barbarians [spoilers] are the best thing about the movie

A big part of the fun of watching barbarian, one of the liveliest horror movies in the long run before Halloween, comes with discovering all its twists and turns for the first time. But what’s even funnier than what comes after you watch is thinking about how well thought out these twists are and how they change the nature of the film barbarian is.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for the entirety of Barbarian follow. For those who don’t want ending spoilers, our spoiler-light review is here. Warning: this article includes discussion of sexual assault and self-harm.]

Buried Secrets

Photo: 20th Century Studios

barbarianThe first act of is shy and uses the audience’s limited perspective to infuse everything in his small Airbnb environment with menace. When Tess (Georgina Campbell) decides to date Keith (Bill Skarsgård, known as Pennywise from the It movies) in the tiny house they unknowingly double-booked on different websites, Zach Cregger’s script immediately sets up two threats. The first is Keith, a strange man Tess doesn’t know, played by an actor widely known for his role as a horror villain. The other is the house itself, which is almost nondescript certainly somehow wrong.

For the film’s first 40 minutes, the biggest question is simple but compelling: will the film’s horror come from Keith, the house on Barbary Street, or maybe both? At the end of the first act, the house seems to be the main threat as deep in its basement lurks a secret passage hiding a cell with a camera and a dirty bed, and a passage leading deep into a series of tunnels where some lurks. And that something kills Keith, leaving Tess’s fate uncertain.

Then the film takes a hard turn with Justin Long singing Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi” out loud while driving down the coast in a convertible, which appears to be a completely different kind of film. But here it is barbarianThe script of starts out clearly saying what it’s about. Once that’s the case, the film begins to become thoughtfully recursive, coming up with the same questions from different angles, in a way that’s hard not to ponder long after the film is over.

Long plays AJ Gilbride, a Hollywood writer and producer who is about to face what he believes will be the worst day of his life. His pleasant drive is interrupted by a phone call from his agent telling him that there will be an article in the Hollywood Reporter about his leading lady in a promising series pilot, which will now accuse him of rape. As AJ processes his shock and anger, the fallout comes fast and hard: her show is canceled and no one wants to work with him. No more money is coming in and AJ is on the verge of going broke. In order to mount the aggressive defense he desires against his accuser, he must liquidate his assets. This includes a certain house in Detroit, on Barbary Street.

When AJ’s connection to the plot is revealed and he heads to the house, barbarian also makes it clear that he’s scum, and he’s almost certainly guilty of assaulting his co-star, even if he’s blind to their experience: he insists he’s only “sexually aggressive” because he’s not No accepted for an answer. So when he makes the same discoveries that Tess and Keith made before him, audience sympathy is said to change. It’s hard not to hope what’s lurking under the house gets this guy. Finally it finds him – and Tess, who is still alive, too. And then there is one final turning point in history, back to the 1980s.

Who is the real monster?

Image: 20th Century Studios

barbarianThe final main character of is Frank, an apparently single man who lived in the Barbary Street house in the 1980s, when the neighborhood was an idyllic, thriving suburb. He has pledged to stay indoors even as his wealthy neighbors begin their white escape, as the changing neighborhood puts their dream of a white picket in jeopardy.

However, Frank has other tainted interests: he is a predator and serial killer who kidnaps unsuspecting women and locks them in a secret maze in his basement, where he forces them to have his children. He’s been doing this for years, raping and fathering until the end result is the mother, the initially monstrous creature lurking in the modern tunnels. In the third act of the film, she turns out to be a poor fellow who tries to bring others into her hiding place so that she can mother them. That’s all she knows how to do.

(In case you haven’t seen it yet barbarian but if you’re reading these spoilers to know if it’s something you’d like to see, know that despite the horrific subject matter explored, the film does not depict sexual violence. It remains off-screen, though AJ finds and plays one of Frank’s videotapes, and the screams and screams of one of his victims are clearly heard.)

At first, the shock of the house’s history encourages a fairly linear progression of transgression and consequence, from Frank’s horrific crimes to Tess’ pain. Each terrible sin sinks into the bones of a decaying suburb, keeping the home alive as a place of suffering even as its surroundings crumble. But look at the three men in the middle barbarian,

At the far end is Frank, whose uninhibited monstrosity takes on a life of its own that he ultimately can no longer control. When AJ discovers him sickly and decrepit in a room deep in the tunnels beneath the house, he is surrounded by records of his evil and fears the consequences of discovery. When AJ threatens to fill the house with cops, Frank shoots himself.

By being the last to confront Frank, AJ barbarian confronts the two men. AJ’s disgust at Frank’s crime is evident, but Cregger asks: How big is the distance between them really? AJ clearly doesn’t respect his accuser. He goes to a bend with a friend, where he admits to overriding her protests. He calls her drunk after the story broke in the press, despite being clearly told not to do it by his attorney. And he refers to her almost exclusively as “that damn bitch.” Yet he still believes he is a good person, one who has not yet crossed any imaginary threshold from human to monster.

Keith’s role in this is the easiest to overlook barbarian ends with virtually no further revelation about him. From what we can tell, he’s exactly who he said he was: just a dude who double-booked an Airbnb. But a conversation between Keith and Tess lays the groundwork for it barbarian‘s themes of how male claims breed violence. After Keith persuades her to stay at the Airbnb with him, she asks if he would have done the same if she had arrived first and if he would have even considered it risky behavior. Keith, surprised, doesn’t seem to have even thought about it.

Keith’s inattention is his end. When Tess finds the tunnels, she makes her way upstairs in a panic and tells him they have to leave the house. But he refuses to take her seriously and insists he check what’s going on before they do anything. Worried about him, Tess waits and doesn’t flee the house. He would have survived if he had believed her. And she would have been spared a lot of suffering if he hadn’t spoken so pointedly, symbolically derogatory, about the fact that her personal experience wasn’t enough proof for him.

The terror of the status quo

Photo: 20th Century Studios

Again and again, barbarian wraps around this core idea of ​​male entitlement and how its consequences spiral outward. It plays on viewers’ sympathies, as each new piece of characters’ backstory can cause contempt to turn to pity, only to swing back again. A less thoughtful film could have launched a redemption arc and saved Tess with AJ facing the ultimate ending of his transgressions. in the barbarian, the opposite happens: he speaks passionately about his need to right his mistakes and help the people he harmed, but then he immediately sacrifices Tess to have a chance at surviving the mother. For him nothing connects him with Frank. He sees himself as the victim of a woman who has it in for him. Complaint as an ideology is terribly difficult to shake once it has taken root.

seen through this lens, barbarian becomes a film about how male entitlement and indifference helped build a world where evil can fester and rot. It’s present in the desire for a carefully tended suburb that Frank’s neighbor gives up once he sees it changing. It is present in the police force, who answer Tess’s call for help but prove hostile and dismissive of someone she clearly sees as a lower-class black woman unworthy of her service or protection. It is visible in that little piece of the American dream that compels a man to claim a property as his own, a place to live out his dreams or nightmares. It grows stronger each time a woman is disregarded to support a patriarchal status quo.

Tess ultimately survives AJ’s attack, as does The Mother, who appears to want to do what she’s always done: bring Tess back to her lair to care for her and tend her wounds. barbarian ends abruptly when Tess gets her hands on a gun and kills the mother in her most tender, human moment. It doesn’t feel like a win. It feels like a desperate decision from a woman who has run out of options. For decades before she even set foot in the Barbary Street home, Tess’s options were being overruled by men with only their own best interests at heart. And she’s been limited even by the men she meets in the present, even the kindest. By killing the woman in the story who suffered the most at the hands of these men, Tess doesn’t seem free at last. She is just another consequence of the barbarians who built the world around her.