LOS ANGELES (AP) 鈥 Ari Aster really doesn鈥檛 want to talk about 鈥淏eau Is Afraid.鈥
鈥淭his is so not the right thing,鈥 he laughed anxiously during a recent press day for his new film. 鈥淚 shouldn鈥檛 be talking about this movie for another 10 years.鈥
But, alas, the insatiable publicity machine demands Aster feed it something now, undeterred by the director鈥檚 protestations, as his three-hour epic of biblical proportions hits theaters on Friday.
鈥淚 wish I could just recede as far as possible and have the film just live on its own without any baggage that I鈥檓 inadvertently saddling onto it,鈥 he said, aware of the awkward position his reticence puts an interviewer in. 鈥淚 just want to throw up even hearing myself right now,鈥 he added sheepishly.
Aster鈥檚 point is a sympathetic one. 鈥淏eau Is Afraid鈥 really is one of those movies best seen with minimal prior knowledge of what you are walking into, aside from the fact that it is three hours of chaos, anxiety and terror.
The movie, a version of which Aster wrote shortly after graduating from the American Film Institute, is clearly a personal project. And while 鈥淏eau Is Afraid鈥 is his most labyrinthine feature to date, Aster maintains he ultimately wants people to enjoy it.
鈥淚 made something for an audience. I hope that it is exciting and fun and, you know, makes people feel things,鈥 he said, although he acknowledged that he is 鈥減repared for people not knowing quite what to make of it.鈥
Critics and journalists have thrown out the names of every erudite-sounding auteur they can think in their attempts to describe this movie's influences: Voltaire, Kafka, Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch. But, taken together, what do those comparisons even communicate about the movie besides that it is absurd?
Without giving more away than what is in the trailer, which itself does a poor job of capturing the kind of movie it advertises, 鈥淏eau Is Afraid鈥 follows its sympathetic title character (Joaquin Phoenix) on a desperate journey to get to his mother's house.
It is billed as Aster鈥檚 third horror feature, following the successes of 鈥淗ereditary鈥 and 鈥淢idsommar,鈥 both widely recognized as movies that elevated the current state of the genre. Although decidedly less scary than Aster鈥檚 first two films, 鈥淏eau Is Afraid鈥 does feel like the final frontier in the director鈥檚 conquest of scary movies.
While 鈥淗ereditary鈥 was a chilling supernatural story of the demonic, 鈥淢idsommar鈥 swung the pendulum the other way, following anthropology students who find themselves in a nightmare devoid of the paranormal and instead driven by human-created terrors.
鈥淏eau Is Afraid鈥 then feels like it lands somewhere in the middle, making it impossible to know whether the fear-inducing aspects of the film are real or in Beau鈥檚 head, demonstrating the ways in which we are at the mercy of our fragile brains. Even if the monsters Beau encounters are not an accurate reflection of his metaphysical reality, does that make them any less real?
Aster said he does not put that much thought into the categories his movies fit into, and that the genres ultimately ascribed to them have little to no bearing on his creative process.
鈥淚 try to stave them off as far as I can. And then in the end, the boxes they鈥檙e put into are boxes that they naturally land in because you have to market the film,鈥 he said. 鈥淥ver time, it ends up as this thing that is more or less different from whatever was made or whatever the spirit was that it was made in, because that鈥檚 the necessary next step.鈥
As a testament to how averse Aster is to boxes, the director recently revealed that horror when he set out to make his feature directorial debut, much to the dismay of scary movie lovers across the internet.
鈥淪omebody asked me, 鈥楽o, you鈥檙e a horror filmmaker?鈥 And I, for some reason, bristled at that because I knew I wanted to make other kinds of films,鈥 he recalled.
In hindsight, he revealed, those comments may have been an overcorrection.
鈥淪ome people thought I was rejecting horror or that I felt superior to it, which is incorrect," Aster said. "You know, I love the genre. I鈥檓 a horror filmmaker, whatever.鈥
