When you wake up from a nightmare, it can feel so vivid, so real – so relevant. But over the following minutes and hours, your brain undertakes the important task of synthesising what your subconscious has subjected you to; it interprets symbols, recognises familiar anxieties, and likely suggests that you refrain from boring everyone you encounter that day with a blow-by-blow account of it all. Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (evolved from his own 2011 short film, Beau) feels like it was written, shot, cut, and released all in the span of those first few waking moments, before the brain had the chance to undergo this process. It is as raw, queasy, and unrefined as what you might discover if you lifted Aster’s dream diary straight from his bedside table and read it cover to cover.