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There’s little to be afraid of in “Beau Is Afraid,” a surprisingly not-so-scary comedy from one of the most exciting horror directors, Ari Aster. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, it’s the sort of comedy where everyone, including the audience, is in on the joke. Everyone except for Beau, who is relentlessly tortured by any and every absurd creative choice Aster could imagine. Not every ambitious idea works in the film’s favor, yet the ungodly fever dream remains hilarious in a perverse, perturbed sense of humor.

Beau is a loser. On top of being a 40-year-old virgin who makes Steve Carrell in the Judd Apatow comedy look like a playboy, he lives alone in a crappy apartment, his therapist doesn’t listen to him, and his mother can’t stop calling his phone. To him, the whole world is after him, and he’s terrified. But when a simple trip to visit his mother becomes further complicated by misadventures and inconveniences, he must face his fears and embark on an uncertain journey of epic proportions to his mother’s house.

If it wasn’t clear from “Hereditary” or “Midsommar,” Aster might have some mommy issues. Both films begin with the deaths of a mother, eventually subjecting the surviving family members through more trauma and torture than what could be dreamed up in the most outlandish “Final Destination” entry. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there’s no demon-worshiping cult behind Beau’s blights, only Freudian guilt brought upon by an overbearing mother.

The apparent distinction separating those first two films from “Beau Is Afraid” is the trade-in for nervous laughter over shocking scares, a shift that might be sudden for those unfamiliar with his early short films. “Beau,” the 2011 foundation for what became “Beau Is Afraid,” is a tame test run for the feature-length product, humorously playing off its character’s agoraphobia. Alongside each other, the idea is the same. In execution, the difference is highlighted by enough LSD to cause twelve elephant graveyards and one small Xanax tablet for the rare downer between the shocks and laughs.

Aster proves horror and comedy are one and the same, reaching into his toybox of fear tactics and repurposing them into ingenious visual comedy. While a naked man hidden in the background and staring at the camera is disturbing in “Hereditary,” the opposite is true when a naked man is chasing people with a knife on the street in “Beau Is Afraid.”

Rarely settling for a moment to breathe, the camera glides through just about every corner of the frame. After previous films, Aster had already reached a level of filmmaking artistry that other auteurs take decades to come into their own. “Beau Is Afraid” proves there are new directions for the auteur to take, and certainly nothing sordid that cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski can’t capture candidly, no matter how crazy the plot gets.

The screenplay asks a lot from Phoenix, constantly placing Beau in situations requiring melodramatic reactions through believable physical comedy. Unsurprisingly, Phoenix brilliantly plays off Beau’s unremarkable existence and does enough for the audience to pity the manchild through the journey. It’s a welcomed change from recent dramatic roles, allowing him to subvert the method actor expectations hanging over him and return to a more self-deprecating character, not unlike his work in the mockumentary “I’m Still Here.”

Among the rotating supporting cast, Nathan Lane steals the show, referring to Beau as “ma dude” and claiming his house arrest anklet is “my little assistant health monitor.” He’s perfectly cast as the happy-go-lucky Roger, garnering the biggest laughs out of the theater. Parker Posey has a similarly show-stealing appearance, but hers doesn’t come until a climactic sex scene that’s the funniest in years.

At every turn, Aster subverts the expectation that he is a one-trick terror pony with bigger balls than Phoenix’s oversized prosthetic testicles. The effort is not without a few setbacks, taking the plot into often confusing directions that come off as intentional misdirects to alienate the audience. Out of the many detours on the journey, the halfway point in the three-hour runtime is perhaps the most perplexing.

Beau imagines himself as the lead character in a stage play stationed in a nearby forest. The scene alone is hypnotic, complete with a mix of live-action footage and cartoon animation that resembles the style of a kindergartener drawing “The Wizard of Oz” from memory. But it does little to keep the insanity moving and creates fodder for an otherwise simple trajectory. The more thought put into the scene, the more it doesn’t make sense nor warrant bringing the story to an unnecessary intermission, which is saying a lot for a movie featuring a giant CGI penis monster.

The movie is also just very, very weird. Almost every line in the script is something only a film bro could dream up in his film school dormitory, proving that a movie can be unbelievably stupendous until it becomes unbearably stupid. In moviemaking history, the only other filmmaker who comes close to an equally offbeat tone is Charlie Kaufman, the mind behind “Synecdoche, New York” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” Unlike Kaufman, Aster sacrifices charm for a story laced with psychedelic-induced dream logic while injecting the juvenile humor and spontaneity of a “South Park” episode to varying success.

“Beau Is Afraid” is not the type of film that asks to be solved. There are details for observant viewers to connect the dots surrounding Beau’s hyperreality. But the main throughline of the plot remains the same, still held back by questionable creative choices that struggle to come together in a worthwhile conclusion.

As a theater experience, Aster’s twisted fantasy sends heads rolling due to a deadly dose of inventive scenarios and gross-out humor. The sole fault? By the time the credits roll over an ending that does little to wrap matters up, “Beau Is Afraid” has little reason to exist besides bewildering its audience.

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