“Do I look like some kind of monster?”
There are three severely distinct acts in Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, each of them less satisfying than the last, however, it starts out on such a high note that it manages to limp across the finish line with good will left to spare.
It begins with an Airbnb mixup: two young professionals, Tess (Georgina Campbell) and Keith (Bill Skarsgård), separately booking the same room on the same night in a rough Detroit neighborhood and deciding the best compromise is to warily share the space. You’d think sharing a living space with Pennywise the Clown would be a no-go, but Tess must have only seen the 1990 television version of Stephen King’s It (1986).
Tess gets the bedroom; Keith, the couch. Cregger wastes no time in setting up this scenario, proving masterfully in-tune with the audience’s genre expectations and tolerance level for cliché. In short order he begins toying with convention, accentuating objects and movements and imbuing them with sinister intent, having Skarsgård do a perfect impression of a closet serial killer who bumbles his way through awkward explanations of why he’s unexpectedly hanging out in someone’s vacation rental and why he’s certainly not planning on poisoning or torturing or eating them. This segment climaxes in the basement, where Tess becomes trapped after the job interview that brought her to Detroit in the first place, discovering an endless series of hidden hallways and rooms full of shocking imagery (particularly a room with a bed, blood smears, and a camcorder). It’s a near-perfect execution of the initial premise—its final trick is keeping us uncertain of Keith’s intentions right up until an unholy creature with dangling breasts (Matthew Patrick Davis) emerges from the darkness and smashes his head into a pulp.
Cut to Justin Long driving down the highway in an Alpha Romeo Spider and singing along to Donovan’s ‘Riki Tiki Tavi’—a song based on a Rudyard Kipling story from The Jungle Book (1894) about a mongoose who kills snakes. Wait, what? Make sure something didn’t glitch and we’re still watching the same movie. Indeed we are. New main character, new setting, new themes, new genre—turns out this segment is about AJ (Long), an aspiring actor who’s accused of sexually assaulting his co-star on a television pilot. He’s going down in flames and needs some extra funds, so he heads to Detroit to liquidate some of his rental properties, including the one where there’s a forcibly inbred mother-monster freak living in the extra rooms in the basement. Hold up. Extra rooms in the basement? Can you list that extra square footage when selling the home? It’s a brilliant inversion of Tess’s earlier discovery of the same space. Played mostly for laughs, this act is much less suspenseful than the first, dolloping on way too much story and fumbling away the clever gender dynamics established in the opening act, holding up a satirical MeToo riff in their place.
Most of this silly subplot should have been cut; establishing the owner of an Airbnb does not need such an elaborate backstory and the content of that backstory is actively harming the overall effect of the movie. There’s humor in it, but Cregger—who spent a good deal of time acting in comedy television shows—does a good job working humor into otherwise horrifying portions of the film, and thus this cornball mid-film distraction offers little of value.
The final act can’t quite shake off the cheese dust. Once AJ ends up stuck in the basement with Tess, there’s a creepy flashback mini-prologue starring Richard Brake that gives us some backstory on the foul beast lurking underground and forcing its motherly affections on any who wander into its domain, which leads directly into a nasty finale involving plenty of gnarly schlock and a few too many campy twists. Tossing off its sense of groundedness, it now presents us with a superhuman monster that can charge through concrete walls and rip the limbs off of grown men, all because it wants babies to suckle. Thank goodness Campbell and Long are willing to play along and maintain an air of plausibility. Bonus points for the fakeout redemption of the rapist, who, after his big speech, immediately commits the most cowardly act imaginable.
It’s a pretty wicked little film, all told, constantly keeping us on our toes and feeling ill at ease but never unwilling to reach for more popcorn. It’s nowhere near as crazy as people weaned on modern horror-lite films proclaimed it to be, but its assured style and novelistic structure give it a nice flavor. And I can’t fault it for taking some chances. In fact, I applaud it. That some don’t pay off is part of the game.