Film Review: Barbarian
Sick delights await in the twisty, uneven Barbarian
The secrets to Zach Cregger’s Barbarian have been closely guarded since its premiere at San Diego Comic-Con in July, and for good reason: There are some nasty tricks hiding in this basement. Gore-hounds and squirm-fiends with appetites for sick thrills will have a great time with the film’s surprisingly funny descent into madness, but Barbarian’s fizzling atmosphere and payoffs make it this year’s not-quite-Malignant. Minor spoilers ahead…
Barbarian asks: Can creepy, fucked-up basements be included in a house’s square footage on Zillow? A surprisingly funny powder keg of twisted delights, Zach Cregger’s (The Whitest Kids U’ Know) confident horror debut aims to throttle, shock, and discombobulate with fits of nervous laughter. With a hush-hush marketing campaign and hype that all but pleads for you to go in spoiler-free, the build-up surrounding Barbarian has been a fruitful exercise in restraint: There’s something sinister - and savage - broiling underground, and it can’t wait to reveal itself to you.
In the dead of night during a torrential downpour, Tess (Georgina Campbell) pulls up to her AirBnB for the evening - a conspicuously pristine, modern rental amidst the impoverished and decayed ruins of a Detroit suburb - only to find it double-booked. Inside already is Keith (Bill Skarsgård), an awkward and unassuming fellow whose attempts to disarm are only belied by the fact that he’s played by Pennywise himself. Against her better judgment and with some heavy convincing from Keith, Tess decides to take refuge from the inhospitable neighborhood and its rain, but not without an abundance of caution. With a mounting sense of unease, it isn’t before long that Barbarian’s ugly underbelly begins to show as a creeping investigation into the corners of this odd house uncovers something much more disturbing than a booking snafu.
“…the build-up surrounding Barbarian has been a fruitful exercise in restraint: There’s something sinister - and savage - broiling underground, and it can’t wait to reveal itself to you.”
It’s a relief that the first act of Barbarian is the only thing I can really talk about without revealing the film’s nastiest secrets, because its opening salvo is a masterclass of spine-rattling suspense. Weaponizing our familiarity with horror tropes and gendered tensions, Cregger playfully ratchets up the atmosphere as Tess settles into a strange house with a strange man. With awkward politeness and a dance around who will take the bedroom and who will take the couch, every word Keith utters conveys reassurance and courtesy, but Cregger - along with DP Zach Kuperstein - uses sinister visual cues to build discomfort: There are snappy close-ups every time Tess locks a door behind her, and Keith’s shadowy figure looms in the periphery, seemingly betraying his chivalrous gestures. Barbarian’s setup is full of swerves and misdirection, all leading to an outrageous rug-pull that transmogrifies it’s narrative from a simmering thriller into a barrage of demented shocks.
In many respects, Barbarian plays much like last year’s sleeper horror hit Malignant, upending familiar genre convention with relentless savagery and an off-the-walls twist. But where James Wan escalated his ode to camp and giallo to a fever pitch, Barbarian reconfigures and widens its scope to varying degrees of success. The introduction of Justin Long’s character of AJ signals yet another left turn, giving us a secondary, much more loathsome perspective of a scuzzy actor battling sexual assault allegations. How AJ figures into the story is best kept under wraps, but Long has never been more detestable or hilarious, whose embodiment of a true root-to-fail character gives Barbarian some of its most uproarious, gruesome moments. But where Tess and Keith’s story is wielded like a scalpel, AJs arc is a cudgel that never finds any real substance within its half-baked Me Too commentary.
“In many respects, Barbarian plays much like last year’s sleeper horror hit Malignant, upending familiar genre convention with an off-the-walls twist and relentless savagery.”
Barbarian walks a thin tightrope between schlock and terror, never really losing its sense of humor: Its gross-out gags are some of the best these types of movies have to offer, which frequently found my theater alternating from anxiety-ridden chuckles to murmured gasps between its bouts of sanguine nastiness. But even with laugh-out-loud moments and characters that are only as smart or dumb as the story requires, Cregger frequently reminds us of his horror chops: Barbarian’s underground sequences are heat-seeking missiles of claustrophobia and nervous freak-outs, housing a terrifying mean streak and a full-on detour into a depraved creature feature.
It’s a shame to say that Barbarian mostly fizzles its landing, biting off much more than it can chew. A third act flashback detonates the film’s perspective yet again, this time with an 80s flashback of a mysterious stalker (Richard Brake) that aims to add color to our surprising villains, but it mostly just siphons gas from a running tank: Once Barbarian’s grotesque adversaries are fully revealed, the mystique and atmosphere buckle into less-effective splatstick. It’s a bloody denouement that tumbles through all of its disparate pieces as characters, monsters, and themes all collide in an underwhelming jumble. It barely works, but it’s hard to truly care about the missteps when the journey is so satisfyingly grisly and wild.
