Barbarian (2022) Review

 

Barbarian (2022) Review

 

What makes a scary movie actually scary? Scariness is almost always subjective. Some viewers are more easily frightened than others. When I’m told I have to see a particular horror movie primarily because “it’s so scary!” it rarely lives up to the hype. When I first saw reviews and reactions for Barbarian, a few people said in addition to it being scary that it was better if you went into it not knowing a single thing about it. After I saw it, I thought two things. One: yes, it is scary—one of the scariest movies I’ve seen in a long time. Two: I think you can know a little about it, and if you go into it knowing almost nothing like I did, maybe it’ll be more effective, but it’s too good of a horror movie for me not to include it in this year’s final review marathon.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) is in Detroit for a job interview and has booked a little Airbnb to stay in overnight. She gets there late at night, so doesn’t see what the neighborhood looks like. When she arrives she discovers there’s already some guy staying there. It seems there was a booking error, but the guy, Keith (Bill Skarsgard), is welcoming, accommodating, and helpful. He is more than a little suspect, though. The whole situation feels…off. Tess is nervous the whole night, but makes it to her interview the next day. She’s warned that the area she’s staying in is dangerous, and when she gets back to the Airbnb in the afternoon we see how rundown the neighborhood is. She’s chased inside by a yelling homeless man, then in a mission to find Keith, she ends up going down into the basement, where she discovers there’s a lot more beneath this house than anyone could have imagined. Meanwhile, the property owner, a minor celebrity named AJ Gilbride (Justin Long), gets into some legal trouble and has to go to the house to check it out for resale value. He, too, finds out what Tess found out—and that’s all I will say about the plot.

Barbarian really does benefit from the mystery surrounding the horror. I didn’t see a trailer or a clip or any spoilers before I watched it, and I’m so glad that was the case, because I was genuinely gripped by the situation as it unfolded. There aren’t many characters throughout and the setting of the Airbnb is made creepy by the way it’s shot and the slow unravelling of its darkest rooms and corridors. As Tess probes the basement you’ll be yelling at her to stop, but I give this movie credit for conjuring a scary situation for the characters to find themselves in without making them idiots. At one point Tess straight up says “nope” and walks away, which is a pointedly funny moment because it’s what anyone with common sense would say and do in her situation, and it goes against horror clichés which is always refreshing for long-time horror fans to see. 

Zach Cregger wrote and directed Barbarian, and I think this is another intriguing example of an actor/filmmaker who comes from a comedy background giving us something that’s injected with purposeful humour and yet is also more terrifying than many films made by, quote on quote, “filmmakers known for horror”. I’ve said in the past that horror and humour aren’t so different from one another because both are about provoking the audience into reacting a certain way. Cregger is one third of the trio who created the show The Whitest Kids ‘U Know and also co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the boner comedy Miss March, but Barbarian is an original concept that came from his own inspiration, and while it might not be wholly original or stick the landing in the third act, it is sickeningly effective in its execution. 

Instead of focusing on specific things the movie does well that make it scary and spoiling too much, I want to highlight some of the things it doesn’t do that also lend to why I found it scary and effective. It has social commentary without being too in your face with it, it doesn’t dwell on the origins of the horror for too long, it has violence without being excessively gory, and it’s dark (lighting-wise) without being too dark or too unrealistically lit. One thing that did bug me throughout was trying to figure out why it’s called Barbarian. Let me terminate that curiosity for you: there’s no specific reason, it’s just called that because that was a placeholder name Cregger came up with and it never changed. It has little to do with the characters or what happens in the movie, nothing to do with Conan, and it is not something you need to think about at all. In fact, knowing it’s not specifically applicable to what the movie is about should add another layer of mystery to it, which might make it even a little scarier.

Barbarian is an easy recommendation from this horror fan. The only glaring negative I could think of is that it won’t be as scary upon a second viewing just by the very nature of the premise, and once you see it you’ll know what I mean, but I think I would still check it out again just for how wonderfully executed the descent into terror was in the first half. I’ll be more than a little surprised if Barbarian isn’t still in the conversation of best horror movies from the 2020s when we reach the end of the decade.