In 2019 on the Cannes film festival director Nicolas Winding Refn ( the director of the 2013 film Only God Forgives ) released episodes 4 and 5 of his ( then ) new multi-episode picture Too Old To Die Young. Episode 5 titled "The Fool" contains a car chase scene. Some argue it is one of the most romantic car chases in cinematic history. The joke is, that the car chase is set to a romantic Barry Manilow's 1974 hit "Mandy", making the juxtaposition rather hilarious in nature. But given the ass-born theory specialist that I am, I must suggest an interesting twist to this whole ordeal. During the principal photography of the first episode of Too Old To Die Young another film-maker Panos Cosmatos released a film, strangely similar in style to whatever Refn is doing. And his film was called Mandy. We can theorize that maybe Refn responded, in his strange way, recognizing the stylistic similarities, so to speak.
Watching Foxtrot ( a film by Samuel Maoz ) I felt a strange feeling. The film moves and feels like surrealistic horror movies by directors like Nicolas Winding Refn and Panos Cosmatos, yet the film is not a horror. It is a drama.
There is a sub-genre of Horror films categorized by surrealism. It could range between totally insane films like anything directed by David Lynch all the way to something like Mandy by Panos Cosmatos, where it is kind of surreal, but also doesn't actually ask from the audience too much in terms of figuring out what is going on. "Beau Is Afraid" is more toward the David Lynch category of surreal horror.
Kristoffer Borgli's 2023 film Dream Scenario starring Nicolas Cage is a movie about a man, who is being dreamed about by a lot of people. At first his family have weird dreams about him. Then people related to them. Then the whole world. At first the dreams make him famous. But then they take a turn for the worst. At first he is just doing nothing in those dreams. Then he is being a creep. And then he literally murders people in those dreams. Which makes the public, in the real life, react to him with greater and greater rivalry. Apart from, for some reason, people in France.