Barbarian review: A twisty horror movie that goes beyond its well-kept secrets

Horror movie BarbarianAn audience with little knowledge about the film is better to help it. The film’s trailer encourages this to a degree that may turn some viewers off: It divulges little beyond the film’s initial setup. Even in our spoiler-phobic times, keeping secrets makes sense for a horror movie — it’s simply scarier if viewers don’t know what’s coming. A well-constructed movie is only good if there aren’t any surprises. After the movie’s 102 minute run, all its secrets are revealed. BarbarianThere is still so much more to be discovered. There is more to it than the initial scary portrait that paints the dark, stormy picture of what can lurk in a home when two strangers find themselves together.

Written and directed by Zach Cregger (formerly of the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’ Know), BarbarianThe beginning is simple. Tess Marshall (Georgina Campbell) arrives at an Airbnb in the outskirts of Detroit, where she discovers it’s been double-booked and that a man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård) is already staying there. With no options and an interview for a job in the morning, Tess finds herself stuck in a hurricane.

[Ed note: While this review preserves most of the movie’s surprises, some minor setup spoilers follow.]

Tess is a great modern horror-movie protagonist — doe-eyed but not naive, a guarded but kind young woman who just wants to land a good job and go back to wherever she’s from. Her bad decisions — the kind every horror protagonist has to make, from staying in the house to exploring its depths — mostly stem from her kindness and wanting to believe the best about others.

Keith peeking out of an open door in the horror movie Barbarian

Photograph by 20th Century Studios

Keith is, to his credit and fully aware of the reality of this. He’s savvy enough to know that Tess has no reason to trust him, and every reason to expect the worst. And he tries to ameliorate that awareness by going out of his way to make sure she’s as comfortable as she can be. There’s nothing he can really do, though; the weight and history of too many women threatened by too many men hangs heavy in a situation like this, and casts a shadow over BarbarianAs a group. Even as Keith continually attempts to put Tess at ease, she — and the audience — can never really trust him. (Even if Skarsgård sans makeup isn’t recognizable as the man who played Pennywise in the recent It The unsettling energy of movies can be used to great effect.

This is what you should do. Barbarian begins: as a suspenseful tale about two strangers forced to ride out a storm together, told from the perspective of a woman who must constantly worry whether the man she’s sharing a house with is dangerous. Even though it has an Airbnb twist, this classic horror movie material is enough to sustain a fast-and-dirty, exploitation film. Cregger doesn’t use the premise, but it is a basis for something much more. Cregger delivers an engaging, surprise film filled with thrilling thrills that leaves audiences wanting to continue their exploration.

Filmmakers don’t make decisions lightly. But every artistic decision is important. BarbarianIt is extremely well-crafted and balanced in a way that both rewards close viewing but also doesn’t detract from the more casual thrill-seeking experience. From its Detroit setting — initially arbitrary, but eventually given reasons beyond aesthetic decay — to the sharing-economy snafu that gives the film its initial premise, there’s a methodical execution of setup and subversion that’s just subtle enough to shift away from what viewers might expect. Still, it’s never so dramatic that BarbarianThe end is in a totally different spot than it was when it began.

Tess stands atop a staircase leading to a dark basement in the horror movie Barbarian.

Photograph by 20th Century Studios

That’s the film’s greatest strength: For all its twists and turns, Barbarian is more a movie about recontextualizing what’s on screen than about big reveals. The script doesn’t call attention to the dynamic but is always trying to win viewers’ sympathy. The script quietly asks questions and persuades the viewers to defend their beliefs at all costs. Keith could be putting Tess at risk. Do they have to be separated? Whose fault is it if they are? Does it matter whether you think they’re good people? Your gendered perception of the world is influencing your perspective?

Barbarian’s visual simplicity gives the mind freedom to wander. Tess, Keith and their Airbnb house are living in a dimly lit and dingy place. With a little grace and imagination, the house doesn’t even look that bad — but why would anyone watching a horror film be that gracious? It is especially striking when viewed with its familiar iconography, which ranges from an endless tunnel and rooms that look like some horrible event took place there.

These images are all familiar. BarbarianThey are used as fuel to speculate that fills the first viewing full of dread and then orients subsequent viewings around them. While Tess, Keith, and the few others they encounter are archetypal, they aren’t blank slates in a nondescript nightmare town. They’re characters visiting Detroit for a reason, and the history of that city — and its late-20th-century turn toward decay, as it was abandoned by a wealthy white community that could no longer mold it to their idyllic middle-class vision — is an unspoken weight on the film and its horror. Like Skarsgård and Campbell, who deftly convey quiet shifts in the energy of a scene with the smallest facial expressions, Cregger’s camera reminds viewers of Barbarian’s setting with small, careful shifts, gesturing at the whole of a place by carefully regarding a narrow slice.

This is what you should do. BarbarianIt transcends all its mysteries. Twisty stories are hard to calibrate for; knowing a film has one or more hard left turns coming can goose expectations, which are often rooted more in what any given viewer wants, not in the storytellers’ ultimate goals. Barbarian’s shifts, fortunately, are subtler and scarier. Its greatest trick becomes even more obvious as the film descends deeper into the home it starts in. Cregger ensures that the most frightening scares happen in your head. And, you may be surprised at what you find out about your sympathies.

BarbarianTheaters will open Sept. 9 for the debut of “The Greatest Showman”

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