Review

dir: Zach Cregger

2022

You know, for a lot of this movie’s duration, I was kinda hooked. It’s a horror movie, so naturally there are some terrifying bits.

And then it all falls apart in the end. Which is okay. I can forgive that in many/most horror flicks because they’re notoriously difficult to end in a way which doesn’t either bamboozle the audience or leave it shrugging in a way that could imply the flick will be forgotten before the viewer has left the theatre.

Barbarian is tricky. You think it’s a flick about a certain kind of horror (turning up to an Airbnb you’ve booked correctly, but someone else is already staying there, which is like the most horrific thing I could possibly imagine), but then it digs two levels deeper into layers of hell you didn’t imagine were there, and will probably regret being told about.

If I could humbly suggest that this flick has maybe three distinct acts, the first act, which happens to be the one where we don’t know anything, is probably the best because it doesn’t hurry and it’s delightfully ambiguous.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) travels to Detroit, and has booked a stay at a house for the night because she has a job interview the next day. She arrives at night, struggles to get the key out of the lockbox, and then is shocked, shocked I say when the key’s not there. Calls to the help line are obviously ignored. And then she sees that someone is inside the place.

Keith (Bill Skarsgard) is in the place already, and wary as well, but tries to be gentlemanly and solicitous, and is well aware of how everything he says and does could look to someone. Tess is very tentative about coming in to sort everything out, and to figure out whether it’s genuinely a mistaken double booking, or whether something else that’s quite nefarious is going on.

The thing about Bill Skarsgard is, other than being the son of Swedish screen legend Stellan and brother to very famous other Skarsgard Alexander, is that while being a kinda handsome guy, his eyes bug out a bit, and one of them tends toward a slightly skewed direction, giving him, from certain angles, a very unsettling air.

It’s probably the key reason as to why they made him play the profoundly evil child-eating clown Pennywise in It Chapters 1 and 2. So here, in human form, it’s used to give him enough of a reason to keep the wary Tess wary, despite his polite and respectful patter.

Tess agrees that it’s probably not fair for either of them to have to find somewhere else to stay, and he helpfully points out that there’s some medical convention in town, and she’s unlikely to be able to find accommodation elsewhere. First red flag. He does everything to make her feel comfortable, and even insists that she take the bedroom, and washes the sheets and dries them. It’s just that it means, despite it being the middle of the night, she’s going to have to wait an hour and a half before she can crash out. Immense second red flag.

Then, after she uses the bathroom, he delivers an understandable but immensely awkward explanation of why he hasn’t opened a bottle of wine that sits on the table yet, so that she’d know that the bottle was sealed up to that moment and nothing’s been added to it, but that if she doesn’t want any wine he totally understands and maybe she wants a tea instead and…

Already I was convinced he was probably a cannibal or something.

But Tess relaxes anyway, and they start chatting about their lives. This section is fascinating, mostly because it does two things: it talks about Detroit itself as it is today (not the root causes), and some of the weird and wonderful ways that people have relocated to Detroit to exploit its devastation and its lack of economic opportunities (large musical and / or artistic collectives trying to achieve something with cheap rents etc). And it also takes to task (slightly) the kind of people, like documentary makers, like Tess aspires to work as, with her job interview tomorrow, who would come to Detroit in order to profit from Detroit’s misery.

Tess mentions an obscure documentarian, but Keith, very suspiciously, has seen her doco and thought it was great and even has further opinions about it. Fancy that, a man with opinions.

At this point I was thinking “Uh oh, Keith has set all this shit up and researched Tess in order to lull her into a false sense of security? What does this mean?” It’s all so could-be-this, could-be-that. Until, of course, things change.
The toilet paper is out in the bathroom. That’s the real tragedy. Tess searches everywhere for loo paper, and eventually finds a whole mountain of it. In the basement.

When she finds a not-very-secret door in the basement, her first response is “Nope”. She literally says “Nope” out loud, just like the sensible characters in Jordan Peele’s recent flick also called Nope.

But she makes the terrible mistake of not listening to her first instinct, her primary impulse for self-preservation. She countermands it, overrules it, and, well, a lot of bad things happen from then on.

Abrupt scene change. Abrupt location change. This is almost spot on at the 30 minute mark.

A Hollywood arsehole (Justin Long) driving a convertible, like an arsehole, takes a work call as he drives along the coast, presumably in California. He is informed over the phone that the pilot he recently filmed for a series they were hoping would be picked up isn’t going to go forward. And the main reason is that the co-star of that pilot has told the studio and the cops that this jerk driving the car raped her.

It’s…wow. It’s not that much of a tonal shift, because I’ve left out the horrific stuff that happens just before this change in time and place and main character, but it’s, wow. This fucking jerk.

He denies it, of course, but all his work dries up, no-one wants to work with him or represent him, and he is left with little flexibility as to what he can do. Half his money will be spent defending against the rape charge, and the remaining money he intends to spend suing the woman for defamation. This is the new Johnny Depp / Christian Porter / malign men finding new ways to be even more awful legal strategy that has risen up in the last bunch of years. I mean, famous men have mostly been protected for years from having their victims believed or from facing the repercussions of their actions, but now there’s a new way for them to get revenge. Oh happy days.

As this jerk, I think called AJ, faces these issues (vowing to DESTROY the woman he already raped), one of the repercussions is that he has to look at selling some of his investments. One of those investments happens to be a certain house in Detroit, in an absolutely destroyed suburb, on a street where it’s the only occupied house that’s still standing.

I wonder if his path will intersect with Tess and Keith?

The most terrifying parts of the movie occur in these quite narrow tunnels *major spoiler warning ahead* that exist underneath the house, which are like catnip to people horrified by tight spaces / claustrophobia *slowly raises hand*. But the most absolutely terrifying piece of dialogue occurs after the reveal of something terrible, but when someone says “she’s not even the worst thing down there”.

There’s a monster, and there there’s the monster that created that monster. I’m not even going to put words together to describe the sheer magnitude of the evilness (that thankfully isn’t displayed, the worst horrors have already happened off screen, probably decades before) here that rubs up against the present day.

Like all people, like the characters here ask themselves when things are grim “what should I do, what do I owe other people; is this life one in which we only look out for ourselves, or do we do our best and try to do what we can, even for strangers in horrific circumstances?” It’s not so much a message film, but let’s just say two characters (at least) get to have moments where they can make a choice either to save themselves or to save someone else, when no-one else is watching, when they would be the only ones who would know.

And one person chooses exactly as you would think they would, and the other, who, at one point wonders if they’re a good person who maybe once did a bad thing, but who could somehow redeem themselves, shows that, nah, shitty people are worse even than the worst monsters.

I really thought Barbarian was very well done. It’s not just all jump scares and gore. It’s mostly light on gore, but long on terror, and on the implications of what’s actually happened, and what might happen again, ye gods, in this American city that looks like it’s on the front lines of the Russian offensive in Ukraine.

And it is very queasy, odd, and horrible in its choice of monsters. I’ve watched a lot of horror, and I’ve never seen a horror flick like this, with this weird specificity in its monstrous creation.

8 times people should just abandon Detroit completely, in fact, abandon most of Michigan already out of 10

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“This process might seem overwhelming. But with a little practice, it can soon become a pleasurable experience. This is perfectly natural.” – just lie back and let it happen - Barbarian