"Beau Is Afraid" Is The Latest Nightmare From Ari Aster, And Here Are 18 Kinda Wild Details And Facts About It

Without spoiling too much, the film opens and closes with the sounds and images of water. And the movie is peppered with things like bathtubs, fountains, pools, the beach, a literal cruise (i.e., a journey on a ship!), as well as artwork all over the place that alludes to water. And, of course, when Beau's therapist prescribes a new drug, he's adamant about the instructions: “ALWAYS take with water.”

For example, a woman holding a sign that says, "I WILL cut off my own hands," a young man holding a machine gun, a woman frantically looking for her child, and a surgeon (covered in blood) sitting on a bench nearby, among many other details.

Although, when he talks to Beau on the phone earlier in the film, I don't think it sounded like him??? LOL.

Eagle-eyed audience members will probably even notice that "MW" is listed as a "production" company on the film at the beginning of the movie — a very meta joke/Easter egg.

Thus confirming that Roger and his family were all working for Mona.

She explained, “Before I met him, I thought he would be the type of actor who stays in character all day, and you navigate around that carefully, calling him ‘Beau’ instead of ‘Joaquin’ when cameras weren’t rolling. But that’s not what I encountered. I felt like we were naughty children in school being led by Joaquin, who kept us laughing as we waited for 'action' to be called. On action, he was already deep in the scene and deep in character. Such is his miraculous talent.”

“As an actor, he wants to embody the character as much as he can, wherever he can,” Aster said. “Joaquin doesn’t have any vanity — he puts all of himself into the part.”

According to the film's notes, "With one day remaining on his lease and on the verge of moving out, Aster envisioned a man living in an apartment like his own, riddled with anxiety, afraid of nearly everything, preparing to visit his mother — only he can’t."

The IMDb synopsis: "A neurotic middle-aged man's trip to visit his mother is delayed indefinitely when his keys are mysteriously taken from his door. He is subsequently haunted by an increasingly sinister chain of upsetting events." (Sound familiar?)

"But even as it grew, it always functioned as this sort of hellish Freudian picaresque," he explained.

“It’s not exploring a man's life so much as his experience, putting the viewer in his head, inside his feelings, hopefully on an almost cellular level,” said Aster.

There's A LOT going on in the film. 🤷🏻‍♀️

They explained, "Mona is overbearing, highly successful, and deeply invested in her son’s interior life from a great distance."

Once again, it's a lot!

Production designer Fiona Crombie, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her work on The Favourite, managed to transform parts of Montreal into this fantastical (scary) world.

Crombie explained, "Nothing is incidental in Ari’s work — everything you see is there for a reason, every sign, every piece of graffiti, every storefront. Everything is designed with a very specific language that’s foretelling something we discover later in the story.”

“The graphic design element of the movie was a distraction during prep because I became so obsessed with building out the details of Beau’s world,” Aster said. “It was never over, and the design team was driven crazy. Every time they thought a set was finished, I came back with more posters, book jackets, signs, and ads. That’s what was fun about this movie for me — creating the minutiae for this sick, comic world.”

For comparison, the spooky homes and dwellings in Hereditary and Midsommar were all meticulously constructed sets.