Considering Jordan Peele's Nope or the U.K. import All My Friends Hate Me, this year has already been a fairly impressive showing for genre films created by career comedians. Writer-director Zach Cregger, best known as one of the founding members of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U'Know, now throws his own hat into the ring with Barbarian. This sinisterly amusing horror flick stars Georgia Campbell as Tess, a transient 30-something who arrives in Detroit for a job interview only to discover that the Airbnb at which she's staying has been double-booked, already occupied by an awkward man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård). Like any person compelled by circumstances to spend an extended period of time with a complete stranger, though especially a woman forced to spend the night in a house with a man she doesn't even know, Tess's guard is up. Indeed, the fact that Keith anticipates and acknowledges Tess's concerns does more to exacerbate rather than relieve the premonition of danger. Nonetheless, Tess basically has no options. And if she is at first suspicious of Keith's "nice guy" persona, she takes her chances enough (just enough, still sure to always lock doors behind her) to spend a rather pleasant evening with him, sharing a bottle of wine and talking long into the night about toxic relationship experiences and her attraction to Detroit's history of collective art and music. Serendipitously, Keith himself turns out to be a member of just such a collective, and is currently in town scouting locations for a music video.
That's enough beating around the bush, though. This is a horror movie, after all. And in a horror movie, all remote houses harbor dark secrets, no curiosity is rewarded, and, more germane to Cregger's increasingly gallows sense of humor, no good deed goes unpunished. Campbell performs well enough in the roll of an archetypal scream queen and final girl. But she can only be so convincing (even in the context of a genre where even the most ardent fans are not above tearing their hair out from incredulity at the absence of self-preserving intuition in so many horror protagonists) when Cregger seems more intent on keeping the spook-house ride moving than credibly balancing this perfectly respectable motive with the equally respectable, but then contradictory intent of framing Tess as a rather resourceful and competent heroine. There's no getting around the classic mode of prurient spectacle into which Barbarian falls, where there's a fine line between empathy for Tess's predicament and the desire to see her really get put through the wringer for the benefit of our own diabolical catharsis. The secret sauce, though, integral to what makes Barbarian so ghoulishly entertaining, is that Cregger isn't punishing Tess for her libido, her cynicism, or her stupidity. No, she's punished for the simple sin of being too good, altruistic to a masochistic fault. While Keith is out of the house the next morning, Tess gets locked in the basement and discovers a secret passageway leading to a room with a dirty old mattress, a video camera, and bloody handprints on the walls. When Keith returns and frees her, she's desperate to get out of the house and go to the police, but he insists on going down and confirming the scenario for himself first. Of course, Keith doesn't come back, and Tess can't help but go down after him. What if Keith is hurt? What if he needs help? It's the benefit of the doubt, Barbarian suggests, that can be just as bad as accepting candy from strangers.
On the side of managing this escalating spectacle, Cregger proves to have a knack for narrative twists and aesthetic spontaneity that, both in terms of horror and black comedy, compensates for the flaws of his vision in terms of credible characterization. The publicity department has done an excellent job of burying the lead, the trailers effectively acting as an abridged representation of only the first half hour or so of the movie. Audiences may not get quite what they were expecting, but they aren't likely to feel as cheated as they did by, say, Trey Edward Schults's It Comes at Night. And while there are certainly stylistic overlaps between Barbarian and Nope, those who found the latter film to be pretentiously cryptic will no doubt appreciate Cregger's more straightforward sensibilities in terms of how the pieces of his narrative puzzle fall into place.
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