When is the last time myopia made you laugh out loud? Let me rephrase: Have you ever encountered someone so obsessed with irrelevant or unimportant minutiae they become hilariously unaware of how deep they are into something stupid? I suppose “Trump voters” are an easy example, except there’s nothing hilarious about people voting for a man who would happily sell all of them upriver if there were a profit to be made in doing so.
The scene is a forgotten section of the greater Detroit MSA. Focus on a block where all the houses are dead, save one. The street lights have been vandalized; at night, it’s spooky dark. But the focus here is the daytime where Hollywood playah and real estate mogul AJ (Justin Long) has come to one the houses he owns and pays no attention to. Because of a personal crisis, AJ needs money –and lots of it- ASAP. Not wanting to sell his Beverly Hills mansion; AJ has traveled to one of his lesser holdings for a personal view.
The house in question is being rented as an Airbnb and at the moment it should be empty. And yet, AJ discovers evidence that it is not. Huh. Peculiar, right? He hears a noise coming from the basement. He investigates. He finds a false door pulled open by a rope. Beyond the door is a dark corridor thirty feet long. The corridor dead-ends, but at the end on the left is, well I’ll describe it and you tell me what you think: it’s a small white sub-basement hidden room that locks only from the outside. In the room, there are three objects: a disgusting sheetless cot, a bucket, and a film camera on a tripod.
If that doesn’t give you pause, I envy the painless life you’ve led thus far. I will point out that the film was in the Act II at the time and has already shown us a young woman following the same path as AJ. Her actions were marked less by curiosity and more by trepidation, straight fear, and several “HELL NO!”s. AJ took a different path, so-to-speak; the discovery of a sub-basement prison -er- torture room on his property elicited no response other than greed (you can see how I thought of Trump, right?). AJ immediately googles whether or not sub-basement rooms add to the square footage of a house. He produces a tape measure and – like a prospector assaying his claim- greedily starts measuring and calculating the added area of the house as if sub-basement hidden torture rooms add to the value of a house.
Priceless. Just priceless.
Need I add there’s more there than AJ bargains for? This is discovered earlier by co-renters Tess (Georgina Campbell) and Keith (Bill Skarsgård – nice to see Bill NOT playing a monster in a horror
film, btw). The opening of Barbarian is quietly disturbing. Tess shows up at night expecting to be alone only to discover Keith is there. Imagine yourself as a young woman in a pitch-black night, perhaps a rainy one, in a dead neighborhood and your accommodation which should be empty, isn’t. And it’s too inconvenient to find another at this moment. So here you are boxed into a corner and forced to deal alone with a stranger … a stranger of whom you know nothing and is one that can likely overpower you if it came to that.
What would you need to see or know from “Keith” before you trusted him?
I’m stuck between Barbarian is a good horror film and Barbarian is a great horror film. The film is deliberate but sets up horror so well that for a healthy portion you will likely be in-between: “I can’t look away and I can’t NOT look away.” Barbarian starts out slow-n-creepy but eventually finds a true horror stride and a mountain-lava flow of cringe-worthy juice; this is a seriously messed up film. If you have a stomach for horror, especially weird horror, Barbarian is probably a must-see in what is steadily becoming a pretty good year for the genre.
There once was a woman named Tess
Who found shelter for the night, God bless
But someone was there
And she got a scare
And the owner found new levels of distress
Rated R, 102 Minutes
Director: Zach Cregger
Writer: Zach Cregger
Genre: Don’t go in the basement
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Horror fans
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Airbnb owners
