Barbarian

Airbnb

Barbarian
Directed by Zach Cregger
USA 2022
20th Century Fox

Barbarian is a film which I missed when it played at this year’s August Bank Holiday edition of FrightFest. Which is a shame, since it turned out to be one of the best loved films of that four day period. However, it’s now playing in UK cinemas and so I finally get to see this one. It’s considered a horror film by many but, due to the nature of the antagonist of the film, I’m a little unsure whether I would bravely categorise this one in that genre and I don’t want to get into that argument again (for me, it’s probably more a thriller) but, it certainly uses horror genre conventions to tell its tale and, although it does mine a lot of the tropes and clichés of that genre... well, this film is still pants wettingly scary for a good deal of its running time. If you can juggle the cliches and do it right, as the director and actors do here, then you can really come up with something which transcends the usual batch of signifiers and that’s exactly what’s happened here... it’s a film which had me on the edge of my seat, so to speak, for a lot of the time, as the suspense was almost unbearable.

Okay. so one of those things the film does so well is set the tone in a way that hails back, in my mind, to a conversation Brian De Palma once had with composer Bernard Herrmann, when they were working on the brilliant Sisters (reviewed here). Herrmann really went for it on the opening titles cue and De Palma was hankering to being more subtle with the music at this point and holding back, from what I understand. Herrmann was characteristically candid in his reply that someone like Hitchcock could get away with being more subtle on the scoring at the start because, with Hitch’s reputation, they knew something awful or scary was going to eventually happen. When you’re a relatively new director, that’s not going to be the case and, yeah, this attitude works like a charm in Barbarian.

For most of the first 40 minutes, protagonists Tess and Keith, both brilliant performances by Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgärd, find they’ve double booked the same Airbnb through different companies but, after some reservations on Tess part, they decide to both stay at the property for a couple of nights. The first five to ten minutes play out, not really with any tension in them except... yeah... the opening music on the title card and other occasional, subtle and sometimes less subtle, scary music shenanigans going on in the background. So even though you’re watching something fairly benign for a short while... the music comes in at various intervals to remind you that you are not going to be in for a comfortable ride.

The dialogue between these two characters is interesting because Keith is trying his best not to seem like a freakish serial killer or stalker to the point when, you know, you just assume he is. Even though he’s a really nice guy but, yeah, it’s always the nice guy, right? Tess, after some ‘toing and froing’, decides to ignore all the warning signs and... that works out fine. Onto evening two... where things get spooky but, what the writer/director does with this long lead in is... he sets the audience up to expect danger from one avenue and then, of course, plays with those expectations a little later in the film.

Something then happens which I’m not going to spoil here before... we cut to a different story altogether... an actor played by Justin Long, who has been the victim of a recent Me Too accusation and had his life turned upside down. That being said, just because he’s a victim of this kind of nasty accusation, doesn’t mean he’s also the better person either... he ultimately turns out to be a disappointing specimen of a human being when push comes to shove later on in the story, for sure. Then, this second story slice dovetails neatly into the first story slice before then drifting into a third. And, I have to say, the third story excerpt made no sense to me at first because, since the 1980s seems just like last week to someone of my age, I didn’t realise until right after the end credits started rolling that this third detour was a flashback. It needed a bit more signposting for me, to be honest. And then, of course, once I thought about it, it does indeed lead back into the first two slivers of story beats we’ve already seen.

Not saying anymore about the plot because, although it’s sheer genius in the way it’s done, it’s a bit of a one trick pony in terms of the story’s trajectory (but what a trick!) and I’m guessing it might not have the best rewatch value in terms of future revisits because of this aspect.

The film looks absolutely fantastic though, with moody lighting styles pitched against the more clinical aspects of the ‘ground floor’ of the Airbnb and a really nice use of vertical upright slices to chop the screen up and delineate the actors in their space. Even a scene outside of the residence, when Tess goes for an interview with a documentary film-maker, is shot inside a particular kind of office building filled with strong vertical slats everywhere. And, yeah, that’s all a visual cliché in itself perhaps but, I’m not getting tired of this kind of compositional approach from directors anytime soon.

The music is good too. The film is sparsely spotted but the scored scenes really work and, again a cliché but the inclusion of a ramping up heartbeat motif on the score or audio design really works well in a couple of sequences. This coupled with the wonderful cinematography and some really great acting by a cast who manage to bring the characters to life and make them people you can identify with... or be concerned about (to a point, not sure about the Me Too guy’s trajectory)... make for a very strong movie and all I can say about this is, horror or not, I can see why this film was so well received by audiences at Fright Fest this year. I think this one will have a good shelf life if it gets a proper physical media release. Plus, without going into too many spoilers, I’m never going to tire of seeing characters in a film pull off a random limb from another character and use it as a club-like weapon.

Now, I have a couple of criticisms in that I felt the ending was a bit of a low key resolution to things. I would have liked a little more from it, perhaps the hint of an outside collusion from figures of authority or some such. And I would have liked the local neighbourhood outside the Airbnb place to maybe have more of an explanation as to why the area is practically deserted and why the houses have been left abandoned and in ruins over the years. The obvious tie ins to the main plot on that score don’t really make a whole lot of sense, truth be told. But, asides from that, yeah, Barbarian is a brilliant movie and a solid recommendation from me. A very suspenseful, intense movie, for sure.