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With the horror film Barbarian, you get three movies for the price of one. Not all of them work equally well, and a last-ditch attempt to bring it all together is almost too ambitious, but you can’t help but admire debutant director Zach Cregger’s audacity. Unlike India, where filmmakers are positively terrified of tackling the genre in its purest form — our scary movies are usually watered down with romance or comedy — Barbarian somehow combines three vastly different styles of horror filmmaking into a wildly original romp that lives and dies by its own rules.
Like so many desi horror directors, Cregger also switches between tones, but the delineations in his narrative are deliberately defined. A second-act tonal shift is so provocatively jarring that it will take a moment for you to recover. Cregger anticipated this, perhaps; he leaves around 10 seconds of inaction immediately after smash-cutting to an entirely different setting, presumably to give you time to pick your jaw up from the floor. Like how Marvel movies these days go silent after big reveals, in anticipation of the din in the theatres. I’d imagine that watching Barbarian with a full crowd at midnight wouldn’t be too different from the experience of watching Avengers: Endgame with an opening day audience. Certainly, it’ll play differently than it does at home, on Disney+ Hotstar.
Barbarian opens with 30 minutes of pure unease, as a young woman in town for a job interview checks into a creepy Airbnb that she discovers is already occupied by another man. It’s raining, it’s nighttime, and there’s nowhere else for her to go. Before you can scream at her to get the hell out of this situation, she has accepted the man’s suggestion to come in and plan her next move. Things get weirder when he offers her some wine, and convinces her that all the hotels in the area are fully booked because of some convention.
Played by Bill Skarsgård, Pennywise himself — ingenious casting that subconsciously adds to the upsetting atmosphere — the man is a walking, talking red flag. The scenario is made more tense by the dude’s unendingly suspicious attempts to put our heroine at ease by suggesting that he’s not a creep. But Cregger’s screenplay offers moderately believable reasons for our protagonist (played by Georgina Campbell) to stick around, even if you, as a seasoned consumer of horror movies, are left scratching your head as to why she’d go through with this. But that’s part of the fun of watching horror movies. And also, if she’d behaved sensibly in the first place, Barbarian would’ve ended five minutes in.
But now, we get to the tricky part. This film is best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible. Certainly, Barbarian’s brilliant marketing was mounted almost entirely on this premise. And suffice it to say, I will not be revealing any further plot details here; everybody deserves to experience the narrative whiplash that I felt at the end of act one for themselves. And by the time the final act rolls in, offering yet another stylistic departure from what we’ve seen over an hour or so, you’re either going to be clinging on to the ride for dear life, or you’d have pressed the panic button and checked out already.
But even though Barbarian plays fast and loose with tone and texture — the first act is a psychological thriller rooted in relatable reality, while the second resembles a darkly humorous social satire, and the third a more traditional horror picture, complete with a monster and a maze — the themes remain consistent. On one level, Barbarian is a post-MeToo men-are-trash movie; yet another suspicious attempt by a male filmmaker to comment on (and inadvertently overcompensate for) the behaviour of their tribe. But on the other hand, it’s a film about urban decay and toxic relationships. Cregger visualises these ideas by showing us the literal decrepitude of modern-day Detroit — the Don’t Breathe comparisons are unavoidable in these moments — and then by suggesting that all men have secrets buried in their basements.
But in a way, he overshadows the fine print of his own screenplay by calling attention to the film’s structure and visuals. It falls short of self-sabotage because that would imply failure, and Barbarian is far from that. But it certainly distracts from the core messaging, and that is unfortunate. On pure inventiveness alone, though, Barbarian stands out in a cluttered horror marketplace, even if the shady guys that it attempts to call out can be rather difficult to identify.
Barbarian
Director – Zach Cregger
Cast – Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long
Rating – 3.5/5
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