“Barbarian” (2022) is about Tess (Georgina Campbell) who rents a house through Airbnb, but someone is already there: Keith (Bill Skarsgard). She accepts Keith’s offer to stay in the rental, but is it a good idea? No of course not otherwise it would not be a horror movie.
“Barbarian” was unexpected and surprised me in terms of story structure so I give the filmmaker credit for getting me to the theater, and the previews for not giving everything away. Except for one character, I never knew what to expect and was constantly surprised. I am a black American woman, and I did not buy that many of the twists and turns would happen even in a society whose default setting is to not respect and protect someone like me. I am uncertain whether the filmmaker conveyed the message that he wanted since the film seemed divided into wanting to horrify his audience and address a couple of lessons. The central thesis seems to be move on versus staying in a toxic dynamic. It feels like a movie, and as if it could not happen in real life, not because horrible things do not happen, but they do not happen in that way. Zach Cregger wrote and directed the film, but Jordan Peele is a friend and allegedly mentored him.
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If I had an issue with “Barbarian,” I never believed that Tess would accept Keith’s offer. I never believed that after being so empathetic and solicitous, Keith would disregard her concerns. I did not believe that the people in their lives would not look for them. He is part of an artist collective, and her future employer knew that she was not safe. I did not believe that cops would not believe her especially if they ran the license plates of the cars parked in front of the house and figured out that an actor with sexual violence allegations owned the place. Unfortunately because we live in a horrible world, we have examples of people who were kept captive, raped and have children for their father. Incest would not produce a huge, super strong, mutant woman with no capacity for knowledge though it makes great horror, and even if it did, just one? There should be more people. How is she and her dad, Frank (Richard Blake), surviving without food? It makes for an entertaining film, but these moments kicked me out of the movie. Also the idea of the mutant adult child being the real monster does not work for me. It works as an instrument of justice against AJ (Justin Long), the real protagonist of the film, but the real monster is Frank, and anything that distracts from him does not sit well with me.
“Barbarian” is brilliant for doing a bait and switch. I went in with the lure of Tess, who does qualify as a final girl, but the story is clearly structured around AJ. I love Justin Long, but he would not have been a draw to see this film. When Keith and Tess are talking about bad guys, they are thinking of guys like AJ, not Frank, though they are part of a spectrum. AJ is a terrific character. The basement becomes a morality Rorschach test, and his immediate reaction is money. Tess is another such test, which Keith passes, and AJ does not, but they both die. Tess survives because she is not a threat, but a baby, a black woman.
“Barbarian” is making a statement about race. The underlying horror is the idea of white flight and gentrification creating the conditions for the horror to go unnoticed except by society’s others, black people. I knew that the guy screaming at Tess after her interview was warning her. When Frank wears the coveralls with the name Carlos stitched, and his neighbor does not notice even though he knows his name, it reminded me of the Boston Strangler and how only minorities are seen as threats. The destruction of Detroit can be equated with violence against women and minorities. Tess embodies both. Certain white men view people and communities as commodities to be consumed. Frank is a monster, but so are a lot of people, including AJ and the neighbor. Racism makes community impossible because people are not working together, but are only concerned with profit. This dynamic hurts white men and women because there is nothing bonding the community except money, not genuine relationships.
“Barbarian” is making a statement about gender, and the capacity of both to hurt the other. Casting Skarsgard is brilliant because the target audience for this film is horror fans so we are hard wired to suspect him of being a monster. Also all the male characters are greeted with suspicion regardless of their actual character because of prevailing violence against women, but Keith gets scared of Tess when he wakes up and finds her standing over him. AJ fears an unseen woman who is allegedly destroying his career for no reason. The cops are suspicious of Tess as a criminal. When the movie reveals that some men did horrible things, regardless of how perverse their acts are, it is quotidian, expected, business as usual because we read about such things in the newspaper, but the monster is a woman though a male actor plays her—is that transphobic? She is body horror-the repulsiveness of her body, her lack of rationality, her rage and her infantilization of everyone around her are what we fear in women—is that misogynistic or taking the pulse? In a film where the worst man keeps women in cages and makes his captives have his kids, our most horrifying creature is a person who escapes the fate of being a forced mother yet still covets it and perpetuates her father’s legacy instead of destroying it. Are we talking about Karens or the 53%? It did not work for me in terms of the story, but as pure spectacle, it was superb gross out horror. Where did they find or how did they make that bottle? Congratulations to Cregger for giving breasts the vagina dentata treatment. I am not wedded to this opinion and can be convinced that my reading of this film is wrong.
“Barbarian” is making a statement about art versus crass sitcoms. The film feels like an unofficial sidequel to “Nope” (2022). Tess and Keith are genuine artists trying to reinvigorate a community and creating one out of the ashes of capitalism by deliberately occupying a rundown neighborhood and forming a unit. AJ is the opposite. He only has business relationships, which will ditch him at their earlier convenience, and sycophants. Show business is amoral, closer to Frank, the serial rapist/killer, than Keith and his unseen collective. Still the filmmaker and the art collective stay off screen and play no pivotal role in rescuing their associates-either because they did not act or did not have enough power. That information is never provided. The nature of their work signifies something deeper about their character.
“Barbarian” was entertaining and surprising, but despite trying to work on a deeper level, its moral was unclear and possibly problematic.
