USA. 2022.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Zach Cregger, Producers – Roy Lee, A.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules & Arnon Milchan, Photography – Zack Kuperstein, Music – Anna Drubich, Visual Effects – Barnstrom VFX (Supervisor – Bill Parker), Mr. Wolf (Supervisor – Danny Yoon) & Neon Robotic (Supervisor – Nathan Weiner), Special Effects Supervisor – Yovko Dogandzijski, Makeup Effects – Lyudmil Ivanov, Production Design – Rossitsa Bakeva. Production Company – Borderlight Pictures/Vertigo Entertainment.
Cast
Georgina Campbell (Tess Marshall), Bill Skarsgård (Keith Toshko), Justin Long (AJ Gilbride), Matthew Patrick Davis (The Mother), Richard Brake (Frank), Jaymes Butler (Andre), Sophie Sorenson (Bonnie), Kurt Braunohler (Doug), Derek Morse (Officer #1), Trevor Van Uden (Officer #2)
Plot
Tess Marshall arrives at an AirBNB in Detroit so that she can attend a job interview the next day. However, due to a booking mix-up, she finds the house is already rented out to another tenant Keith Toshko. He invites her to stay and they connect. The next day, Tess hears noises in the cellar and enters to find a series of tunnels and then a room where somebody has evidently been tortured and it filmed. Sometime later, the house’s owner, actor AJ Gilbride, leaves Hollywood after his career implodes following sexual allegations. He returns to the house in Detroit, intending to liquidate some of his properties, only to encounter what is in the basement.
Barbarian comes as part of a spate of films we have had in the last couple of years about AirBNB rentals. See also the likes of Cats Kill (2017), Tone-Deaf (2019), H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020), The Rental (2020), Sacrilege (2020), Superhost (2021) and Mid-Century (2022).
Barbarian comes from director/writer Zach Cregger. Cregger began in the late 1990s as a member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, which later became the basis of a tv series The Whitest Kids U’ Know (2007-11). In between this, Cregger directed and wrote two non-genre comedy films with Miss March (2009) and The Civil War on Drugs (2011).
Barbarian has been getting some of the best reviews of any horror film released in 2022. It is also proof positive of the reasons why I make a point of not reading other reviews or almost anything about a film other than a minimal description of what it is about before watching,. The reason being that reading anything tends to influence your own opinion. If others are claiming a work as worthwhile and praising or condemning it, you go in already preconditioned to do so yourself and begin judging and adjusting your views in comparison to match what you expect.
Remember when massive successes like Titanic (1997) or Avatar (2009) came out, which were then followed by anti-reviews calling them a massive letdown and boring, even the Worst Film of the Year etc? The problem being that massive word of mouth robbed people of being able to discover what one of these works had to offer for themselves and these viewers weren’t entering it fresh but already mentally expecting something and the experience was not one of discovery but more about having to align with groupthink.
This word of mouth here took the ability to experience Barbarian away from me. I ended up finding it an okay film with some original touches, a good many familiar ones and a couple of jumps but not really anything that comes anywhere near denting my Top 10 of the Year list. What we get is another AirBNB horror. This is combined with the familiar trope from a certain older form of horror film of the mad relative in the attic/cellar as seen in the likes of The Black Torment (1964), The Shuttered Room (1967), The Beast in the Cellar (1970) and The Unseen (1981).
Zach Cregger proves a reasonable director. There is an undeniable dread generated with all the wandering down into dark tunnels and narrow confined spaces with ominous revelations of bloodied cages and of Bill Skarsgård’s distant cries of help. And there are moments where Cregger produces jumps with the unexpected appearances of figures and surprise attacks that jolt you out of your complacency. There is definitely a very original monster and Cregger creates some undeniably perverse image of the giant mother forcing Justin Long to suckle at her breast.
The story is told in a series of different chapters almost, which approach events from different angles, abruptly throwing you in with a new character each time and then leaving you wondering how this connects up to everything else. This is unusual, although I think that What Josiah Saw (2021), which I saw earlier in the year, does a far better job at this type of chapter-structured storytelling. There isn’t a whole lot of clarification about what is going on, or even how the flashbacks to Richard Brake in the 1980s scenes fit in to everything else, although Jaymes Butler does offer a brief explanation that makes sense of it all fairly late in the game.
The film features some solid performances. Bill Skarsgård has been identified with the horror genre ever since playing Pennywise in It (2017) and sequel – here he actually has one of his most normal roles as just a regular guy, which you expect to turn out to be something more, but turns out to be … just an ordinary guy. Justin Long takes on a role that can be best described as a brave one. The pleasure of the film is that often it jerks the carpet out from us in terms of our sympathies with the characters, or places the sympathy with an unlikeable character.
In the end though, I felt as though Barbarian was an okay variation on some familiar tropes – the mad relative in the cellar, the sinister AirBNB. It produces some okay jumps but nothing exceptional. I just wonder how I would have thought about all of this if I hadn’t come to the film with all the build-up there beforehand.
Trailer here