News of Phoenix fainting came as part of an April Fool’s day prank by Ari Aster, when instead of showing audiences a screening of his previous film Midsommar, he instead unveiled his latest work at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in New York. Stage 6 also acquired rights from A24 in Middle East, worldwide ships and airlines and pan Asia pay TV.

The trailer for Beau Is Afraid starts off pretty freakishly with a flashback on a conversation Beau’s mother had with his younger self. After entering a cave, the boat's motor begins to stall, and he suddenly finds himself in a crowded arena.threat and horror There are frequent scenes of threat in which characters are frightened by or are in danger from aggressive individuals meaning them harm. The trailer has already picked up over 3 million views in its first couple of days, so it has caught a lot of attention, which should translate into a strong cinema run when the release date comes around. We also have a short synopsis for the film, which has been released by A24 - not that it clears much up. Bread’s Everything I Own and Mariah Carey’s Always Be My Baby provide brilliantly excruciating needle drops, while a joke about the soundtrack CD for Bette Midler’s For the Boys is so niche as to be almost subatomic. Right now, it's unclear what she's referring to but it's clear Beau is a troubled character and the trailer follows him in a number of locations, some more abstract than others.

Each episode seems to exist in a different genre, from the taut, zombie-nightmare farce of the early apartment scenes, through the Todd Solondz-style urban sickness of the second act (“just a bad dream”), to the play-within-a-play theatricality of an extended hippy woodland sojourn in which travelling thespians strive “to blur the line between the audience and the players”. When his mother dies, Beau makes a journey home that involves some wild supernatural threats, and Ari Aster has kept the whole thing mysterious to keep us intrigued, although "Kafkaesque" has been used to describe the project. A third chapter takes Beau to a fairy tale forest, where a kindly pregnant woman (Hayley Squires) introduces him to a wandering theatre troupe, and where one of its plays turns into a poignant, animated picture-book reverie about the life he might have had. As the plot goes, that’s sort of it, but the detours along the way drag us through an epic journey that comes reeling out of Aster’s own subconscious like an expensive, beautifully ugly fever dream.Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is middle-aged, profoundly paranoid, and preparing to face one of his greatest fears: paying a visit to his mother. Originally from Northumberland, she graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a degree in Film Studies and moved to London to begin a career writing about entertainment. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

On its own, this opening 45-minute section works as a profoundly misanthropic satirical farce about the stresses of contemporary city life, with more visual gags, and more male nudity, than most raucous Hollywood comedies. Along the journey home many circumstances and people try to stop him who have been hired by his psycho mother. His own bare apartment is something of a refuge from this savage Gotham, but when he gets there after the therapy session, he is greeted by a sign on his door saying that a poisonous spider is loose in the building, and angry notes from a neighbour complaining about the volume of his music – even though he isn't playing any music.Roger Waters releases solo versions of 'Speak To Me' and 'Breathe,' celebrating the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon. There are riots on the streets, Misery-style escape room setups, and surreal dreamlike worlds to cross. This will be just in time to land for a little of the summer holiday movie market if it does well at the box office. He has an air ticket to visit his mother on the anniversary of his father’s death – a prospect that cranks his anxiety levels up to 11. Patti LuPone also deserves all the Supporting Actor awards next year for her turn as Beau’s monstrous mum – just one horror among so many in a film that crackles with dread and anxiety from the very start.

After further degrading from his mother, an enraged Beau briefly attempts to strangle her before she collapses. The pure oddness of this alt-reality urban dystopia, though very striking in its way, slightly brings into question how seriously we are supposed to take it all in the first place.Hung so heavily with Freudian symbolism that it features a scene where a man beats a giant penis monster to death, it’s impossible not to see it all as Aster trying to turn his own counselling sessions into something as terrifying, twitchy and accidentally hilarious as only he sees them. He is invited to their rehearsal and becomes entranced by the play, imagining himself as the protagonist, who spends his entire life looking for his family after they are separated by a flood. After that it started dragging and it seemed to be trying too hard to make a point or be meaningful. Meanwhile, Dune actor Stephen McKinley Henderson stars as Beau’s therapist, and Parker Posey plays Elaine, Beau’s childhood love.