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.

Die Hard 4.0 (aka Live Free Or Die Hard)

Yippee Ki Hard

Die Hard 4.0 (Live Free Or Die Hard)
2007 USA/UK
Directed by Len Wiseman
20th Century Fox Blu Ray B

Warning: Spoilers exploding out of the paragraphs

John McLane never had a cell phone in the first three Die Hard movies.

Amazingly, when you look back at the way technology has progressed over the last few decades, mobile phones were not something that almost the entire population had with them back then. Only a minority of people would have them. In fact, in the first two films in this franchise McLane is shown to be “technically up there” in that, well... he has a pager.

It’s a good job mobile devices weren’t so prominent when it came to writing the scripts for those first three movies because, sad to say, technology has made their plot lines redundant in a modern world. In their first one, if McLane had been carrying a phone, he could have just called for police assistance and that would have made for one short movie. Ditto for the “communications outage” in the second movie. A quick call to one of the planes (oh, by the way, when you land, your sea level has been dropped by 100 metres) and the story is completely junked. And in the third movie, running around from phone booth to phone booth to get the next instruction.... err... yeah, right.

However, Die Hard 4.0 (as it is known in this country) was made twelve years after that initial trilogy. It is set in a world where the character and his ways are sadly out of step with the era. So what do the script writers do to balance the necessities of this character, in terms of giving audiences the kind of situations they are familiar with from John McLane... well, they make sure the phone networks are switched off as a part of the plot. A plot which is based on a newspaper article, in this case, and not on a random script or novel like the other sequels prior to this.

I remember thinking it was a bit late to make a Die Hard movie in 2007. I figured the writers would make a load of mistakes and concentrate purely on the action at the expense of plotting and character detail. Well... I was wrong (they saved making all those mistakes for the fifth movie, reviewed here). This fourth expedition for McLane is every bit as enjoyable as the previous installments (although the third movie is still my favourite) and, to boot, it’s the cleanest, nicest looking of the films to date with a beautiful sense of composition and some lovely colours pitched against each other in the shots. You might think this is at odds with the generally grimy milieu of the original films but, no, Wiseman manages to make it all work beautifully and, what’s more, it doesn’t just look good.

The plot is a little cliched in one hand... escort the witness (or hacker in this case) back to headquarters and don’t let him get killed. This plays out for the first third of the movie before the real story of a “fire sale” (the disablement of the IT systems across the city to render everyone, including all the authorities, pretty much powerless) kicks in properly and it becomes about McLane and his new hacker friend Matt (played expertly by Justin Long) taking on the bad guys and, incidentally, rescuing McLane’s estranged daughter Lucy (played by the always more than watchable Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who is taken hostage by the leading villains towards the end of the movie.

The story is really fine, putting McLane back in a situation where the odds are stacked against him and, also, there is the secret weapon of Kevin Smith (Silent Bob himself) playing a Star Wars obsessed super hacker who Willis also employed to rewrite the dialogue for his scenes. I gt a real kick out of seeing him in this and just wish he had a little more screen time throughout the film.

There’s one bad thing about this movie though... and that’s the credibility factor. Bruce Willis is fairly long in the tooth by now and, although he is in terrific shape, there’s no way you can really buy into him winning fist-fights with the likes of Maggie Q and Cyril Raffaelli (a man who, prior to this, I’d seen acrobatically beat up whole roomfuls of people with his bare hands as one of the two main action leads in the District 13 series). Sometimes the baggage an actor brings with him to a movie is good and, other times, it can strain credibility a notch, it has to be said.

But who cares, Die Hard 4.0 is brilliant, sometimes way over-the-top (jumping your car to take out a helicopter) fun and you still really care for the character and his friends in this one. There is one sad thing, however...

Michael Kamen, the composer of the first three Die Hard movies had already died tragically young by the time of this one. Here, the musical reigns are handed over to composer Marco Beltrami but, I’m happy to report, he does a good job. Writing in a modern action style while still weaving in some of Kamen’s original themes and ways of handling certain situations from the first three movies. It falls somewhere in between an homage to the late, great Kamen and a strong, appropriate score and it succeeds brilliantly on all levels. I wouldn’t have expected anyone to be able to recreate Kamen’s style all that easily but, in the scenes where that kind of respectful tribute to the franchise history is called for, Beltrami does really well and my respect for him truly went up a notch on this film. He does it even better in the fifth movie in the series. Nice work.

And that’s about all I have to say about this one. A great movie and a great Die Hard movie. Mission brief fulfilled. Job done.

You can read my reviews to the others in the series here...

Die Hard
Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Die Hard With A Vengeance
A Good Day To Die Hard