Beau Is Afraid UK release date, age rating latest and more

If you’ve seen the then you’ve probably got two question, what is the Beau Is Afraid UK release date and what the jinkies is it about. We’ll do our best with the latter, but the former is covered less myopically below, along with the latest details on the age rating certificate, cast and runtime.

Plot

So piecing this together from the trailer and the brief synopsis on the A24 website, the story for Beau Is Afraid sees the titular character (Joaquin Phoenix) embarking on a surreal journey. He’s trying to get home to see his mum, but he’s got a whole world of fear to get through along the way.

There are riots on the streets, Misery-style escape room setups, and surreal dreamlike worlds to cross. How much will be real and how much imagined is hard to say, but with director and writer Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar) behind the camera and Joaquin Phoenix (Joker: Folie A Deux) in front of it all bets are off.

There are some pretty big links between Beau Is Afraid and Phoenix’s other recent darker work, You Were Never Really Here and Joker. They all blend mum issues with the challenges of mental wellness and it’s hard not to relate to the sentiments that are behind them.

Cast

In addition to Phoenix in the lead role, the Beau Is Afraid cast includes Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan as his ankle tag captors, Stephen McKinley Henderson as a member of Beau’s support group, and Armen Nahapetian as the younger version of Beau. Zoe Lister-Jones plays a younger version of his mum, Parker Posey plays his love interest and Patti LuPone plays his mum.

We’ll update you with more details on the cast as they become available. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter to see more news and updates on upcoming films, and you can find the official A24 Twitter page at https://twitter.com/A24.

Beau Is Afraid UK release date

The UK release date for Beau Is Afraid is still out for confirmation, but the film has been scheduled to come out in North America on the 21st April 2023. It’s a A24 production, so it should arrive in the UK at the same time as in the UK if you look at their previous releases.

For example, Midsommar has a release on both sides of the Atlantic on the 3rd July 2019. However, that wasn’t the case for The Whale, which came out in the US in December, but isn’t due to arrive in the UK until the 3rd February 2023, so there could well be a split run for Ari Aster’s horror comedy too.

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In all fairness, The Whale came out during a very busy winter at the box office and there’s sort of more scope for that in the US, which could be why it had a different release date in the UK. It wasn’t just the A24 film that fell foul to this as Puss In Boots The Last Wish, Babylon and The Fabelmans were also shunted to early 2023 despite coming out in the States before the New Year. Post-COVID nervousness and the impact of Avatar 2 both probably contributed to it as well as the differences in audiences.

If Beau Is Afraid does come out in April 2023 it should then get a DVD, Blu-ray and digital release date in the UK around August later in the year. This will be just in time to land for a little of the summer holiday movie market if it does well at the box office.

Age rating and parents guide

The Beau Is Afraid age rating for the UK will be confirmed by the British Board of Film Classification when we get a little closer to the release date. However, we can take a lot from the trailer and Ari Aster’s previous films, Midsommar and Hereditary.

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The first had an 18 certificate in the UK, so rated R in the US, and the latter was given a 15 certification in the UK, but still rated R in the States. If you’ve seen either of these then you should know to expect things to veer into pretty horrific moment from time to time.

You get a pretty stark taste of this in the trailer below, which gets is pretty grim at times, despite its lighter notes. Horror elements mix with dark comedy and surreal circumstances. Aster’s last two films containing gory image references in the age rating notes, so it’s going to be a surprise if the Joaquin Phoenix film doesn’t follow suit.

Runtime

As ever, we’ll get the Beau Is Afraid runtime a little closer to the release date, similar to the age rating. Hereditary was a little over two hours, but Midsommar clocked in at two and a half and with all of the time skipping and setting changes we could be in for another longer film here.

Beau Is Afraid trailer

The trailer for Beau Is Afraid starts off pretty freakishly with a flashback on a conversation Beau’s mother had with his younger self. She talks about being sorry for what his dad had passed down to him, so Beau clearly has a fairly chunky skeleton somewhere in his closet.

He then has a series of mind-bending adventures in his bid to get home to his mum with a number of scenes hinting at the dark town of the horror comedy. Jaquin Phoenix does a lot of running in the role, mostly to try to escape the world around him, which appears to be one of the themes.

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It’s probably a little redundant to say that things probably aren’t what they seem in this one. The trailer has already picked up over 3 million views in its first couple of days, so it has caught a lot of attention, which should translate into a strong cinema run when the release date comes around.

Check out our film news section to keep tabs on the latest age rating and release date news, or visit the A24 website at https://a24films.com/.