Beau Is Afraid ending explained: Eww... What's that thing?

Ari Aster will next come up with his black comedy Eddington and bring Joaquin Phoenix back from his previous film, Beau is Afraid (2023), a surrealist tragicomedy whose ending will make you rub your eyes because you won't believe what you just saw. And you might want to deny what you just saw, because that is surreal.

The film is about an extremely anxious Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) who believes that his mother, Mona (Patti LuPone), has died and needs to visit for a funeral. However, he cannot, as he is injured in an accident and is being held by the family who hit him so that he can recover quickly.

For Beau, the biggest question is who his father is, and only his mother can tell him that. And she does tell him, because she isn't really dead. Turns out that Beau's father is a d*ck, and we aren't talking metaphorically. Keep reading to know what we mean.

Beau's father is a dck, a giant talking dck

Beau is Afraid is the third film directed by Ari Aster. (Image via A24)

Our protagonist finally makes it to his mother's house at the end of Beau is Afraid, and he appears to be sad. However, she is still alive and finally decides to tell Beau the truth about his father.

Throughout the years, she has deceived him by telling him that he died while having s*x with his father due to a condition called a heart murmur. But all of it was a cover-up for the reality that is disgusting.

After guilt-tripping his son in Beau is Afraid, she sends Beau up to the attic and closes it. There's dark and, naturally, Beau is afraid. He tries to see around with a torch in his hand, and the first thing he sees is a man exactly like him sitting there, though he is much thinner.

Then the big reveal happens. All the lights in the attic come alive, and Beau sees a giant penis-shaped monster sitting there, screaming and calling Beau's name.

The most painful part comes after this revelation, as a man called Jeeves, who is here to kill Beau for the family who hit him with the car and believes Beau killed their daughter, enters from the attic's window and shoots and stabs multiple times in the monster's balls. That is indeed ballsy. However, the monster kills this guy in just one blow, and then Beau leaves that attic in a hurry.

Our interpretation of Beau is Afraid

The film was a commercial failure. (Image via A24)

It is established in the very beginning that Beau has some anxiety issues, which also cause him to see things that are actually not real. Most of the time, he is imagining them.

The best example of this is that he finds his love interest from his childhood, Elaine Bray (Parker Posey), at his mom's fake funeral, and they went on to have sex. This is when mom catches him, but it is revealed that he was doing a sex doll. This is why she guilt-trips him because, as a son, this is not what she expected of him after she dies.

Considering all this, the contents of the attic are his imagination, or maybe a representation that his father was actually a d*ck in real life, now we are speaking metaphorically.

If you pay attention to his mother in the film, her dialogue corroborates the fact that his father was abusive.

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