When Tess (Georgina Campbell) pulls up to her Airbnb, late, on a rainy night, she is quickly frustrated when she finds the front door key was not left for her in the lockbox.  While leaving a voicemail with the owner, a light from inside the house turns on.  Keith (Bill Skarsgård) opens the door, just as confused as Tess and the two begin to realize the house was double booked.  When Tess is unable to find a hotel in the city for the night, she reluctantly agrees to share the house with Keith, but as the night wears on, strange things begin to happen, and the light of day just reveals more mysteries surrounding the house. 

Zach Cregger writes and directs Barbarian for Twentieth Century Studios, marking a shift from his roots in comedy by delivering an incredibly well-crafted and suspenseful thriller.  The film covers three major periods, each with its own distinct look and feel, and when it enters into the second act, revolving around AJ (Justin Long), a disgraced Hollywood actor, it begins to take on a very campy, creature feature which does allow Cregger to embrace his comedic skill while not feeling like a tonal abandonment of the first act. 

Barbarian is acutely aware of the dangers of the modern world and the truly horrifying environments that can be shaped by the presence and threat of abuse.  The script plays with audiences’ preconceived notions of this, especially early on, as Tess struggles to keep Keith at a distance.  Keith himself is aware of the situation and, try as he might to disarm Tess of her fears and apprehensions, there is a constant feeling of discomfort and distrust.  Skarsgård’s performance is mild, but in his bumbling and overexplaining he never lets us get our bearings because he keeps telling Tess, and by extension us, what we must be thinking.  What is most refreshing about how Cregger unpacks these everyday horror setups is that because his characters are older, they are able to engage with these topics in a much more mature manner than just an incoherent stream of shrieked buzzwords as was seen earlier this year in Bodies Bodies Bodies.   

Creeger really solidifies his thesis at about the one-third mark of his 102-minute thriller when he smash cuts out of the dark Detroit rental basement and into sunny California which finds AJ zipping down a beachside highway in a convertible.  He receives a troubling phone call from his manager and the legal team at the television station where his pilot was just picked up by the network.  Assault allegations have been made against the actor by his female costar, and with his show now on hiatus and his revenue stream cut short, AJ is urged by his financial advisor to liquidate some assets and scale back his lavish lifestyle.  He takes that to mean instead of selling his extra properties, to move into them, one of which is the small house in Detroit where the film opened.   

This is where the setting up of AJ as a foil to both Tess and Keith kicks in, and it lifts what could be a generic creepy small-scale slasher into a biting look at the world around us.  As details come out about the allegations against AJ, each piece becomes more and more damning and there is little doubt that he acted without consent.  Keith, on the other hand, and without any of the incel meme baggage attached to the phrase, is just a genuinely nice guy in the middle of a confusing situation of being double booked by the rental service.  Tess, understandably so, is nervous about the whole situation, and after much reluctance decides to place her trust in Keith, but she is always wary of her surroundings, making sure to lock every door behind her and taking a picture of Keith’s license when he is not in the room.  And then there is AJ, an actual offender, who stomps and storms his way through the home without a care in a world more than the growing agitation that the previous tenets’ belongings are still strewn about the house.  When the narratives collide, it is interesting then that through the change of circumstances, Tess not only places her immediate trust in AJ, but finds a concern for his own safety and survival, a courtesy that will not be returned later. 

There is another twisted dynamic in the film, the one that ties the two stories together, and that is of Frank (Richard Brake), the original homeowner, and the Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis), a massive and terrifying creature that dwells in the tunnels under the basement.  The dynamic between the two reflects the dynamic between Keith and AJ where the apparent monster is actually working from a place of genuine care and the more bumbling and feeble of the pair is the true horror.  The film’s handling and breakdown of toxic masculinity and the impact it has on the lives of the women they engage with is both much more straightforward in its delivery and also much more palpable than another takedown seen recently, Men, an earlier release from A24 like Bodies.  Do not be mistaken, though, as Barbarian is not kind to the characters who do not deserve kindness, but its less abrasive approach from the onset allows the message to be absorbed more easily by a listening audience as it does not feel so blanketly accusatory, not to mention its less lyrical and metaphorical delivery. 

Barbarian is a blending of many subsets of the horror genre to create something that plays with our expectations and understanding of the horror tropes. It oscillates through three distinct stories while staying relatively put in the same small house, showcasing Cregger’s creativity as he tirelessly works the environment to support a full narrative. There is a surprising amount of commentary going on here just below the surface, but it also works well as a creature feature/thriller mashup for audiences who are just looking for some scares. The consistent hallway framing lends itself well to the atmosphere, and the close quarters make for some truly terrifying moments as flashlights begin to flicker and echos help to disorient. In a genre that is often bloated every year given the low price tag and high yield, quality is often a huge sacrifice when it comes to horror, but every now and then there is a true gem that comes along and Barbarian rises to the top of the list, not just for horror films, but also in terms of general releases for the year. Cregger delivers one of the most engaging and thrilling films of 2022 and proves that a low budget does not mean low ingenuity.