In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is tasked with bringing the One Ring to Mordor and destroying it. Along the way, he fights orcs, spiders, and a small fish-loving monster. Ari Aster sees a lot of similarities between the fantasy trilogy and his new movie, handsome is scaredwhom he called “a Jew the Lord of the Rings, but he just goes to his mother. No word on orcs and spiders, but if it’s like all the jewish gatherings my family has held, there will be fish.

A24It is handsome is scared stars Joaquin Phoenix in a “decades-long surreal horror film set in an alternate present” about an “extremely anxious but agreeable-looking man who has a strained relationship with his overbearing mother and has never known his father. When his mother dies, he makes a return trip that involves savage supernatural threats.In the behind-the-scenes video above, Aster, who also directed Hereditary And Midsommar, said he had been thinking about this movie for 10 years. “If you filled a 10-year-old child with Zoloft and took him shopping, it’s like this movie,” he added.

handsome is scaredwhich also stars Nathan Lane, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Hayley Squires, Michael Gandolfini, Zoe Lister-Jones and Richard Kind, is out April 21.