Barbarian came straight out of the mind of Zach Cregger, who is also behind Weapons.
Ideally, you should dive into this movie without any prior knowledge; that will be the best way to experience it.
If you haven’t seen it yet or any trailers, drop everything you’re doing and watch it before you get spoiled.
All set? Can we move on to the review? Haha.
For a job interview, a young woman books an Airbnb, but upon arrival, it’s already occupied. Unable to book anywhere else, she decides to spend the night there anyway with the stranger.
It’s only the next day that things take a turn for the worse…
I remained vague here, but splitting the film into several parts is absolutely brilliant. It goes from a legitimate fear of stranger danger to pure nightmare fuel.
The three faces of male entitlement
What I love most about Barbarian is that we have three male protagonists with varying degrees of sensitivity towards the opposite sex. From Keith, whom we instinctively distrust (especially played by Bill Skarsgård, our new Pennywise), during their first encounter, who has to justify his every single one of his actions to reassure Tess, we move on to Justin Long, who is adored in the film industry and always plays a victim, but who here plays a rapist who hides behind his own excuses…
Then we finally meet the worst of them all, the one who has been kidnapping, imprisoning, and raping young women in his basement all along. He’s responsible for everything in this movie, and he’ll face absolutely no consequences for his actions… because, remaining in absolute control, he ends up killing himself. On his tape collection, when he didn’t catch one of the victims’ names, he wrote disgusting details instead.
On one of them, you can read, for example, “Wouldn’t stop crying.”
He’s as vile as it gets. He’s very naturally played by Richard Brake, whom we’ve already seen in Rob Zombie’s 3 from Hell and 31, but also in Doom. He’s mostly known for playing assholes, so no real surprise here.
Meta humor and shit buckets
The movie also has a very meta sense of humor. Given the violent themes at play, you wouldn’t necessarily expect the overall tone to lean so heavily towards comedy, and yet… it works out amazingly!
The abrupt tone shift between Tess’s capture and the introduction of AJ (Justin Long’s character) already breaks the tension considerably, but the most visual part is the discovery of the basement…
As women, we have a natural apprehension to going into places where anything could happen to us. We’re aware of the danger from very early on. The discovery of the “torture bedroom” is a perfect example of this. It even has a shit bucket. While Keith pushed towards the stairs without considering the consequences, Tess stayed back, knowing what it meant. Meanwhile, AJ… went back upstairs to get his tape measurer to see how much this new space could be worth, completely ignoring the red flags in the process! Where even the mother’s character recoiled at the approach of Richard Brake’s character’s room, AJ pressed on, believing he would find salvation there, without a second thought.
Subtleties of reality vs. horror
It’s rare in a horror movie to see the subtleties linked to the reality women face every day. AJ primarily represents men who sometimes commit atrocities but won’t take any responsibility for the consequences, yet feel entitled to judge those who do worse, hiding behind a sense of legitimacy and justice. However, as soon as the tide turns against him again, he sacrifices another woman, immediately absolving himself of guilt. The eternal victim syndrome. The typical white straight male experience.
The ending is very divisive, and I understand why. I haven’t even addressed the discrimination Tess faced because it’s not really my place to discuss this topic, but if we picture what happens next for her character, it doesn’t bode well when she has to turn to the authorities again. Having been shot and all.
The mother’s character is also a victim, even though she’s the film’s main antagonist. Her intentions were good, and we don’t know the atrocities she must have endured at the hands of Brake’s character, but that’s a difficult conversation to have when bringing up this topic…
A harsh victory
I would have liked to see Justin Long’s character survive and face the consequences of his actions… All of them.
But you and I both know that he’s famous, young, and white, and that the script would unfortunately have backfired on Tess in the world we currently live in. The harsh reality is far more unpleasant than any imagined script out there. All in all, Cregger scored a huge victory with this little gem of the genre.
My rating : 4.5/5 bats
🦇🦇🦇🦇🍼
(Picture a half-eaten bat here, the emojis won’t let me do it)