OnScreen Review: "Barbarian"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
In this hyperconnected world with nearly unlimited access to everything, it’s nearly impossible to go into a movie blind as trailers, Rotten Tomato meters, and social media spoilers abound. While I consume trailers for big blockbuster events and puzzle over what the clips could mean, with some movies I try my best to avoid as much of the promotion around them as I can, and the horror genre is in that category because often the less you know about them going in the better. I managed to only see one trailer for Barbarian recently in front of another movie I went to see, and while it hinted at what the movie was about, it did not fully prepare me for this cinematic horror experience.
The setup for the film is a completely modern premise of a double-booked AirBnB. Tess (Georgina Campbell) has booked a stay in a mostly abandoned suburb on the outskirts of Detroit, on the cusp of a job interview, but she finds Keith (Bill Skarsgård) is already staying there, having booked the same place through another service. The small house sticks out like a sore thumb in the run down, abandoned area; a nicely maintained house surrounded by dilapidated buildings. It turns out that there is more to the house and their unfortunate booking circumstance than meets the eye, and, through some innocuous sequence of events, the hidden secrets of the house are revealed through an extended flashback and expanded upon through an odd connection to a Hollywood film producer named AJ (Justin Long) experiencing his own #MeToo moment.
Tess’ stranger danger instinct is immediately up with Keith, who is also seemingly aware of his appearances in the situation. He offers Tess tea and, alternatively, wine as a kind gesture in an awkward situation, and it eventually dawns on him why Tess would be reluctant to take a prepared drink, made unobserved, from someone she doesn’t know. The film does a fantastic job of throwing out all the possible warning signs that Tess should have her guard up and that Keith is being almost too chivalric in his behavior and keeps you guessing about whether or not is a misdirect the whole time.
Right at the moment Barbarian finally shows it hand, it immediately shuffles the deck by jumping the story from Detroit to Los Angeles and Justin Long’s AJ gets an extended sequence where his story is introduced and integrated; it is a complete tonal shift that makes you wonder how it is connected to what you’ve seen so far and what is happening with Tess and the dangling threads of her storyline. Long’s AJ is a man with a lot of blind spots in his attitude and perception of his own actions. Like the house in Detroit, there are levels and layers to AJ and how he is grappling with his own self-delusion and whether he is rotten down to the core or if he is maybe a good guy who might have done one bad thing. I think there is an interesting dialogue of compare and contrast going on between AJ’s story and the third tonal shift of the movie that involves a flashback.
Another aspect of the film that I really appreciated was that of apathy and disinterest as a being a stand in for sinister forces; or to put it another way, that apathy, disinterest, and other things that contribute to urban decay allow for sinister forces to do their work. This comes through in a few different areas, but most obviously in the management company that owns the house and their mismanagement of the property, but also the police and their reaction to the Tess in a moment where she reaches out for help.
The only drawbacks are that the film sometimes relies a bit too much on convenient horror atmospherics and tropes as misdirects or to push the story forward, like doors inexplicably opening on their own for no apparent reason and the superhuman strength and apparent invulnerability of human monsters. But the cohesive whole of the film is so good that these are easily forgivable minor complaints.
Apologies for having to write about this movie in code and in a sphynx-like manner, but Barbarian is a horror film that has a lot of levels and layers and twisted reveals, so it is the kind of movie you can’t get into too much depth about for fear of giving away too much. It is a truly unnerving, unsettling horror movie that has a unique pace and tenor and the jumps in tone from Tess to AJ and to the flashback all work and paint the picture of a terrific horror story.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars