[REVIEW] Barbarian
In 2019 my best friend at the time and I went to Australia and found an absolute steal of an AirBNB in the cutest little arts district neighborhood called Darlinghurst. The price was affordable, the location was perfect, and the décor was modern and chic. That is until we discovered a door we didn’t know about. Lucky for us, if you can even say that, the only thing behind a door was the apartment complex’s dumpsters, and two nights into our stay was trash night. If you know anything about Australia, it’s known for its absolutely gigantic bugs, and we learned the hard way that our deal wasn’t so sweet when we were descended upon by massive cockroaches. I thought that was the worse an AirBNB could possibly get, but boy, was I wrong.
Barbarian opens with protagonist Tess (Georgina Campbell) ignoring every imaginable red flag and instinct possible on a rainy night in the desolate outskirts of Detroit when she learns her AirBNB rental is already occupied by someone else, a handsome and seemingly harmless guy named Keith (Alexander Skarsgard). With nowhere else to stay and an important job interview in the morning, Tess stays, and in a shocking turn of events, Keith turns out to be okay. The house on the other hand, does not.
Things get crazy when trap door is discovered in the basement, and crazier still, when Tess and Keith decide to go down it. Surely, there is something on the other-side, and unfortunately for the pair, it is not gargantuan Australian roaches. It’s something much worse. The movie reaches an early and unimaginable crescendo with jump scares abound, and then, perspective flips. We meet AJ Gilbride (Justin Long) a celebrity fresh off the heels of sexual assault allegations who comes to Detroit to liquidate the rental property he owns for quick cash for legal fees.
The choice to switch things up like this is certainly an interesting one. To go from such an intense moment like the one where we leave Tess and Keith to the sunny coast of California where we meet AJ, who at first feels completely disjointed from the first act, left me feeling a touch disoriented and more than that, desperate to get back to the basement of the AirBNB. And because of the changeup, there’s a large stretch with absolutely no jump scares or scare beats, period, which felt a little disappointing given just how scary the last scene with Tess and Keith was.
Going into things, I was hoping for something more along the lines of 2020’s The Rental meets Saw or Hostel—something absolutely fucking terrifying that investigated all the ways home shares really could go wrong, which is many. And this is where it seemed like things were going until we met AJ. The thought of a full movie with as much tension as was in Tess and Keith’s scene prior to meeting him was an absolutely horrifying thought, and I found myself wondering what if the movie went there? Instead, I got something equally dark, but also strangely humorous with a tone that took something with real and immediate fear and turned it into something ludicrous and almost slap-stick, even. Where, of course, AJ finds his way into the basement, too, and becomes the key to escape.
While sure, I think the movie would have been stronger and would hold up longer if it had pursued a slightly more realistic route, to its credit, the unexpectedness of the entire film and how imaginative it is in both structure and subject matter made it a blast to watch for the first time, especially in theatres. At no points could I have imagined the movie would take us to the places it did until the very end, and never have I ever seen anything even remotely like this. Barbarian is insanely ambitious, and somehow, pulls it off. Is it an instant classic that’ll stand the test of time? Probably not. But a must see? Without a doubt—if for no reason other than to convince the population to never, ever trust strange and unexpected rental property doors.
