Joaquin Phoenix in a delirious psychological nightmare signed by filmmaker Ari Aster

The BBC sums it up best when it calls it “weirdest movie of the year“. Beau is Afraid is the deranged new fantasy from 36-year-old Ari Aster, one of America’s newest masters of horror, in theaters Wednesday, April 26.

Beau evolves in an alternate reality

“This movie is like sending a 10 year old boy drunk on Zoloft [un antidépresseur] go shopping“, describes Ari Aster about his new film, which he also sees as “a jewish version of the lord of the rings“. You don’t understand what it’s all about? Neither do the spectators who have seen it. For nearly three hours, their nerves are put to the test over the course of an uneasy epic on board the psyche of a character. paranoid played by the brilliant Joaquin Phoenix.

The film takes place over a week in the life of Beau Wasserman, a middle-aged, paunchy and unhappy American Jew, followed by a psychiatrist. Filled with anguish and guilt, he evolves in a dystopian alternate reality and struggles above all with a toxic and castrating maternal figure who comes to haunt him in his sexuality. When he tries to reach his mother, the world seems to gang up on him.

A surreal collage

The role is carried by a Joaquin Phoenix who once again gives himself headlong, portraying a character as dark as in the unforgettable Joker (whose sequel he is currently filming with Lady Gaga), less violence. The baroque and virtuoso paintings follow one another in an uninterrupted whirlwind and the spectator, shaken, regularly loses the thread. In fact, this surreal collage on board of a tortured human soul shatters the very notion of narration.

Author of remarks Heredity And Midsommar, films that renewed the codes of the horror genre, the American director and screenwriter Ari Aster signs with this feature film his most disproportionate and most personal project to date, in which he admits to having condensed many of his own neuroses. “This movie is more like me than anything I’ve done beforehe confides in the production notes, “it contains my personality and my vision of humor“. In any case, Aster deploys his prodigious imagination and his own obsessions with mad freedom, leaving the spectator panting, stunned. A film to experience as much as to see.