Beau Is Afraid’s strange rollout makes sense for such a strange movie

polygon.com:

Ari Aster is a very strange director. Not just for his eccentric, fantastic popcorn-art horror movies, but also for the way those strange movies become incredibly popular. Both of his previous movies, Midsommarand Hereditary, are excellent, scary, contemplative horror movies about trauma and grief. They’re both funny, in their own twisted, dark ways. And they’ve both created a lasting footprint with teens and 20-somethings online, thanks to idiosyncratic marketing, intense shocks and imagery, and general meme-ability.

Now, production company A24 (which was behind both of Aster’s previous movies) is hoping to manufacture that same kind of enthusiasm for Aster’s newest, weirdest movie, Beau Is Afraid, by giving it an extremely odd release schedule that’s primarily designed to woo fans and take over social media.

Beau Is Afraid follows Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), less of a regular guy and more like a tightly wound ball of anxiety in every moment of his life, as he travels to visit his mother. Along the way, he encounters all kinds of oddities, like an apocalyptic city, a traveling theater group, slightly deranged children, and Nathan Lane. Unlike Aster’s other two films, Beau Is Afraid is more obviously a comedy, though it’s passed through a filter of absurdist tragedy with a bit of horror mixed in for good measure.

It’s also a singularly bizarre film, in the most complimentary possible way. While it has bits and pieces of familiar movies, it combines them so aggressively and constantly that it defies comparison to any one other thing at a time. Instead, Beau is more like a hodgepodge of dozens of directors, movies, books, plays, and writers that have influenced Aster through his life. And with a movie this strange and