Ari Aster’s horror gets weird and comic in A24’s Beau Is Afraid trailer

If a surreal paranoid nightmare comedy from the guy behind Midsommar and Hereditary sounds good to you, get ready for a rare moment of enjoyment. It’s the trailer for Beau Is Afraid!

The latest from Ari Aster feels just as much like it’s something that would have come from a Charlie Kaufman script in the mid-’00s—and how could that not be a positive? Joaquin Phoenix stars as a man trying to visit his mother. On the way, he freaks out, gets hit by a car, and seems to at least perceive himself as being held captive before escaping into a world of playful artifice. Parker Posey, Nathan Lane, Amy Ryan, Richard Kind, Patti LuPone, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Michael Gandolfini co-star.

Boutique distributor A24’s official synopsis doesn’t add anything to that, so we’ll be going in pretty fresh when we definitely see this in theaters on April 21.

Please help these sad nobodies and: