This article contains mild spoilers for "Beau is Afraid."Ari Aster's new film "Beau is Afraid" is an elongated, abstract college-student-experimental-art-piece-cum-Oedipal-freakout that will leave most audiences either confused or outright enraged. Running three hours, the film takes place in an abstract, non-real world where guilt, fear, and panic seem to be humanity's only available emotional states. Joaquin Phoenix plays the titular Beau who, at the film's start, lives in a rundown apartment in the middle of a war zone. He has to sprint down the street and make his way quickly through his building's security door before a pursuing tattooed, black-eyed man can attack him. There is a dead body rotting in the middle of his intersection, and no one seems the least bit concerned with removing it.

When Beau requires a bottle of water to take with his medication, he finds that his apartment keys have been stolen.