Beau is Afraid director accuses ‘indifferent’ viewers of missing hidden detail: ‘That’s frustrating’

Filmmaker Ari Aster has hit out at the “indifferent” responses to his latest film, Beau is Afraid.

The director, who rose to prominence with the independent horror movies Hereditary and Midsommar, claimed that he had inserted a secret story in the background of his film, but no one appears to have noticed it.

Beau is Afraid is an avante-garde psychological drama starring Joaquin Phoenix as an anxiety-stricken man whose life spirals out of control after he is informed that his mother has died.

With a runtime of nearly three hours, the film received mixed reviews, and has been described as a box office bomb, making just over $11m worldwide.

In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Aster expressed bemusement that fans of the film had seemingly overlooked some of its Easter eggs.

“The film ends on a theatre just very gradually emptying out over the credits, with a very indifferent audience. I wasn’t quite ready for just how prophetic that ending was going to be,” he said. “It occurred to me in retrospect. I knew where this was headed. Right. And that’s part of the point.

“One thing that excites me about Beau is that there are certain things that I buried in that film that still haven’t been talked about, and I was kind of disappointed by the way people were maybe engaging with the film on first release because it was very verdict-based like, ‘Well, it doesn’t all work.’ It’s like, ‘Well, wait, what doesn’t work?’”

Aster described the film as an “experiment in so many ways”, noting that he had left details in the “background” of scenes that “tell a whole other story that nobody has brought to me yet”.

He pointed to a flashback scene in which Phoenix’s character takes a cruise as a child.

“In some ways, that’s frustrating because you take the time to put them there and you wonder who’s going to catch them,” he said. “But I’m excited by the idea of people finding those things. In the cruise sequence, if you look in the background in every scene there, you might catch something and it might spark an idea.”

The scenes in question feature a large bald man standing in the background. The literal or symbolic meaning of the figure has seemingly yet to be decoded by viewers.

“That’s frustrating because you take the time to put them there and you wonder who’s going to catch them,” Aster said. “When you make a film like this, it feels in some ways like you’re just pulling yourself inside out. With this film especially as it came out, I felt very protective of it. I’ve said this before, but it’s absolutely my favorite of my own films and I think the furthest I’ve been able to go.”