Ari Aster Admits He Might’ve Gone Too Far With ‘Beau Is Afraid’ Final Hour

Ari Aster’s highly anticipated new movie Eddington might not be having its best time in the box office right now, but the director’s previous film definitely saw worse.

Having risen to stardom with true horror hits like 2018’s Hereditary and 2019’s Midsommar, Aster went on to direct something completely different in the Joaquin Phoenix-led surrealist drama Beau Is Afraid, causing confusion among both critics and viewers expecting something more even more horror-ish after what Midsommar showed.

However, the movie’s running time was the most confusing part of it all, and two years after Beau Is Afraid’s premiere Aster seemingly came to terms with what really went wrong — and what can potentially make the movie rise up again.

Ari Aster Says ‘Beau Is Afraid’ “Was Supposed to Be Exhausting”

Just like the odyssey of Phoenix’s paranoid character couldn’t be a normal short trip, so Ari Aster’s movie wouldn’t be the same had it run for 2 hours only.

This, however, was exactly what many critics and viewers had the issue with, eventually getting as weary as Beau himself when the film reached its third act.

Now that Beau Is Afraid turned out to be a lengthy box office disappointment, Aster seems to be regretting such a decision, recently unveiling some more details about how Beau Is Afraid came together back then and how it would have changed now.

“There are things that I would do differently if I did it now. While I was making it I was really excited about how exhausting the film was. It was supposed to be exhausting and that last hour was a real gauntlet […] I would probably tighten that last hour, in a certain way”, the director said while appearing on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast.

However, he still admitted that not everything might already be lost for the movie that, like many other cult classic films right now, would possibly be brought back from oblivion someday.

“I was pretty sad that it was so maligned […] it was a bummer. It lost money. Critically, I wouldn’t say it was reviled, there’s just no consensus whatsoever. I would say, now I hear about it more and more, it’s sort of being reassessed”, Aster added.

‘Beau Is Afraid’ Was Labeled “Three-Hour Panic Attack” Upon 2023 Release

• On Rotten Tomatoes, Beau Is Afraid holds scores of 68% and 71% from critics and audiences

• On IMDb, the movie is rated 6.6/10

While Aster’s Eddington also heard some bad words about its helmer’s lack of organisation and coherence of thoughts, Beau Is Afraid seemingly made the same mistake years before.

As if the movie’s runtime was in fact the only thing that stopped it from being a potential hit, many critics pointed out the issue as what led Beau Is Afraid to flopping in the box office with $12 million grossed.

“In his third film, Aster attempts to bewitch you with a pixel-perfect rendering of what feels like a three-hour panic attack that worsens every second”, The Hindu’s Bhuvanesh Chandar wrote about the movie.

“This new horror starring Joaquin Phoenix and Patti LuPone is a building panic attack of a film - but its bloated, self-indulgent three-hour runtime lets it down”, iNews’s Christina Newland added.