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BARBARIAN

2022

Written and directed by Zach Cregger

Spoilers: oh, severe

You're not supposed to watch Zach Cregger's 2022 horror phenomenon Barbarian knowing anything about it, and I guess that maybe that's the case.  Considering how late I've gotten to it, it's a minor miracle that I didn't know much about it beyond the most basic statistics anyone would want to have about a horror movie before they commit 102 minutes of their time to it—what it's about (an evil basement); whether its inevitable resort to darkness, being a horror movie about an evil basement, utilizes well-etched darkness, or simply unreadable darkness, in the vein of so much 2020s horror movie cinematography; how likely it'll turn out to be that Justin Long will be in it—and so on one hand, even though I think our culture's prevailing maximalist position on spoilers isn't actually very good, I also have to admit it's pleasant that, thanks to people being so circumspect and polite about a hit film that everybody's seen by now, I did go into it largely blind.  (In contrast, but perhaps tracking the rapid coarsening of American society, I've had more blasted in my face regarding the third act of Cregger's follow-up horror phenomenon, the similarly spoiler-sensitive Weapons, in just three months than I had with Barbarian over three years.)

On the other hand: for this?  Now, I wouldn't deem it worth discussing without serious spoilers, but Barbarian also doesn't actually have any twists.  It has tangents, many of them, but those aren't the same thing.  Way too many people have talked around spoilers for Barbarian by gesturing significantly at Psycho, and maybe that would be my first impulse too, because, you know, Psycho is famous for (beware! spoilers for Psycho!) a tripartite structure and a protagonist switch.  But if Barbarian is trying to be Psycho—and I have to assume that it does, at least, want to think of itself as plying the same basic kind of narrative fuckery as Psycho, even if I don't wish to perceive it as being so arrogant as to presume anything beyond that—then it sure is one awfully incomplete and ragged kind of Psycho.  It's got the tripartite structure, sure, but to all appearances it has one mostly because it doesn't really have any idea how to keep its first story going past the forty minute mark, and it needs to somewhat start itself over, even though it hasn't quite finished that first story yet; and it does not, actually, have a protagonist shift, though it sort of presents the illusion of one.  The heroine in the first shot is the heroine of its last, after all.  It's pretty much just any old horror programmer, except for how there's a completely different film shoved into the middle of this one, in order to give a movie that's about a subterranean monster in a basement the requisite frisson of relevance-chasing novelty.

That this is pretty bad should go without saying, and at most I could be persuaded to begrudgingly admire Cregger for stuffing Barbarian with every stray notion he possibly could just in case he never got to make another movie, though I think this would have needed to have manifested as a problem of having too many ideas for a movie, rather than the much drabber sensation Barbarian provides, namely watching a writer-director methodically go down a checklist he'd compiled by way of thumbing through an issue of The Nation that he bought right before drafting his screenplay.  Still, at least the first act feels like a real movie, as Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives amidst a dark and stormy night at her destination in Detroit, this being an Airbnb (I'm not the first or thousandth to point out that this is some of the most remarkable product placement of our age; it would be like if the Tesla in The Shrouds spontaneously combusted) on one of the shittier stretches of "Barbary Street," which would make the title way cleverer if it were a real place in one of the most blighted neighborhoods of Detroit and not a completely fictional street.  (There's a "Barbary Street" in Bethlehem, PA, on the other side of the Rust Belt, but only a "Barbara Street" in Detroit, with all of seven houses on it and within two hundred yards of a grocery store, a museum, and an IMAX theatre, and I suppose if I liked Barbarian it might not matter that much, but this anchorless wordplay only compounds my dissatisfaction with it.  The closest it gets to reflecting content is "piratical slave raids" and I believe that would be a stretch.)

Anyway, Tess is confronted immediately with the absence of the key in the lockbox and shortly thereafter realizes that's only because there's someone already in the house, Keith (Bill Skarsgard), for the managers have double-booked the house through another company (in this case one that I'm pretty sure is fake).  After awkwardly dancing around the issue, Tess accepts Keith's hospitable offer to let her stay anyway—he'll sleep on the couch—while making it reasonably clear that she'd never in a thousand years offer the same had the circumstances been reversed, because the movie's forthrightly planting its flag in the ground of what it shall be claiming as its theme, and despite Keith's attempts to assure Tess of her physical safety generally coming off like the nervous stammering of somebody who might be a little too invested in convincing somebody to let down their guard, it turns out they have much in common and, who can say, in another universe this is a scraggly romcom.  Instead, after a night marked only by modest prefatory signs of something being awry—Tess's door comes open, though it couldn't have been Keith, though it's not like it makes sense with the real culprit anyway—Tess discovers in the basement a secret door into a long-disused serial killer dungeon, and then a second secret door into a tunnel that stretches out into an infinite-seeming abyss.  This rightly freaks her out, though Keith is adamant that he see it for himself, out of curiosity and the absence of any specific threat in Tess's report, and I'll give Cregger the modicum of credit deserved for at least not bellowing aloud that when Keith's venture into the tunnel leads to his demise at the hands of a monster we can just barely make out as a seven foot tall albina (Tess's fate is left, for now, ambiguous), it's because he didn't Believe Women, this being a level of editorial restraint not demonstrated by any subsequent element of his screenplay.

HARD CUT TO BLACK, and the movie is something much weirder but also more misshapen upon our return, where it simultaneously turns out that the probability of Justin Long being in it was 1, and that a writer-director best known for a sketch comedy show might not be a natural at getting dramatic performances out of actors not well-disposed to give them, and Long is basically just retreading the performance he already gave once in Tusk, which is reasonable enough, considering that you'd think there'd actually be much more chatter about the similarities between the two pictures (comedy guy makes horror, single-location in its main phase, Long playing a dipshit).  Even the big difference is a big similarity after all, because this time Long's also playing Johnny Depp, structurally-speaking, and somewhat literally, too.  Long is AJ, some kind of TV showrunner whose career we witness implode in one phone call, due to being Me Too'd by one of his actresses, and the movie resets around this, spending a frankly unnecessary amount of time watching Long superficially wear his feet straight through the shoeleather of AJ's newfound financial travails, but the upshot is that AJ is the owner of this particular Airbnb and he eventually arrives in Detroit himself to try to sell it to fund his legal battle, and just look the fuck around you, dude, this house is worth $20,000 and you still won't find a buyer.  (Barbarian also never really clarifies how in the world this Angeleno owns an Angeleno mansion, an Airbnb in the most post-apocalyptic part of Detroit, and essentially nothing else, and it's one of the minor ways that it feels like Cregger is not doing so much as the bare minimum work—e.g., "oh, I inherited some shithole from my uncle"—to fit the pieces of his movie together.)  Fair's fair, AJ does at least bring us the movie's single cutest beat, when one of the few flirtations with any kind of real success in the back half of this whole movie by a sketch comedian turns out to be, well, a comedy sketch, concerning the glib homeowner whose reaction to discovering a sinister secret terror cave underneath his house is determining if this adds to the square footage and resale value.  However, this question shall be rendered somewhat moot when AJ is also taken prisoner by the thing—her apparent goal is to make them her "children"—and presently Tess reappears in her movie.  Now they have to try to figure out some way of escaping their captor's clutches, and AJ, at least, solves the mystery of her existence on his way out.

A couple of things are obvious about Barbarian, I think, the first being that it's interested in cataloging a taxonomy of masculine threat types ("false positive" by way of Skarsgard's stunt-cast auto-creepiness punched up with his off-putting unctuousness, "false negative" by way of Long playing an amiable goofball capable of rape and, eventually, base betrayal, and "mythic sexual evil" by way of the long-lost true owner of the Barbary Street property played by Richard Brake), and the second being that this doesn't amount to a cohesive experience, like, at all.  It doesn't really have any interest in doing anything with AJ besides forcing him to compare himself to a dungeon-keeping kidnapper before reverting him to type anyway and killing him (just in time to keep this movie flowing down the path of absolute least resistance, lest anyone confuse it for something that's challenging in any sort of way), when if that's it, then it sure feels like we didn't need to have forty damned minutes of Long being our irritating false protagonist, complete with a stated-out-loud false character arc, just to get from sin to punishment.  Likewise, it doesn't have much idea what it even is doing with a female monster that turns out to be a victim in her own way, though if I'm being nitpicky and Barbarian clearly brings out the worst in me, I might mention that "the inbred mutant spawn of a multigenerational rapist who sired his own victims in a hole in the ground" could have used another generation or two to cook up the seven foot tall albina previously described, and in any case it feels like we ought to have a more developed underground than one freak offspring obsessed with mothering babies for no reason that makes itself apparent besides a looping VHS tape demonstrating breastfeeding that, itself, would've broken twenty years ago.  (Contrast Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear," for an example of this concept done more-or-less just as implausibly, but with whole lot more impact.)  Papering over the remaining empty spots in the screenplay, we have that checklisting I mentioned: consider a Barbary Street squatter (Jaymes Butler) that Cregger tricks you into thinking is menacing local color only to reveal, by completely changing his characterization and affect, he was actually only trying to help the young woman he was screaming what sure did sound like rape threats at (there are very few and extremely narrowly-defined contexts in which grown women respond well to being addressed in guttural tones as "little girl"); or how about the cops Tess eventually gets ahold of but who do nothing to help, because the police are useless, oh, I know, but by the same token so is this scene, which like a lot of stuff here just feels like Cregger flogging his movie towards the necessary plot beats (mustn't the heroine return to the underworld to face her fears, etc.?), but as slowly and uncertainly as possible.

It still kind of gives me a headache to try imagining any writing process where Barbarian's organizing principle actually came first, and Cregger still decided that the ideal forum for discussing Hollywood sex predators and bad men in general was a horror film set in Detroit that is still, foremost, about a mutant rape victim who lives in a tunnel and wants to adopt, forcibly if necessary, its heroine and antivillain alike as its new babies; I guess I can relax because I don't actually have to imagine anything, Cregger having straight-up admitted, with what I find to be a rather perverse pride, that he simply started riffing after getting frustrated trying to write an actual movie, and kept at it even if what he wound up with was not an actual movie, declaring that if he was surprising himself during his writing process, then it stood to reason it would be a surprise for his audience, and I guess I have to grudgingly concede that the financial outcome for Barbarian means it "worked" even if this all strikes me as an almost malevolently misguided way to make a horror picture.  It doesn't keep me from finding it to be poisonous and brutish in its attempts to reposition a perfectly-fine-sounding scary matinee into the most frightful of all horror subgenres—you know, elevated.

And there was clearly some potential here, albeit squandered.  The first third is slow, and can already feel like it's allowed to have as much slack as it has because of its writer's premonitory worries that he isn't going to be able to extend this scenario to a feature's length, but it's taken recourse to a perfectly serviceable build of tension, so that probably my gravest concern before the Hard Cut to Black was, in fact, that Cregger was mismanaging Campbell's performance and making her overcook Tess's fears about the basement before they became manifest ("this is a feminist horror movie, so what I'm looking for is 'hysteria'").  Zach Cuperstein's photography has probably gotten more praise than it deserves—the initial interiors are basically indistinguishable from any other contemporary movie that's decided underlighting and glum color grading is the way and the life and the truth, so that it all still looks a bit like mole people attempting to reconstruct "a room lit by a lamp" from inaccurate guesswork—but it has earned some praise, because when it's required to plunge into actual darkness, there's an intelligence about how to present the obscurity and keep some light sources available so that we can follow the principals (there's a very nice use of the "VHS tape room" that casts a pool of purplish light into the dark corridor and sidelights our characters) while still being very keenly aware that somewhere inside those swathes of black, there's something cruel and implacable waiting to burst out.  (It may not be good, however, that this only sometimes translates into strong horror staging: for every time Cregger indulges in what I suspect is a computer-assisted fade of the "mother" into invisibility in that inky backdrop, or brings out some neat gore effects, there's another where AJ mistakes a woman two feet shorter and obviously not an inbred albina for the enemy and shoots her, even though he's the one in the darkness and she's the one standing in the light source.)

Cregger and Cuperstein are even getting up to some decent-enough experimentation, at least in a gonzo flashback sequence that sweeps back to the origins of the current horror at the advent of the Reagan Administration, also partially explaining how this house has been maintained in the face of deindustrialization—and, credit where it's due, not only does the fisheyed weirdness of this Academy ratio segment involve some of the most queasily-interesting aesthetics the movie ever trots out (and, indeed, some of the best queasily-interesting oblique storytelling in Brake's "plastic sheets/diapers/homebirth/no midwife" interaction with a bemused store clerk), but it invokes the sole "it's about vampires, ostensibly"-style allegorical notion that feels remotely organic to Cregger's screenplay, or comes off as effective within it, just in the way the juxtaposition creates a more intense feeling of a civilization in decay than the imagery of rotting houses alone would have been capable of doing, along with tabling the movie's pulp fascination with the problem of exactly what one does when the local economy collapses, but thanks to that whole dungeon thing, one's pretty much stuck there anyway.  (It occurs to me that it's functionally the same movie as Don't Breathe, except Don't Breathe is much better.)  That's not so bad, though what it does with its setting just isn't very much.  A fifth of the movie takes place in Los Angeles (it feels like half of it does), and even once it does return to Detroit, it doesn't really have much else to show us there, while the movie taken as a whole, despite its one big signposted theme and its constant meandering over towards disconnected sideshow themes, feels like its only real, consistent message is "never help anybody, ever"—there are approximately one dozen plot turns that rest on a decision to assist somebody or not, from the very first where Keith offers Tess a roof over her head, to as seemingly-innocuous as AJ moving a fucking nightstand, and it backfires every single time; so it happens that the Goddamn cops the movie doesn't even like turn out to be the smartest people in it—and I could really appreciate a horror flick this mean-spirited and nihilistic, at least if I had any reason whatsoever to believe it was made that way on purpose.

Score: 4/10