continues to reflect its content. Because of the scale of the film, $35 million, it is surprising that Beau is Afraid only managed to earn about $11 million at the international box office. The critics and the audience had mixed reactions to the surrealist, grotesque and quite odd film featuring Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role. However, Beau is Afraid can now be streamed on Amazon’s Prime Video, which may facilitate broadening the audience for the film, even though Aster’s postmodern view of dark humor, dream, and horror received rather ambivalent reviews in the press.
One of the film’s defenders got to be legendary director, Martin Scorsese, who particularly liked Aster’s vision. At the presentation of the film, Scorsese called Aster one of the most extraordinary new voices in world cinema. Scorsese seemed to be inspired by how distinctive technical artistry of film is along with creative risks which are quite rare among films made today’s era. Scorsese also related the confrontational pace and the style of ‘Beau is Afraid’ to old genre horror films, specifically citing the classics of Val Lewton’s B-movies along with sluggish horror subgenres.
In some of his interviews, Aster recalled how trying was to make Beau following but, at the same time, he pointed out that many details are yet to be realized fully. For instance, one of the characters who appears throughout the film without much explanation is referred to as ‘the predator’. The character is thought to represent the unsaid past violence in Beau, something that many have identified as his repressed sexual abuse during his formative years. This shadowy man, though, still makes his presence felt; even during tranquil times, during scenes that show Beau’s history with sex—an act so excruciatingly pleasurable that for him, guilt is an invariable element.
Aster has also commented in the past that there are even further layers in the film that are obscured from the audience. For instance, he referred to a ‘dark’ scene where an ice cream cart is seen with the motto ‘greasy and easy,’ a scene he notes is linked to Beau’s trauma. These connections also assist in drawing similarities between this film, and Aster’s earlier films like Hereditary or Midsommar, which also somewhat explored the themes of internal dread, or regret on a psychological level. In relation to his films, he focuses on grief, family dysfunctions, existentialism, and of course, darker elements of the human psyche.
Although its commercial aspect was a bit wanting, *Beau is Afraid is still a textured and nuanced film with unexplored depths and continues to engage audiences who wish to engage with its complexities.