For the past twenty minutes, we have seen the arrival of a camera crew along with Bogdan, the main antagonist. His involvement suggests that he will be one of the major characters. Proof that this has been a well-prepared project comes from Director Zach Cregger starting “Barbarian” with the story of people like us, a horror scenario that everyone dreads, arriving at an online booked space only to find that it has been booked twice. Tess – a documentary researcher played excellently by Georgina Campbell – reaches a tiny shack which is tucked away in a remote part of Detroit late at night and in bad weather. While this is happening, a rather lazy man called Keith is already at the place. As the time goes by, he gives her a number of excuses for her to remain: she has a reservation but no place to sleep, and it’s bad manners to open a bottle of wine without showing the person who will have the first drink.
Cregger, who was once a participant in a sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know and featured in the likes of Miss March, is well aware of his current situation. It is not very easy watching this young woman doing something so proposing of oneself, but the cheapness of his cinematic style allows to hair it just so. Nope, spoiler alert, when the basement is finally about to be seen, one doesn’t really wish to explore the area behind the rope held door. In this narrative, the term ‘effective dread’ can be operationalized rather broadly, at times thanks to the rather obtrusive back story. And yet even in this film, ‘Barbarian’, as you would expect, the entire experience goes as it promises, while being dumb on purpose, and full of freaky plot twists.
Did I mention that the other Airbnb guy is Bill Skarsgård from It? This is another case of casting being most essential to the film — consider how most of the unsettling parts of the film’s structure are only complete with Skarsgård’s inclusion — unsettling in the way those hidden dark corridors connection several sections of the house do. Here, the man who used to portray “Pennywise the Clown” takes on a different role after AJ Long arrives at the residence, and together with those round eyes and that big figure, tries to talk about caring for Tess like she’s already home, and so on. But is that all there is to it? Is this Skarsgård chap just another of them luring creeps? That query sustains “Barbarian” a fair amount of tension, and resolves it in the most enjoyable of manners later in the film.
While at it, later on, Justin Long arrives at the house. We meet AJ. A Hollywood dude. He is driving along a coastal highway in a convertible and then finds out over the phone that he has been accused of something horrible against the actress. Being the one who likely has done this, AJ would rather think about his career and move on. It is a good thing that they are getting good miscasts such as Long, who is funny in a horrible way and one of the only moments that is laugh out loud funny, is how he ends up getting involved in this situation at the airbnb (could be that ‘Barbarian’ had funnier moments, but appeal to broad humour is a weakness it had). A film of this type lives off the decisions that actions that these characters take and in this case it is Long’s case that the most well-crafted sleazy character is a dapper creep.
“Barbarian” is fairly familiar as there are other films that have existed under the same theme, most notably “Don’t Breathe”, but what Cregger’s project lacks in originality it recoups through its artistry. There are times when the film disorients the audience and transports them to entirely different periods of time, allowing them to assimilate the previous context before the new tale is presented. It also works in a much more stylistic manner as these new pieces, embody various ratios and lengths shot by Zach Kuperstein, complete the films thick atmosphere. Anna Drubich’s score is also violent with a frenzied choir and screeching strings, “Barbarian” is very much in spirits of the film making which creates a metaphorical house of mirrors, and that is the horrifying truth.
This busyness almost makes it work, almost. It’s just an annoyance, as it makes one sit there and scream the first two acts of “barbarian” hardly contain the cleverly locked sophistication that would make the film a perfect statement of horror.
The picture slows to a crawl as Cregger uses a myriad of crutches in the form of decision-making that’s best suited for him. There are certainly enough ominous doors, so why go out of your way to get the characters to open them, look inside and search around the premises at the expense of rational actions in order to make the audience participants? In the end, it seems that “Barbarian” just wants to become as insane as possible and it shows in how it evolved as a film.
And yet: For all his straight-ahead pathways sometimes feel for his characters, Cregger certainly has a great sense of stylistic correlation with the various traumas which his characters possess. Especially where sights this outrageous are witnessed. A lot of approaching blackness in the shots of “Barbarian” is certainly not the most pleasant thing one would want to watch and quite possibly one’s pulse rate would be indifferent to that too.
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