It's Barbaric

I wasn't intending to write about Barbarian. I knew it had plenty of attention when it came out, and didn't think I had much to add to a conversation that seemed played out. But a day or two went by after I finished the movie where I found myself so frustrated that it seemed like I should hit the laptop to figure out why.

Quick Plot: Tess arrives at her Detroit suburb Airbnb in the middle of a rainy night to a surprise: it's already been occupied by Keith, an awkward but pleasant tall drink of water. With a convention in town and big job interview the next day, Tess's limited options overpower her logical intuition that this could be a very dangerous situation.

I'm going to go into full spoilery detail on Barbarian so stop now if you're planning to watch the movie fresh (in the States, it's currently available on HBO Max). I ultimately have a lot of mixed feelings for the film, but it does enough new things that I'd say any horror fan should check it out.

Onward we go.

The easy part: the first thirty or so minutes of Barbarian are a worthy horror movie on their own. Georgina Campbell does tremendous work showing us how Tess is thinking through every decision in a tense situation, and Bill Skarsgard toes the perfect line between handsome stranger and potential murderer. We simply don't know what kind of movie we're in.

When Tess (and we) see this neighborhood in daylight, it's a new reveal, and one that makes a great contrast with the next one: the house's subterranean torture chamber. 

And here's where I roll my eyes for the first time.

A soiled mattress and a video camera. Gee, I wonder what went on there. Briefly, my hopes get raised as Tess goes deeper and writer/director Zach Cregger demonstrates some more fundamental horror filmmaking skills: the jump scare. It's a great one! I'm in!

Now Barbarian takes its biggest swing, changing our point of view to Justin Long's AJ, a disgraced, insufferable actor who just so happens to own the property where Tess went missing some weeks earlier. Cregger leans into the tonal shift and Long is certainly up for the task. He's positively odious, but also incredibly watchable, even when making absolutely terrible decisions. 

So far, so good. Where Barbarian lost me was the reveals of its two sources of horror: a typical horror movie rapist with incredible engineering skills, and a monstrous feminine creature played by someone who maybe doesn't belong in the suit. 

I'll address the second point first, as it’s more a recent pet peeve. Male actors have portrayed female monsters for decades, and from a certain filmmaking standpoint, I'm sure it makes perfect sense. Maybe it's because it's the one aspect of Ti West's X that really left me feeling off as well (having young and beautiful Mia Goth play the old Pearl, a character whose homicidal motivation springs from the fact that she's absolutely NOT young and beautiful). But yes, to have yet another extremely cisgender heterosexual male director create a grotesque female horror villain out of a performer who doesn't fit that mold...it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Like X, I could have looked past this decision and still felt good about Barbarian's strong points. But then the film had to do that THING.

You know the THING. You're a horror fan! You've been seeing it your whole life, but over the last fifteen years or so, it somehow feels like it's gotten more ubiquitous. Specifically, the new trend of "when in doubt, it's a dude who's elaborately imprisoning women in his basement." 

You could probably draw a timeline to the Josef Fritzl case, which became public in 2008 (the same year Pascal Laugier's Martyrs took French extremity into similar territory). Since then, it feels like horror movies that use sexual violence in their plotting have SPECIFICALLY decided the easiest way to work it in is to have the rapist be the kind of architectural genius who can build a functional torture chamber on his own. 

To what end? Barbarian is such an interesting film for so much of its running time that to rely on this tired trope of a serial rapist feels like such a ridiculously lazy decision. What do we get out of the character of Frank, an incredibly vile man who’s committed atrocious acts only to die on his own terms, while his “daughter” is a pained creature taking on the Frankenstein’s monster role? 

I’m a lifelong horror fan, which means I’ve spent decades with stories that rely on men doing terrible things to women. I’ve marathoned so many episodes of Law & Order: SVU that I can identify the season by Olivia Benson’s haircut. I GET that these kinds of storylines work, but there’s something about Barbarian’s use of it that feels so carelessly gratuitous. I had similar feelings with Slasher’s first season dungeon reveal and how Don’t Breathe handled its insemination. 

There are so many stories to tell, and Barbarian has a new one! And yet, for some reason, Cregger felt like he had to a rely on this to serve as the underlying basis for what otherwise would be a fresh and exciting tale. 

It’s a disappointment.

High Points

I’m sure many viewers found themselves screaming at Tess’s poor decision making, but I actually really appreciate the idea of showing us what a genuinely good person might do when faced with the choice of saving their own life or fighting for a stranger. It’s believable (at least to me) and makes the flip flopping of AJ that much more interesting

Low Points

Aforementioned major issues

Lessons Learned

Hell hath no fury like just outside the city of Detroit

For the sake of nice people like Tess and Keith, please leave brutally honest reviews on vacation rental sites

Dungeons do not officially count towards the square footage of a home on a standard real estate listing

Rent/Bury/Buy

Well, here I said I wasn’t going to write about Barbarian only to crank out more words on this one than several write-ups combined. Make of that what you will. This is a well-made genre film, with plenty of tension and humor that works REALLY well. I can’t not recommend it, but maybe the fact that it comes so close to being so good is what makes its faults that much worse.