Beau (film)

'Beau' is a 2011 short film written and directed by Ari Aster, produced as his thesis project at the AFI Conservatory. The 14-minute piece follows a neurotic middle-aged man, played by Billy Mayo, who is unable to leave his apartment to visit his mother and becomes trapped in increasingly absurd recursive anxieties. The short laid the narrative and tonal groundwork for Aster's 2023 feature 'Beau Is Afraid,' which expanded the protagonist's hypochondriac spiral into a three-hour surrealist odyssey with Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role.