There are people who say it’s best to go into Barbarian blind. While I agree and had a blast doing so, this is no One Cut of the Dead. The twists here are fun, but there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before. That said, if you want to go in completely unspoiled, here’s my review in brief: Barbarian fucking rules. Go see it.
Now on to the review.
“What are we supposed to do?”
Tess (Georgina Campbell) is in Detroit for a job interview. She booked a cheap AirBnB and she’s ignoring calls. It’s hard to escape the feeling that she’s running away from something.
Unfortunately, her AirBnB was double-booked. Keith (Bill Skarsgård) arrived earlier that day. He showered, napped, ate — made himself at home. Now, Tess and Keith have to figure out what the right thing to do is. The neighborhood is dangerous and the night is late. Tess is reluctant to stay with a strange man in an unfamiliar house, but she doesn’t have much choice. The two settle in for an uncomfortable night.
But something is deeply wrong here. Is it Keith, the artist who claims he lives in Detroit but has a license from Brooklyn? The house, whose doors seem to open and shut on their own? Or is there something haunting the neighborhood itself?
“Why don’t you come inside?”
There are so many ways Barbarian could go wrong. The spectre of looming sexual violence hangs over the movie at all times. There were moments when I worried that the movie was trying to Say Something that it wasn’t totally equipped to say. Thankfully, unexpectedly, it never does. It never tips over into torture porn, and it doesn’t fetishize sexual violence. Instead, it takes a different path forward.
The Mary Sue wrote a great article about the way Barbarian undermines our expectations of male redemption and sexual violence. It has heavy spoilers, but I wanted to acknowledge that they really hit on one of my favorite aspects of the film.
Early on in the film, Tess has a conversation with Keith that stuck with me. In it, she talks about how careful women have to be. Men can take risks; women can’t. Men can afford to be generous. The movie acknowledges and validates her fear. Keith is gentle and considerate, but Barbarian uses the expectations of horror to make everything he says and does seem… off. Can she really trust him? I wouldn’t.
In a way, this is the inverse of Fresh. Fresh used the style and conventions of romantic comedy to get the audience to ‘let down our guard’ the same way its heroine did, before pulling the rug out on us both. Here, Barbarian uses the tone of a horror film to let us feel the paranoia even seemingly decent men can evoke.
“We’ll call these idiots.”
Now, all that said, I want to back up. I love that Barbarian plays with those ideas in smart and effective ways. The movie gave me a lot to think about, and that’s nice.
That’s only part of why I loved Barbarian.
See, the other part, just as important, is that Barbarian fucking whips. It’s tense and creepy. It’s wonderfully shot. The performances are excellent. The set design is fantastic. Watching it was a rollercoaster ride, and every twist was a fresh delight.
Sometimes I worry that modern horror relies too much on making theme explicit. The monster has to mean something, and the movie has to tell you what it means. Don’t get me wrong, this can work. I love The Babadook and The People Under the Stairs. But, like… the monster doesn’t have to be a literal one-for-one fully explained metaphor for anything, you know? Oftentimes the best horror lingers in the unaccountable shadows of your brain, coming to mean something specific to you rather than something prescribed to you.
Barbarian excels in this space. It is an exceptional addition to an already stellar year for horror.