REVIEW: Barbarian’s Subdued Exterior Hides A Gory Subterranean Freakout
Viewers expecting a typical Airbnb thriller will be in for a shock
by Josh Lewis
(NOTE: Mild spoilers after the fourth paragraph. You’ve been warned!)
Much like last year’s big-swing genre shocker Malignant—a film that pretended to be yet another modern, polished haunted house trauma movie before exploding into an action-movie version of Italian horror or a Frank Henenlotter conjoined-creature splatter movie—Barbarian, the sophomore effort from writer-director Zach Creggar (of sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ Know, following the same comedy-to-horror-director career path as Jordan Peele), impressively sidesteps its satirical Airbnb-thriller premise for a genuinely gnarly piece of subterranean horror that harkens back to legends like Sam Raimi, Wes Craven, and Stuart Gordon, and at a certain point resembles the type of lean, nasty movie that might have come out in the torture porn era.
On a stormy night before a big job interview, Tess (Georgina Campbell) pulls up late to her Detroit Airbnb rental—but in the first of many subversions to come, she finds the lockbox empty and the lights already on inside. The renters have double-booked the cute little house on an ominously rundown block to Keith (Bill Skarsgård), a charming stranger who excessively signals his chivalrous upbringing by immediately offering Tess the bedroom and a glass of wine (from a bottle he ensures hasn’t been spiked by offering to open it in front of her). What begins as a night of fear and suspicion slowly melts away into a rainy meet-cute evening of putting on fresh duvet covers—but it’s not long before Tess and Keith (having successfully evaded the domestic, gendered-thriller premise the film briefly flirts with) realize that there’s a lot more square footage to their rental than was advertised.
To reveal much more would be a detriment to the carefully-calibrated experience of watching Barbarian unfold, which Creggar (perhaps relying on his comic background) crafts with a clever alternating dynamic of elaborate sleight-of-hand set-up and sudden, primal, destabilizing genre shocks. In the early altercations especially, Creggar and his cinematographer Zach Kuperstein opt for a sleekly rendered subjectivity of observational glances and inserts that tell a familiar story of women having to be on edge and scanning constantly for predatory intent in what for men would just be an innocuous accident. There’s a visual focus, for example, on Tess always locking the door behind her when she turns her back on Keith, which is skillfully weaponized against the audience in preparation for the one moment she forgets to do it. That sense of build-up and escalation eventually becomes so gleefully ridiculous that any unassuming midnight audience will find themselves yelling at the characters in a series of tense call-and-response setpieces that take this unbalanced situation of gender dynamics into a literal, historical hell.
Suddenly, a movie that’s been focused on psychological micro-dynamics enters the realm of crushed skulls and gouged eyes.
Those concerned about spoilers should likely stop reading here and simply go watch the film—because it’s now time to talk a bit exactly what works beneath Barbarian‘s surface. Tess, like all great and terrible final girls before her, goes into the basement of the rental house and (as one does) discovers a decades-old catacomb of rusty cages, stained torture chambers, and a genuinely hilarious number of trap doors. With this development, the movie reshapes itself into a much weirder beast that I can only describe as occupying the intersection of the neighborhood satire / intruder horror of The People Under the Stairs (1991) and the bad-taste, gory monster horror of Castle Freak (1995), with Creggar making great visual use of low-lit perspective imagery and slick wide-angle lens camera moves to observe every piece of the filthy and decaying production design his team has cooked up. The level of texture to the film’s monster lair as we are forced to trudge deeper and deeper is some of the best you’ll see outside of Tobe Hooper’s underrated Toolbox Murders remake from 2004.
And just as Hooper took a seedy history of Hollywood exploitation and abuse in that film and rendered it into a sticky and tangible late-slasher, suddenly a movie that was operating in sparring matches of psychological micro-dynamics is now in the realm of crushed skulls and gouged eyes.
It’s a physical horror that the film makes clear stems from a history of sexual violence; both the modern Hollywood #MeToo variety—as personified through the introduction of the Airbnb renter AJ (Justin Long), who is quick to act out of a monstrously slimy and pathetic self-interest at any given moment, such as a hysterical scene of him discovering the dungeon and pulling out a measuring tape to see how much square footage it adds to his property—and the old-school 80s serial killer kind, with a late-in-the-game appearance by the always-welcome Richard Brake as Frank, who gets an extended flashback sequence depicting the inception of this dungeon that dexterously replicates the wide-angle craning and lurching camera maneuvers of Angst (1983), a film well-known for unbearably capturing the psychology and logistical procedure of serial murder in uncompromising and close proximity.
It will be up to the individual viewer to decide whether Creggar’s thrilling sense of poor taste when it comes to gruesomely ratcheting up setpieces adds value to the film’s serious ideas about the psychic landscape women navigate, or if it just overwhelms them. But there’s a certain level of unabashed sicko pleasure the film takes in its grisly violence and gendered reversals (including a breast-feeding scene that combines the two) that aims admirably for the cathartic revenge heights of Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999)—and even if it doesn’t quite reach them, it’s impressive to see that level of ambitious craft and genre extremity from a studio horror movie.
Barbarian is just the right amount of calculated and comical, with a good feel for narrative and psychological accumulation. If nothing else, we might have a real-deal, show-your-unsuspecting-friends midnight movie banger on our hands… as well as a new Mother’s Day classic. (You’ll see.)
Josh Lewis is a freelance film critic with writing at The Film Stage and Cinema Scope, a former movie theater programmer, and host of the genre and exploitation double feature movie podcast SLEAZOIDS.
