Horror Review: Barbarian (2022)

We were vaguely aware of Barbarian (2022) when it came out, but didn’t watch it at the time. After seeing it available on streaming, we decided to check it out. Since we’re writing a review, odds are it didn’t go very well… Warning: SPOILERS.

Tess and Keith are surprised when they realize they booked the same house, but decide to share it. They begin to warm up to each other and Tess puts aside her usual concerns about stranger men. However, what could've been the beginning of a cutesy romcom soon takes a turn for the horrific when she discovers a secret door in the basement leading to a hidden room…

After Tess accepts Keith’s offer to stay, things seem to be moving in a predictable direction: she explains how women are much more aware of their vulnerability than men; Keith insists there’s nowhere else she could go; he’s very understanding of her concerns and insanely solicitous; he also talks in his sleep while seemingly having a weird nightmare; someone opens Tess’s bedroom door during the night; she never bothers to verify any of the information Keith gave her; a supposedly threatening hobo who will clearly be later revealed as actually trying to help chases her; and her prospective boss outright tells her that Brightmoor is a very bad neighbourhood. However, the movie changes things up. Normally, this would be good, but in this case, it means that it wasted its audience’s time with the biggest red herring in any movie ever. Usually, the Tess and Keith story would’ve been the pre-credits sequence, to show everyone the existing dangers before the real protagonists show up. Instead, Barbarian stretches it to the point where the reveal that Keith isn’t a psycho planning to make Tess the lead in his next snuff movie is more baffling than shocking. That it doesn’t even manage to find a good reason for why he would go into the tunnels that lie beyond the hidden room really doesn’t help. And no, the conversation about how men aren’t as concerned about their safety as women doesn’t justify it. There’s a big difference between a man letting a strange woman into his house because millennia of gender stereotypes have conditioned him to see women as nonthreatening and men as invulnerable, and a man ignoring decades of horror, crime, and true crime stories to go explore some creepy tunnels in a house he’s just rented. Keith’s reaction to Tess telling him about the room was unbelievable. Yes, characters in horror movies are usually dumb, but this was downright suicidal. A hidden room with a camera, a bucket, and a handprint on the wall? Who the hell hears that and doesn’t immediately think of kidnapping? The movie did a really good job making the tunnels terrifying, which makes the whole situation harder to believe. But down into the tunnels he goes, and Tess follows after hearing him call for help. They find cages with dog bowls that you know weren’t used for dogs, and a naked, freaky-looking woman with very bad teeth that smashes Keith’s head against the wall. Repeatedly. Considering how long the movie spent with Keith and Tess, you’d expect it to move on to her captivity. Instead, we cut to… AJ, driving on a seaside road and singing along to the radio. AJ is an actor who’s just been accused of rape and is going to lose his job because of it. Since he’ll be facing thousands of dollars in lawyer fees, he decides to sell his Michigan properties, even though he’s told they aren’t worth much. One of those properties? 476 Barbary, aka the house where Tess and Keith disappeared. If you’re wondering whether the accusations against him are true, rest assured that the movie leaves no room for doubt. While in Michigan, AJ meets with a friend and brags about his powers of persuasion that can turn a no into yes, so not only is guilty of this rape, he’s probably a serial rapist and doesn’t even know it.

When AJ finds Tess and Keith’s stuff at the house, he calls the people who manage the rental and we find out that no one checks out whether the tenants left or if they’re still there, dead, rotting in the secret tunnels underneath the house where a naked, murderous woman is lurking. And this is why paying for stuff in advance is a bad idea. You know that if the agency had been waiting for their money, they would’ve organized a search party already. We expected that at least Tess’s prospective boss would check up on her, but she doesn’t appear again. Even with 2 tenants nowhere to be found and a door keeping the basement door open, AJ still thinks it’s a good idea to go into the tunnels with his measuring tape after googling whether extra basement space can be added to property size when selling a house. Again, we don’t care how blinded by their male privilege any of these characters are, NO ONE WOULD GO INTO THOSE DAMNED TUNNELS! The cages don’t stop him, neither does the room filled with dirty clothes and/or rags, which should’ve at least made him worry that homeless people could be camping in the tunnels. There’s also a TV showing a video on breastfeeding. So, the tunnels have electricity? But where is it coming from? The house? In that case, why didn’t anyone ever notice how the electric bill was higher than it should’ve been? Especially if the TV + video are always on. Naturally, it doesn’t take long for AJ to be caught by the creepy woman (to whom the credits refer as The Mother, so we’ll be calling her that from now on) and thrown into a hole where he meets the still alive Tess. Wait, she’s keeping them alive? Then why did she kill Keith (other than for shock value)? And… flashback! Let’s go back to a time when Ronald Reagan was still president, Brightmoor was all nice and tidy, and a man who doesn’t even know what he needs could buy supplies for a home birth that won’t feature a midwife without raising a bunch of red flags. The man is Frank, who refuses to abandon the neighbourhood, and likes to make up excuses to get into women’s homes. When he gets to his place, which is, of course, 476 Barbary, he goes into the basement and we hear a scream. And, that’s it. We have no idea why this couldn’t have been a pre-credits sequence or at least set after the Tess and Keith section.

What does The Mother want? To give their babies milk in an old, dirty, DIY bottle. Tess drinks it, but AJ doesn’t, and The Mother jumps in the hole and drags him up with her, and through the tunnels, all the way to the room with the TV. Seeing that she forgot to close the hole, Tess climbs out. Meanwhile, in the TV room, exactly what you expect to happen, happens. The Mother forces her breast into a struggling AJ’s mouth. So, the rapist who laughingly dismissed his victim’s nos, gets his nos ignored. How subtle. And how is The Mother still lactating? How long ago did she have a baby? And to how many people did she do this? These are all questions the movie will never bother to answer. Tess’s escape isn’t as silent as she’d hope, which draws The Mother’s attention. Thankfully, the Apparently Menacing But In Fact Helpful Hobo helps Tess get out through the basement window. His name is Andre and he warns her that there’s worse than The Mother in the house. He offers to let Tess stay with him at the water tower, where The Mother has never gone, but Tess wants to get help for AJ, who’s currently running through the tunnels. It looks like he’s been caught when he gets to another door, but The Mother shies away. Oh, that cannot be good. Could it be the something worse Andre warned Tess about? Instead of wondering what could possible scare away his pursuer, idiot AJ opens the door and goes in. There, he finds more lights on (really, where is the electricity coming from?) and evil Frank, a very old, bedridden evil Frank. It’s nice that Andre cares about someone’s lack of moral values, but that doesn’t seem as relevant to Tess’s well-being as whether he also has the ability to smash people’s heads like the mutant, breastfeeding-obsessed, tunnel-dwelling woman that she’s running away from. In the room AJ found is also Frank’s video tape collection. He watches one and is horrified, but Frank just wants to end it all. Which he does, by blowing his brains out. Well, at least AJ has a gun now. While all that was happening, Tess was calling the police, getting them to go to the house, and then failing to convince them that she was kept prisoner by a psycho to the point where they threaten to arrest her. Of course, the cops are both men. Tess breaks back into the house and retrieves her car keys, which then allows her to use her car to fatally run over The Mother (except not, because that’s how things work in horror movies). She goes back into the tunnels and… AJ accidentally shoots her. Because of course. The two end up at the water tower with Andre after they see, predictably, that The Mother isn’t where Tess left her. Andre explains that The Mother is Frank’s daughter and that Frank kidnapped women, forcibly impregnated them, and then did the same to their (female) children. And that’s all the backstory we’re going to get on the house and its secret occupants. But how would Andre even know that? If one of Frank’s victims escaped, someone who knew all those details, they would surely have known about the tunnels, but it’s clear that neither he nor they were ever found out. Either make it more vague, like The guy who used to live in the house was accused of kidnapping and never caught, or at least have Andre say he heard the story from a homeless woman everyone thought was crazy. Because as it is, it really makes no sense for him to know all that. Hell, AJ should’ve been the one to know what Frank had been doing thanks to the video collection. Also, why no mention of what he did to the male children? After all, it’s highly unlikely he had only girls.

During their conversation with Andre, AJ appears to realize what he himself did, but his moment of self-awareness is cut short by The Mother, who decided to venture into the water tower for the first time. She rips out Andre’s arm and beats him to death with it, while AJ sprints out of there and Tess limps after him. Holy shit! That was unexpected, gory, and somewhat comical in its excessiveness. So, inbreeding gives you bad teeth and super strength? And of course, AJ just forgot about Tess, and it’s only going to get worse. You didn’t really think this movie would truly redeem a (possibly serial) rapist, did you? The fugitives climb the water tower, The Mother follows, and AJ… throws Tess off the tower to distract her. WTF? It works and she jumps after her “baby”. Somehow, no doubt thanks to her special inbred skills, she managed not only to grab Tess, but also spin around and hit the ground first. So, AJ finds Tess still alive and starts to help her while making all kinds of very weak excuses. Surprise! Naturally, The Mother is not dead yet, and sticks her fingers in his eyes, in close-up, before ripping his head apart. Even so, when she goes to get Tess, looking genuinely concerned, Tess uses Frank’s gun that AJ took and shoots her. It looks like this time it worked, and Tess limps away, presumably to safety.

It’s obvious that Barbarian has something to say about entitled, evil men, and the way they exploit the vulnerability of women. So, we get a kidnapper/rapist/incestuous villain, Tess + Keith’s conversation in the beginning, AJ’s otherwise unnecessary backstory, even the cops dismissal of Tess’s story. However, at the same time, Frank’s crimes and The Mother’s tragic origin are explained in an elliptical flashback and a couple of lines of dialogue, the video and AJ’s disgust are very brief, and we don’t even get Tess’s reaction to any of this, even though you’d expect her to be the character most affected by all of it. In fact, Barbarian is so eager to show AJ’s awfulness and his subsequent brutal murder, that it ends up sidelining its female lead. It’s as if the moment the evil man turned up, the focus shifted from highlighting women’s concerns to creating a revenge fantasy with Tess as nothing but a prop. Her interaction with the cops didn’t really feel about her, either, just another example of men ignoring women to serve the movie’s message. How ironic. Also, it looked as if she and AJ were in two different movies. Hers was a serious one that saw her confronted with a situation that was all her worst fears come to life. The horror here was more psychological and creepy. Meanwhile, AJ’s movie was a black comedy about the human embodiment of straight male entitlement getting a taste of his own medicine at the hands of a woman who happens to be an extreme manifestation of the same patriarchy that produced him, with ridiculously extreme violence. The two characters didn’t spend enough time together for their interactions to be that meaningful, either, which emphasized the feeling that these were two concurrent stories rather than a coherent whole. No sooner was AJ being dropped in the hole with Tess than they were being separated, and then he was accidentally shooting her and purposefully throwing her off a building. The latter was insane and cemented AJ as a symbol of male evilness to be taken down rather than an actual character. With the change in tone, came the change in horror. To be fair, it started a little earlier, with Keith’s death, but it became more pronounced with AJ. The slower build-up from the Tess/Keith section was a lot more effective than the frantic mess of the second half. Once The Mother, as freaky as she looked, was revealed, the tunnels lost a bit of their spookiness, and without the tunnels, The Mother was just another seemingly unstoppable monster. However, the chase never lasted long enough to be scary, and the physical violence was shocking rather than horrifying. And that’s another problem, the movie never spent too long with each of the disparate elements, jumping from one to the next before the audience had time to settle down. Some movies benefit from keeping the audience on its toes, unable to guess what’s going to happen next - Barbarian isn’t one of them.

VERDICT

The only thing stopping us from calling Barbarian a bad movie is those creepy tunnels. The moment Tess found the secret door in the basement was genuinely scary. If what followed had fulfilled the promise of her first trip into the creepy unknown, we would’ve been willing to ignore Keith’s unbelievably suicidal recklessness. Unfortunately, we got stuck with AJ and a very different movie that never fulfilled its darkly comedic promise either. We still don’t know whether Barbarian wanted to be a dark comedy or a straight up horror, a psychological thriller or a gorefest. In the end, it was a mishmash that never really came together. Some movies are able to be several things at once - this one wasn’t. It really would’ve been better if it had picked one - lead, tone, genre - and stuck with it throughout.