Barbarian’s [spoilers] are the best thing about the movie

The fun part about watching is the people you are looking at. BarbarianIt is a horror movie that has become incredibly popular in the months leading up to Halloween. The fun of seeing all the twists and turns first-hand makes it one of the most talked about. It’s even better to watch it than the first time. After watching, you will be able to think about how clever those twists were and how they changed the movie. Barbarian is.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for the entirety of Barbarian follow. This article includes discussion of sexual assault and self-harm.]

Hidden secrets

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Barbarian’s first act is coy, using the audience’s limited perspective to imbue everything in its small Airbnb setting with menace. When Tess (Georgina Campbell) decides to ride out a storm with Keith (Bill Skarsgård, best known as Pennywise from the It films) in the small house they unwittingly double-booked on separate websites, Zach Cregger’s script immediately sets up two threats. Keith is a mysterious man Tess doesn’t know. He is played by a well-known actor for his horror role. The other is the house itself, which is nondescript to a point where it’s almost CertainYou are wrong.

In the film’s first 40 minutes, the biggest question is simple but compelling: Will the movie’s horror come from Keith, the house on Barbary Street, or maybe even both? The house is the main threat at the end. In its basement lies a secret passage that hides a cell and filthy bed. This passage leads deep into tunnels. Something lurks. And that something kills Keith, leaving Tess’ fate uncertain.

Then the movie takes a hard pivot to Justin Long loudly singing Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi” while driving a convertible along the coast, in what appears to be a different kind of movie entirely. Here is where the fun begins. Barbarian’s script starts to clearly state what it’s about. Once it does, the film starts to become thoughtfully recursive, coming at the same questions from multiple angles in a way that’s hard not to keep thinking about long after the film ends.

Long portrays AJ Gilbride as a Hollywood producer-writer about to experience what he considers the worst day in his life. His pleasant car ride is interrupted by a phone call from his agent, telling him there’s going to be a story in The Hollywood Reporter about his lead actress on a promising series pilot, who is now accusing him of rape. AJ’s shock and fury quickly turns to anger when he receives a call from his agent. He informs him that there will be a story in The Hollywood Reporter about the lead actress on AJ’s promising series pilot. No more money is coming in, and AJ’s about to be broke. To mount the aggressive legal defense against his accuser that he wants, he’s going to have to liquidate his assets. This includes a house on Barbary Street in Detroit.

As AJ’s connection to the plot is revealed and he makes his way to the house, Barbarian also makes it clear that he’s scum, and he’s almost certainly guilty of assaulting his co-star, even if he’s blind to her experience: He insists he’s just “sexually aggressive” about not taking no for an answer. So as he makes the same discoveries Tess and Keith made before him, the audience’s sympathy is meant to shift. It’s hard not to hope that whatever lurks beneath the house will get this guy. Eventually, it finds him — and so does Tess, who’s still alive. And then there’s one final story pivot, back to the 1980s.

Is there a real monster?

Image Credit: 20th Century Studios

Barbarian’s final key player is Frank, an apparently single man who lived in the Barbary Street house in the 1980s, when its neighborhood was an idyllic, thriving suburb. He’s committed to staying in the house, even as his well-to-do neighbors begin their white flight, as the changing neighborhood puts their white-picket suburban dream at risk.

Frank, however, has other depraved interests: He’s a predator and serial killer, kidnapping unsuspecting women and imprisoning them in a secret labyrinth in his basement, where he forces them to have his children. He’s been doing this for years, raping and inbreeding until the final result is The Mother, the initially monstrous-seeming creature lurking in the modern-day tunnels. By the movie’s third act, she’s revealed as a poor wretch who seeks to bring others to her lair so she can mother them. It’s all she knows to do.

(If you haven’t seen Barbarian but are reading these spoilers to know whether it’s something you’d be comfortable seeing, know that in spite of the horrific subject matter being explored, the film does not actually depict any sexual violence. It’s left off screen, though AJ does find and play one of Frank’s videotapes, and the screams and cries of one of his victims are clearly audible.)

At first, the shock of the house’s history encourages a fairly linear sequence of transgression and consequence, from Frank’s horrific crimes to Tess’ pain. Every terrible crime sinks into the bone of the suburb and keeps the house alive, keeping it alive, as a source of suffering, as the surrounding areas crumble. The three men in the middle of this story are a reminder. Barbarian, A second reading is revealed, where a toxic circle of male entitlement appears across a broad spectrum from subtle to explicit.

Frank is at the extreme end of the spectrum. His unchecked madness becomes a living entity that he cannot control. When AJ discovers him, sickly and decrepit, in a room deep in the tunnels below the house, he’s surrounded by recordings of his evil, and afraid of the consequences of discovery. Frank kills himself when AJ threatens the police to take over the house.

Frank was last confronted by AJ. BarbarianThey are compared. AJ’s disgust over Frank’s crimes is clear, but Cregger asks, What is their distance?AJ does not clearly respect his accuser. He takes a trip with a friend, where he confesses to having overruled her protests. After the news broke in the media, he drunkenly called her “that fucking bitch” even though his lawyer had told him not to. And he speaks of her almost exclusively as “that fucking bitch.” Yet he still believes he’s a good person, one who hasn’t crossed some imaginary threshold from man to monster.

Keith’s role in this is easiest to overlook, since BarbarianThis is it. No more information about him. We know that he is exactly as he claimed to be: a man who booked an Airbnb twice. A conversation between Keith, Tess and his wife is the beginning of the foundation for this. Barbarian’s themes of how male entitlement breeds violence. After Keith persuades her to stay in the Airbnb with him, she asks whether he would have done the same if she’d been the first to arrive, and whether he’d even think of that as risky behavior. Keith, caught off-guard, doesn’t appear to have even considered this.

Keith’s obliviousness is the end of him. Tess is panicked when Tess discovers the tunnels. She tells him to go. But he refuses to take her seriously, insisting that he check out what’s wrong before they take any action. Out of concern for him, Tess waits and doesn’t escape the house. He would’ve lived, had he believed her. And she would have been spared a lot of suffering if he wasn’t so pointedly, symbolically dismissive about her personal experience not being proof enough for him.

The terror of the status quo

Image courtesy of 20th Century Studios

As many times as possible BarbarianThis core concept of male entitlement is at the heart of how it spirals outwards. It plays with viewers’ sympathies, as each new sliver of character backstory can cause disdain to shift to pity, only to pivot back again. Without the thought, AJ would be compelled to confront Tess with his worst transgressions. You are In Barbarian, the opposite happens: He speaks passionately about his need to fix his mistakes and help the people he’s harmed, but then he immediately sacrifices Tess to have a chance of surviving The Mother. He sees nothing that connects him with Frank. He sees himself as a victim of a woman who’s out to get him. It is extremely difficult to overcome the ideology of grievance once it has become ingrained.

Through this lens you can see: BarbarianThis film is about the ways in which male entitlement and ignorance have helped to create a world where evil can fester and rot. It is present in the desire for a carefully cultivated suburb, which Frank’s neighbor abandons the second he sees it changing. It’s present in the police who answer Tess’ call for help, but prove hostile and dismissive to someone they clearly see as a lower-class woman of color, not worthy of their service or protection. It’s visible in the little slice of the American Dream that compels a man to claim a property as his, a place to let whatever dreams or nightmares he has take root. This is reinforced every time women are not treated seriously to maintain patriarchal status.

Tess does ultimately survive AJ’s attack, and so does The Mother, who, it seems, wants to do what she’s always done: bring Tess back to her den to take care of her and nurse her wounds. BarbarianThe abrupt end is reached when Tess grabs a gun to kill The Mother in her most vulnerable, human moment. It doesn’t feel like a victory. It’s a difficult choice that a woman made because she had no other choices. Tess’ options were chipped away for decades before she even entered the house on Barbary Street, by men who had nothing but their own interests at heart. They were thwarted even by men who she met in the past, even the most kind. In killing the woman in the story who has suffered most at the hands of these men, Tess doesn’t seem like she’s finally free. She’s just another consequence of the barbarians who built the world around her.