Balancing themes of female intuition and rage with laugh-out-loud moments, Barbarian is exactly as satisfying as horror fans have hoped. Eliza Janssen checks out its basement against her better judgement.
Barbarian (2022)
I haven’t been to a film in quite some time that elicited the audience reaction Barbarian did: groans of “you’re not seriously going back in there?”, nervous laughs, and one poor lad shrieking at the top of his lungs about 20 minutes in.
That’s the sign of something special. And for the last, agonising month since Zach Cregger’s debut feature came out in the US, horror audiences everywhere else in the world have been hoping for just that. With its distinctly structured, surprising story and meaty mystery, Barbarian totally satisfies.
One of the most promising early shots comes after strangers Tess (Georgina Campbell) and Keith (Bill Skarsgård) end up sharing the same double-booked Detroit AirBNB. Arriving on a rainy night, Tess is mostly wary of Keith—fair enough sis, it’s hard to forget that the handsome Swede was Pennywise, after all—but that soon gives way to a warm, trusting meet-cute. It’s only the next morning that she leaves the house and sees the true nature of the environment she’s booked herself into.
In the cold light of day, we can see every neighbouring house is abandoned, or ruled by squatters—cars rusting in front of boarded-up, graffiti-barnacled properties. The reveal is clever and dread-inducing, and instantly reminds horror fans of Candyman, another brilliant gentrification story with potent themes of trauma lingering in derelict architecture and female paranoia.
I’ll ruin the movie for you if I lay out any big details, but it’s safe to say that something is horribly wrong deep in the bowels of the unassuming house. Georgina finds one hidden door in its depths—then another, then a tunnel, and then it’s too late. The only place to go, Cregger decides, is a hard cut to seemingly unrelated, asshole sitcom actor AJ (a hilariously vile Justin Long), the home’s owner who we can’t wait to see get gobbled up by untold evils.
Fresh off getting #MeToo’d and seeking quick cash, AJ’s very Hollywood reaction to the nesting doll of terrors in his Michigan property is to opportunistically Google whether evil basements can be counted towards footage in selling the shack. It’s a huge relief to laugh after the first act’s screams—to feel the filmmaker manipulating your biological response to suit the rollercoaster needs of the narrative.
Despite some of those Sam Raimi influences and loveably laid-back practical effects makeup, Barbarian has a serious and dark heart. Cregger’s screenplay was influenced by the self-help book The Gift of Fear, which posits that women in particular are haunted and helped by an innate intuition that’s often ignored by the gung-ho men (or even predators) they’re beholden to. That’s the case for poor Georgina, but also for the film’s antagonist—a Golem of repressed female rage (can’t say much more).
What starts as a perhaps disappointingly conventional thriller—the first act kinda feeling like any solid Shudder Original until the shit really starts hitting the fan—reveals layers of comedy, sickening psychology, and more experimental visuals. An unexpected flashback to Reagan’s 80s has the look of a VR game, alienating us with an uncanny new character perspective.
The adrenaline-chasing ending feels a little obvious, painting Long’s gormless bro as too much of a clear-cut villain in an otherwise nuanced and mysterious story. But by this point any viewer looking for nasty fun will already be totally on board—happy to tread deeper and deeper into this perfectly-executed film’s dark thrills, ignoring the audience’s knowing groans as we go.
