Mark Reviews Movies: BARBARIAN

Barbarian, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 8, 2022

Boiled down to the core, the plot of Barbarian essentially amounts to a tour of a haunted house. Each section of the story takes us farther and deeper into the structure, which is much, much more than it seems on the inside and especially from the outside. That's where writer/director Zach Cregger's simple but smart—mainly because it so embraces the simplicity of its premise—horror film begins: outside the house, where an eerie cacophony of voices lets us know that something is very, very wrong here.

Obviously, the specifics of what happens in this story are best left a surprise. While Cregger's screenplay certainly does match the general expectations of characters discovering a series of horrors within this house, the ways in which those discovers are made—as well as how, when, and why those discoveries are made by whom and, additionally, who survives or doesn't survive them—are genuinely unexpected. Basically, we quickly come to realize that the plot will revolve around each step in the exploration of this house. As for who will be making those steps and what those people will find, though, that's the foundation of the twisted fun and additional suspense of Cregger's narrative.

It is quite suspenseful right from the start and, eventually, in ways we definitely don't anticipate, given the story Cregger seems to setting up from the beginning. A young woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) has arrived at home she has rented online in a seemingly abandoned neighborhood in Detroit. She has a job interview the following day, so it's quite frustrating when Tess opens the lockbox next to the door that's supposed to have the key to house in it, only to see it empty.

With his protagonist standing on the porch and surveying the surrounding neighborhood, Cregger displays a few solid filmmaking instincts. First, there's the patience of simply establishing the basic layout of this area, which will become important at a certain point. Second, there's the simple but frightening juxtaposition of light and darkness, in that Tess is standing in the only lighted part of this block, which is otherwise filled with imposing shadows and shadows within the silhouettes of other houses nearby.

Third, the darkness hides the real nature of this neighborhood, which we and Tess eventually get a good look at in broad daylight. That third quality becomes a pattern here, as darkness constantly hints at some unseen terror lurking in the gloom. In a scene or two or three later, though, Cregger will use light to reveal something that makes us long for the fear of the unknown in the dark.

Anyway, the plot comes across as one gimmick at first, with Tess learning that someone is already inside the house. He's Keith (Bill Skarsgård), who opens the door for Tess and explain that he also rented this house on a different website. The stranger invites her inside from the rain and to the safety of a locked door.

Tess, with some hesitation and plenty of suspicion, accepts the offer and does all of the work to make sure Keith's story checks out and that he won't do something nefarious to her. To his credit, Keith gets the worry and, in his awkward way of trying to explain how he understands that, seems like a genuine, polite, and harmless guy.

All of this feels quite important in the moment, and there is a fine thriller going on beneath the scenes between Tess and Keith, who reveal just enough through the dialogue to make them sympathetic—as long as both of them are being honest, obviously, which does appear to be the primary question of the plot once Keith shows up in the story. It's fascinating how these scenes both do the clear-cut job of building suspense from one angle, while also establishing some sense of these characters, and serve as a distraction from the real game that Cregger is playing behind the scenes, briefly glimpsed by us and unseen by the characters.

The filmmaker gets a lot out of a quartet of doors, for example—one that's mysteriously opened in the middle of the night, another that closes without anyone noticing (and inconveniently closes and becomes stuck on its own), a third that blends in to its surroundings, a final one that surely marks the end of the tour of this house, if only the characters were so lucky (Technically, it does, if only by the standards of what's legally allowed to be deemed square footage for real estate listings, which actually does become a point here). So much of the film's tension comes of such modest means—doors, hallways of various lengths and seen in varying levels of illumination, a hidden room with obvious signs of something sinister having occurred there.

Cregger just lets his characters move through these spaces, using the camera to scan and see—or, often, not see—along with them, while the soundtrack is often just the ambient sounds of these locations—the buzzing of lightbulbs or the dense air of an enclosed place. The scares are earned here, as is the unexpected humor of dramatic irony when another character, an actor named AJ (Justin Long) who begins his section of story in Los Angeles, ends up in that house and finds—but is unfazed by—the same things as Tess and Keith.

The short of it is that Barbarian allows Cregger to prove himself a skilled crafter of horror. Some of it is in the unpredictable and occasionally cheeky nature of his screenplay, but most of it is just a matter of solid, clever craft.

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