Review: BARBARIAN

Tess is in town for a job interview and finds that her AirBnb house has been double booked. Keith answers the door, sees her in the rain without the possibility of a hotel with a convention in town and asks her in to see if they can sort it out. While there's an edge to the situation he proves charming and self effacing enough to risk taking up his offer of the bedroom. There's a lock on the door and he seems pretty genuine. Strange disturbances during the night seem distant by the light of day and she rushes to her interview, smiling at Keith's note on the table saying he had a good night. Back from the appointment, she finds herself in a situation which compels her to search the house. Ending up in the basement she finds door after door to ever dingier rooms, including one which looks like it's housed torture. When Keith gets back she persuades him to check it which he reluctantly does. After too long waiting upstairs she goes after him, finding not only more dark rooms but a staircase that looks like it goes into the dark forever. Keith cries out. It sounds like he's faraway. Fight or flight?

It's fight, she, like Dante before her, follows on behind.

Barbarian is a crafty contemporary horror film with solid construction and clean lines. There are no arch nods to audiences that let them know that it's just a corny old movie and they are clever just being there getting all of it. It makes no claim to join the groanworthy nonsense of elevated horror. It's just a horror movie. It builds dread and earns its scares. There are references to a horrific crime from the past two decades and what seems a stab at cancel culture takes on more significance which resonates throughout the rest of the film. Two abrupt setting changes variously add backstory and deepen the narrative. There is also depth given to the monster but not at the cost of its threat.

This would just be an exercise if not for the warmth offered by Georgina Campbell as Tess who runs the gamut from personable through threatened, nervous, terrified and furious as the story throws ghastliness at her every few minutes. Bill Skarsgard comes out from behind his Pennywise makeup to reveal a kind of designer hunk with a disarming charm. Justin Long's sudden appearance as a heavily entitled Hollywood  hotshot facing cancellation and ruin, continues one of the most effective and thankless movie careers of recent decades. 

So, this is an accomplishment. I had actually toyed with catching up with the second of the recent rebooted Halloween and then going to see the next one in the cinemas but thought the better of  sitting through something I would most likely find tiresome. I chose this and was glad to sit in the cinema immersed in dread and care. A powerful electronic score comes in handy, there. 

Here's a point of frustration: there is a possible problem here of othering but it would involve too many spoilers to discuss. I'm still haunted by it but know that that doubt is balanced by the great threat that a character bears. It is a lot harder a case than the wincing depictions of baddies in Silence of the Lambs (an unfavourite of mine) or Incident in a Ghostland which as a very recent film ought to have known much better. There is also the counterbalance of the character A.J.'s comparable sins. Still don't know.

What I can say is how refreshed I felt that a current piece of horror cinema made it out of the gate without needing to be anything but itself.