Barbarian (2022)

directed by Zach Cregger

USA

103 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm fairly certain that this is still in theaters as of the time of this writing, and the only thing I've seen anybody say about it is that it's "good but overhyped". I've somehow managed to avoid 100% of whatever hype for this is out there, so I'm not sure what the overall response has been, and I'm not sure if I'll be going against the grain when I say that keeping myself in the dark for this made me see it as a really excellent, unexpected horror film. I would highly recommend not looking at reviews or even watching trailers if you're planning on seeing this.

We start out thinking we probably know where the story is going: A woman arrives at her Airbnb to find it's been double-booked, and although us viewers have alarm bells going off about the whole situation, after some deliberation she decides to stay in the house anyway with the man who had already been renting it out. The casting of Bill Skarsgård in this role as well as his name being fairly highly billed was a great choice, because we've seen him be incredibly creepy so many times that we may, perhaps subconsciously, be expecting to see him be creepy again. Little things are off about the house itself, besides the obvious risk of a single woman staying in the same house as an unfamiliar man, and at any minute it seems likely to crescendo into the reveal of him as a killer. It also, strangely, seems like we might be headed for a meet-somewhat-less-than-cute scenario, as the two temporary cohabitators are actually having a nice time and getting to like each other, but it's hard to tell if this is deliberate misdirection or not. All we know is that something is wrong about the house, and although we think we know from genre conventions what it is, we can't be certain - until we are.

In short, what this movie does and why it is so effective is that it presents us with situations where our nerves are instinctually on edge, like seeing a single woman and a strange man together, and then it says "Oh no, you thought that was what you had to be afraid of?" It's not so much that it leads the viewer towards thinking the wrong thing, with red herrings or false starts; it's more that it makes us feel like we're already unsafe and then shows us that things can always get worse. Like, you trap a spider in a jar and then look slightly to your left and there's an even bigger spider, and you only have one jar.

Barbarian is also incredibly good at establishing a creepy atmosphere by reeling things out so slowly and with such care for pacing that I could almost imagine the plot as a physical line that kept branching out further and further. And further and further and further. Nothing whatsoever is as it seems in this film, there's always an underground beneath the underground, always something worse no matter how bad things have already gotten. As we see the main character descend into the space beneath her rental, the sense of unease mounts and mounts until it's almost unbearable. She just keeps finding more doors and passageways and it would almost be funny if it wasn't so thoroughly terrifying - it's labyrinthine, this cavernous space under the house, and like many, many things in the film it implies a length of time spent down there that only gets more disturbing the longer you think about it. One of the scariest moments in the film for me wasn't even a moment where anything bad was happening - it's when Tess is exploring the tunnels with only very scant light to guide her, and Keith, who she's gone in after, suddenly comes crawling out of the dark on all fours. Again, he's actually the one in trouble, there's nothing sinister about him in the end, but seeing something that wasn't immediately identifiable as moving like a person made me almost jump out of my chair. And then when he says that they have to get out because something "bit me" - just awful. That's about where things start taking a sharp downward turn and don't stop.

I wanted to call this movie "relentless", but the truth of it is that it does quite frequently relent, and that's why it works so well. There are three major transitions over the running time of the film, and each time, the sudden shift into something completely different is so jarring that it feels like whiplash. We go from the absolute depths, a dark and horrible cavern where goodness and light go to die, to watching some chucklehead singing in his fancy roll-top car. The timing is comedic, but in the moment it doesn't feel comedic; all we can think of is what we saw just moments ago. This happens again closer to the end of the film, when we get to see some backstory on the house, which leads me to another thing I thought was really impressive about Barbarian: That it does the same thing over and over and manages not to feel stale. It never lets us get used to things becoming steadily worse. I had the pleasure of seeing Hereditary in theaters when it first came out and I remember feeling the same way during that as I did during this; I actually laughed out loud at one point because I was just thinking "How much worse can it get?"

I think it's also important to note that this is not a strictly realistic movie, and I don't think it was trying to be. It has the trappings of the horror genre and it dials up the intensity on many things that simply would not be that way in real life (I.E. I don't think inbred people actually look like that, nor can they rip people's heads open with their bare hands). It's good that it does these things, it's good that it puts us in these situations that beggar belief, because when a horror movie is not going to involve supernatural events, it sometimes feels like it has to lean more towards gritty realism, and more often than not the end product is a movie that is just gory and brutal but not scary, not creepy. This is all of those things and it's even a little funny, in a dark way. It's not content to have viewers sympathize with Tess, who as far as we know is entirely innocent, it also has to give us A.J., the aforementioned chucklehead(/rapist), who we really kind of hope gets dragged off into the darkness while he obliviously tries to figure out if he can include the chud tunnel under his house as extra square footage. Again, I really don't know what most people think of this, so I could be making myself look foolish by having enjoyed it and been so receptive to its twists and turns while everybody else is calling it lazy and uncreative, but I genuinely thought this was a great film. As a last note, the title makes a whole lot of sense if you know the supposed etymology of the word "Barbarian", and I thought that was a brilliant small touch as well.

Actually, there is one last thing I want to talk about, and it happens at the very end of the film. I just thought that there was a very compelling parallel between how A.J. keeps invoking excuses like "I had no choice! It was me or you!" to justify actions that he takes where there is indeed a choice [the choice to not be a massive asshole] and what Tess has to do to defend herself. Her act was a real case of "me or you". If the film has been successful at impressing the horror of what was going on beneath the Airbnb on its viewers, then they really should feel at least some kind of sympathetic response to Tess' attacker. I think there's a real deep tragedy in having no choice other than to kill someone who is so far beyond being culpable for their actions due to the circumstances of their birth and life.