10 'WTF Did I Just Pay To See' Movies
3. Beau is Afraid (2023)
Hot on the heels of making two of the scariest horror movies of all time, Ari Aster had the world at his feet - or at least the Hollywood moneymen. With the possibilities laid out in front of him, he could do anything he wanted. So, of course, he made a sinister, postmodern, three-hour-long retelling of Homer's Odyssey that was decimated at the box office.
Split into four sections, each stranger than the last, Beau is Afraid is the story of anxious everything-phobe Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) who lives in the most hellish part of the most hellish city (probably LA), and who is unwittingly swept up in a nightmare adventure that takes him waaay out of his comfort zone.
The film is claustrophobic and uncomfortable from the get, with impromptu parties held in Beau's flat and savages chasing him on the street, but things only get worse as he bumbles through encounters with a suicidal, paint-drinking teenager, a woman who dies during orgasm and, the pièce de résistance: a gigantic, sentient penis that lives in the attic of the family home and is literally his father.
Tacking closer to the short films Aster made before he was able to get backing for his large projects, this may be indicative of the kind of thing he wanted to make all along but just didn't have the leverage to push it through. Either way, it's a wild ride that beggars belief at every last turn.