Don't go in the basement
Barbarian is the kind of film whose boosters (of which I don't entirely count myself one, though I think it's a pretty easy recommendation for anyone with a more than passing interest in grotty horror-thrillers) would have it be the case that even mentioning that it has a story constitutes an unforgivable spoiler, or some such thing, and by God you had best watch it without learning one solitary thing about its content. Indeed, merely by starting this review, you have perhaps already gone too far. I find that's substantially overpraising the film's originality and unpredictability, but it is, at least, not afraid to zig and zag a bit, becoming essentially three different films as it shifts between the three acts of its marvelously non-protracted 102 minutes. I would also probably go so far as to say that each of those three different films is meaningfully worse than the one before it, which is going to start to get us to spoiler territory, so we'll put it off for now.
So, as for that first movie: Barbarian gets right into it, starting with a woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) racing from her car to the porch of a house in a terrible part of Detroit on a very dark, very rainy night. She messes about with the security box mounted next to the door, finding that it has no key, and then just a beat later, the door opens, and out peers the confused face of a man, Keith (Bill Skarsgård). We are maybe one minute into the film at this point; writer-director Zach Cregger (making his solo debut as a feature filmmaker, after a lengthy career in television comedy) is very much disinterested in fucking around, and one of the things that is obviously best about Barbarian is that it doesn't belabor anything except when slowing down and letting things come up to a slow boil is the point.
In short order, Tess and Keith determine that they've somehow managed to book the same rental property, perhaps because they used two different companies (she used Airbnb, he used one I didn't recognise the name of), and the emergency number of the property owner isn't working. They eventually come to a compromise that makes nobody terribly happy, but it's a no-win scenario: Tess will get the bedroom (with locking door), Keith will take the couch, and they'll figure this out in the morning. Thus far, a splendid little anecdote of the cost of living in the over-connected modern world, mixed with an omnipresent but happily never overstated gendered component: Keith apparently views this all as awkward but silly, while Tess views this as potentially the last night of her life before she's murdered by some psycho who fakes Airbnb reservations and acts like a socially incompetent dweeb when greeting his victims on rainy nights. The film keeps us meaningfully away from Keith, giving us just a tiny bit more information than it gives Tess, mostly just enough to let us figure out that he's not responsible for her door creaking open in the dead of night. But it still leaves plenty of horribly vague uncertainty about what this guy's deal is: the best case is that it's a nattering dimwit who's terrible at hearing what the words coming of his mouth sound like, such that even his attempts at being reassuring feel like the prattle of somebody who is for sure going to poison you, otherwise why would he be so damn eager to clarify that he's not going to poison you.
I have said that Barbarian is three films; that might have even been an underestimate. This sequence is something of a distinct film unto itself; it's the only part of the whole feature that is to a substantial degree driven by acting and dialogue, in part because it's sort of the only part of the whole feature where two characters share a scene for any length of time. Both Campbell and Skarsgård are very good in this stretch; he's got the more active role, flailing about like an idiot and making himself seem as suspicious as possible, but she's ultimately doing the more finely-tuned work, maintaining a very delicate balance between, on the one hand, feeling like enough of a personality that we know who she is as a person, and on the other hand, not making Tess such a detailed psychological actor that she overwhelms the movie around her.
For despite its feints in the direction of socially conscious horror (and it has more of these to make), Barbarian is generally less interested in "elevating" its material than crafting a pretty successful series of grubby genre shocks. And this starts to become very apparent in the second half of the first act, when Tess returns to the rental from a very promising job interview, only to get herself locked in the basement while hunting for toilet paper. Here, she finds a few very disconcerting things: first, there's a rope leading into the concrete wall that, when you pull on it, opens a mostly-invisible door; second, there's a very dark hallway behind that door; third, there's a room with a filthy, blood-splattered mattress, a few blood handprints on the bare walls, and a video camera at the end of that hallway. this freaks Tess out good and well, and when Keith returns and lets her out of the basement, she's ready to get the hell out and find literally any other conceivable lodging. Keith wants to see the room for himself, though, and of course he doesn't come back upstairs, so after a very miserable moment of contemplation, Tess steels herself to go into that dark hallway again to look for him.
This entire third of Barbarian is pretty much a flawless suspense machine, working in every possible direction. That first night, Cregger lines us up perfectly with Tess's deeply uncomfortable suspicions of Keith's intentions, and then he manages the even better trick of making him feel like a welcome, safe presence compared to that unholy darkness, while also leaving the possibility all the way wide open that he's just playing her this whole time (and really, there's nothing other than genre convention to ever encourage us to trust him; it's unlikely that the shady guy from the first act would turn out to be actually dangerous. But the characters can't know that). It's a sequence almost solely dedicated to narrative empty spaces, the unbearable tension of waiting: waiting for Keith to snap and go all axe-crazy, waiting for whatever we just barely missed seeing go into the basement to show up in that dark hallway. Zach Kuperstein, the director of photography, fearlessly cuts the light down as low as he can and still get shots; it's a dark dark hallway, and even the bland bourgeois trimmings of the house upstairs look pretty horrific and ominous when they're just navy blue shadows in the night scenes.
That whole first third is absolutely terrific, right up until it crescendos and ends on the same punctuation mark, an abrupt cut to black followed by a cut to an image that is, at least, wholly incongruous (it was, for what it's worth, the one place where the film caught me entirely off-guard). And then we get the middle third of Barbarian, followed as it must be by the last third, and I don't think it ever completely gets back to those early heights. For one thing, we have a new story, built around a new main character, AJ (Justin Long), and it's sort of too much story, especially since Cregger obviously doesn't care about the social commentary he's seemingly trying to kick start at this point (or worse: he does care, and he's just not very good at handling it). There are some metaphorical dovetails between all three acts of Barbarian, but not ones that really "do" anything; it's a movie that you could accurately say is "about" the dangers men represent to women, in three different registers, but it's not about that, and the first long stretch of AJ's plot is where that's most damaging. Before too very long, his plot connects up with Tess and Keith's and right about the time it does, we get the third act, which hits the customary "now that we know exactly what's going on, it's less mysterious and thus less spooky and good" threshold that has felled so many horror movies. Barbarian still manages to be a good time even in its most flat-footed scenes, largely because of the quality of the acting - I can with great sincerity declare that I've never liked Long doing anything more than his performance as a sad little weasel here - and because Kuperstein (whose sleek black and white cinematoraphy in the 2016 film The Eyes of My Mother remains, to me, one of the great unheralded triumphs of stylish horror in modern times) doesn't magically forget how to light night and basement scenes just because the content of those scenes gets a bit more pedestrian. And the film does have some great moves in its second half: a pretty terrific flashback filmed in full-frame with extremely wide lenses, one hell of a good jump scare, an ending that swoops in at the earliest possibly millisecond.
Also, blessed be its name, Barbarian is a really mean film. Not "unpleasant" - in fact, doubtlessly owing to his comedy background, Cregger includes quite a remarkable amount of humor in the film as it goes along, though very little in that first third - but the reveal of what's going on in that basement is pretty damn distressing to contemplate, and the film makes sure it stays that way by never giving us the pressure release of actually showing it to us; we just get to think it (this happens most explicitly when we see AJ's face sink as he watches a videotape that we, very effectively, are not shown). It's got a grubby, filthy soul, Barbarian does, and it earns its R rating with aplomb; I wouldn't go so far as to say it feels properly "unsafe", but it comes a lot closer than I would have expected likely, and it's all very scuzzy - stylistically and narratively - in a way that feels very, very right for a September horror movie.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
So, as for that first movie: Barbarian gets right into it, starting with a woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) racing from her car to the porch of a house in a terrible part of Detroit on a very dark, very rainy night. She messes about with the security box mounted next to the door, finding that it has no key, and then just a beat later, the door opens, and out peers the confused face of a man, Keith (Bill Skarsgård). We are maybe one minute into the film at this point; writer-director Zach Cregger (making his solo debut as a feature filmmaker, after a lengthy career in television comedy) is very much disinterested in fucking around, and one of the things that is obviously best about Barbarian is that it doesn't belabor anything except when slowing down and letting things come up to a slow boil is the point.
In short order, Tess and Keith determine that they've somehow managed to book the same rental property, perhaps because they used two different companies (she used Airbnb, he used one I didn't recognise the name of), and the emergency number of the property owner isn't working. They eventually come to a compromise that makes nobody terribly happy, but it's a no-win scenario: Tess will get the bedroom (with locking door), Keith will take the couch, and they'll figure this out in the morning. Thus far, a splendid little anecdote of the cost of living in the over-connected modern world, mixed with an omnipresent but happily never overstated gendered component: Keith apparently views this all as awkward but silly, while Tess views this as potentially the last night of her life before she's murdered by some psycho who fakes Airbnb reservations and acts like a socially incompetent dweeb when greeting his victims on rainy nights. The film keeps us meaningfully away from Keith, giving us just a tiny bit more information than it gives Tess, mostly just enough to let us figure out that he's not responsible for her door creaking open in the dead of night. But it still leaves plenty of horribly vague uncertainty about what this guy's deal is: the best case is that it's a nattering dimwit who's terrible at hearing what the words coming of his mouth sound like, such that even his attempts at being reassuring feel like the prattle of somebody who is for sure going to poison you, otherwise why would he be so damn eager to clarify that he's not going to poison you.
I have said that Barbarian is three films; that might have even been an underestimate. This sequence is something of a distinct film unto itself; it's the only part of the whole feature that is to a substantial degree driven by acting and dialogue, in part because it's sort of the only part of the whole feature where two characters share a scene for any length of time. Both Campbell and Skarsgård are very good in this stretch; he's got the more active role, flailing about like an idiot and making himself seem as suspicious as possible, but she's ultimately doing the more finely-tuned work, maintaining a very delicate balance between, on the one hand, feeling like enough of a personality that we know who she is as a person, and on the other hand, not making Tess such a detailed psychological actor that she overwhelms the movie around her.
For despite its feints in the direction of socially conscious horror (and it has more of these to make), Barbarian is generally less interested in "elevating" its material than crafting a pretty successful series of grubby genre shocks. And this starts to become very apparent in the second half of the first act, when Tess returns to the rental from a very promising job interview, only to get herself locked in the basement while hunting for toilet paper. Here, she finds a few very disconcerting things: first, there's a rope leading into the concrete wall that, when you pull on it, opens a mostly-invisible door; second, there's a very dark hallway behind that door; third, there's a room with a filthy, blood-splattered mattress, a few blood handprints on the bare walls, and a video camera at the end of that hallway. this freaks Tess out good and well, and when Keith returns and lets her out of the basement, she's ready to get the hell out and find literally any other conceivable lodging. Keith wants to see the room for himself, though, and of course he doesn't come back upstairs, so after a very miserable moment of contemplation, Tess steels herself to go into that dark hallway again to look for him.
This entire third of Barbarian is pretty much a flawless suspense machine, working in every possible direction. That first night, Cregger lines us up perfectly with Tess's deeply uncomfortable suspicions of Keith's intentions, and then he manages the even better trick of making him feel like a welcome, safe presence compared to that unholy darkness, while also leaving the possibility all the way wide open that he's just playing her this whole time (and really, there's nothing other than genre convention to ever encourage us to trust him; it's unlikely that the shady guy from the first act would turn out to be actually dangerous. But the characters can't know that). It's a sequence almost solely dedicated to narrative empty spaces, the unbearable tension of waiting: waiting for Keith to snap and go all axe-crazy, waiting for whatever we just barely missed seeing go into the basement to show up in that dark hallway. Zach Kuperstein, the director of photography, fearlessly cuts the light down as low as he can and still get shots; it's a dark dark hallway, and even the bland bourgeois trimmings of the house upstairs look pretty horrific and ominous when they're just navy blue shadows in the night scenes.
That whole first third is absolutely terrific, right up until it crescendos and ends on the same punctuation mark, an abrupt cut to black followed by a cut to an image that is, at least, wholly incongruous (it was, for what it's worth, the one place where the film caught me entirely off-guard). And then we get the middle third of Barbarian, followed as it must be by the last third, and I don't think it ever completely gets back to those early heights. For one thing, we have a new story, built around a new main character, AJ (Justin Long), and it's sort of too much story, especially since Cregger obviously doesn't care about the social commentary he's seemingly trying to kick start at this point (or worse: he does care, and he's just not very good at handling it). There are some metaphorical dovetails between all three acts of Barbarian, but not ones that really "do" anything; it's a movie that you could accurately say is "about" the dangers men represent to women, in three different registers, but it's not about that, and the first long stretch of AJ's plot is where that's most damaging. Before too very long, his plot connects up with Tess and Keith's and right about the time it does, we get the third act, which hits the customary "now that we know exactly what's going on, it's less mysterious and thus less spooky and good" threshold that has felled so many horror movies. Barbarian still manages to be a good time even in its most flat-footed scenes, largely because of the quality of the acting - I can with great sincerity declare that I've never liked Long doing anything more than his performance as a sad little weasel here - and because Kuperstein (whose sleek black and white cinematoraphy in the 2016 film The Eyes of My Mother remains, to me, one of the great unheralded triumphs of stylish horror in modern times) doesn't magically forget how to light night and basement scenes just because the content of those scenes gets a bit more pedestrian. And the film does have some great moves in its second half: a pretty terrific flashback filmed in full-frame with extremely wide lenses, one hell of a good jump scare, an ending that swoops in at the earliest possibly millisecond.
Also, blessed be its name, Barbarian is a really mean film. Not "unpleasant" - in fact, doubtlessly owing to his comedy background, Cregger includes quite a remarkable amount of humor in the film as it goes along, though very little in that first third - but the reveal of what's going on in that basement is pretty damn distressing to contemplate, and the film makes sure it stays that way by never giving us the pressure release of actually showing it to us; we just get to think it (this happens most explicitly when we see AJ's face sink as he watches a videotape that we, very effectively, are not shown). It's got a grubby, filthy soul, Barbarian does, and it earns its R rating with aplomb; I wouldn't go so far as to say it feels properly "unsafe", but it comes a lot closer than I would have expected likely, and it's all very scuzzy - stylistically and narratively - in a way that feels very, very right for a September horror movie.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
