Emma Stone was blunt. “Are you okay, man?” she asked Ari Aster after a surprise screening of his latest film, “Beau Is Afraid” at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
Audiences around the country may be asking variations of the same question after they emerge from the occasionally creepy, often hilarious and deeply weird horror-comedy. It’s a movie about a neurotic man (Joaquin Phoenix) with serious mommy issues, who must endure a phantasmagoric odyssey as he labors to get home following a family tragedy. Over the course of his journey he will be kidnapped by a suburban couple (Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan), stalked by a hulking vet with PTSD, menaced by a paint-drinking teenage girl and embraced by an experimental theater troupe. There’s also an animated sequence, as well as a recurring gag involving Phoenix’s distended testicles, plus a sex scene with Parker Posey that may rank among the wackiest ever committed to film. Oh, and did we mention the whole thing is three hours long?
“I want you to go through his guts and come out of his butt,” Aster explained to Stone at the packed Alamo Drafthouse auditorium. Ticket buyers had come to the theater expecting to see a director’s cut of “Midsommar,” Aster’s previous film about a group of graduate students who make an ill-fated visit to a Swedish cult. Instead, in an April Fools’ Day twist, the group was treated to “Beau Is Afraid,” becoming the first public audience to see the film before its April 21 release.
The crowd seemed to love it, though the group was already game to spend a Saturday afternoon watching a longer version of “Midsommar.” The general public may have a tougher time with the film, as people split between the profound and ponderous camps when it comes to this bladder-testing epic. Even Stone, who called “Beau Is Afraid” a “masterpiece,” admitted “When I first saw it I needed hours afterwards to process it.”
The whole film, Aster said, centers around a simple premise. “The joke here for a long time is that Beau is really worried about everything and I’m going to put him a situation that could go wrong in one of 10 ways,” he said. But his movie hinges on asking: “What’s the eleventh way?”
Aster said working with Phoenix, who plays the twitchy, over-medicated title character with a scary level of intensity, was a career highlight for him.
“He’s so beyond committed,” Aster said. “He really makes decisions carefully because when he takes something on it’s his whole life. Every dangerous thing that Beau does, Joaquin did.”
That meant falling down ladders, barreling through forests and crashing through glass doors. The latter stunt left him with a shard of glass in his side.
“I think we did one more take after that,” Aster said. While shooting a tense standoff with Patti LuPone, who plays Beau’s manipulative mother, Phoenix was so exhausted he fainted. “I knew that it was bad because he was letting people touch him,” Aster said.
Phoenix was also on hand, greeting the crowd while outfitted in a black cap and jeans. But he opted to forgo the Q&A.
For Aster, who dreamed of making “Beau Is Afraid” before he made a name for himself with “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” his new movie represented a chance to mix in more humor with horror. It was also an opportunity to delve into his own anxieties (this is a man who admits choosing where to go for lunch can spark an existential crisis).
“You just want to punish Beau,” Stone told him at the end of the Q&A.
“Yeah,” Aster said with a laugh. “Fuck him.”