The hijinky horror film Barbarian plays like a stunt, but at its best it’s a stunt that forces you to reconsider the act and experience of storytelling. Georgina Campbell plays Tess, a young woman who arrives late one rainy night at her Airbnb rental in a decimated Detroit neighborhood to find Keith (Bill Skarsgard) already staying there. An innocent mix-up or something more sinister? That’s just the first of many questions in a movie that keeps ratcheting itself up into new levels of terror and weirdness. Writer-director Zach Cregger makes the most of the opening third, turning out a tense little thriller punctuated by insert shots of Tess instinctively pressing the button to lock the door of the bedroom, bathroom, etc. As the movie opens up, it suffers from a credulity issue (even for the horror genre, where characters routinely make dumb decisions). And the nods to such notions as white flight and male culpability are half-hearted, at best. But the main thing holding Barbarian back is its execution of the very quality that makes it interesting. (Spoilers ahead.) The issue isn’t so much that Cregger jerks you out of the narrative at hand about 40 minutes in to introduce Justin Long, whose television producer, AJ, has been accused of sexual assault and who happens to own the Airbnb in question. Watching AJ discover the tunnel beneath his home—now knowing what we know, while he doesn’t—is like being in the midst of a giddy experiment on audience point of view and story structure. Unfortunately, with each new, insane development—including a lengthy jump back to the 1980s—Barbarian begins to feel as if Cregger had handed the screenplay to someone new, who then added a few pages, and passed it on to someone else who tried to top what just came before. There’s a lot of invention here, but as a complete film Barbarian lacks coherence.
(9/30/2022)
