Barbarian Review

One of the clearest and most evident trends in contemporary cinema, both genre and non-genre, is certainly that of making films which, in a more or less blatant way, make subtext and subtext – very clear, defined and focused subtexts and subtexts – the most central and, paradoxically, evident component of the film. Barbarian is clearly one of these films: a film that uses a genre (horror) and a plot (the one that starts from two people who find themselves having to share the same house due to a double booking on online platforms) to tell a a story which, beneath that surface, addresses another issue (in this case, an issue linked to the role of the male and the masculine, and patriarchal violence, and all those things).
In this, Barbarian could be associated, in an ideal double bill, with Alex Garland’s Men, which precisely used the same genre to address the same issues. However, very different films correspond to similar intentions and conclusions, not so much from the always subjective and questionable point of view of “quality”, but from that of the relationship with the genre itself and with cinema in the broadest sense.
If Garland ended up being the victim of an aesthetic and a message, and established a conflictual relationship with folk horror that he took up and paid homage to, this film written and directed by the American Zach Cregger has a more playful and postmodern approachand this contributes to ensuring that the film’s message – which is clear and strong, even too strong – never manages to gnaw at the surface of entertainment, without prejudice to all its limitations in that sense.

Cregger starts from a banal but well-managed idea: in a suburban neighborhood of Post-default Detroit (which also has its metaphorical meanings, and which has often recently been the scene of horror or quasi-horror stories), a girl named Tess (Georgina Campbell) discovers that in the house she booked online there is already someone else: someone else named Keith, who seems kind and thoughtful, but who has disturbing features, capable of opening glimpses of ambiguity in his gestures and words, Of Bill Skarsgard.
The two embark on a series of advances and retreats that give rise to a strange dance full of suspense, but at that point Cregger opens – literally – the first of many doors which, in the film, will lead protagonists and spectators into new and differently frightening realities. And not only will the exploration of new spaces be an opportunity to consistently tell different nuances of horror, but it will lead to a sort of restarting the film on at least two separate occasions: the first when the actor accused of harassment played by Justin Long; the second when we are told a story set in the early eighties with a protagonist Richard Brake.

What unites the stories of all these characters is, on the surface of things, the house from which it all began and the horrible secrets it hides, while at an immediately underlying level, only infinitesimally less superficial, there is a male nature whose initial ambiguity it reveals itself more and more for what it is: an innate monstrosity, expressed in different forms.
Barbarian’s thesis is clear: even the most seemingly innocent male character has behaviors that contribute to the female protagonist getting into trouble. Clear, evident, declared. Maybe she’s right, but she’s hyped up too much. A bit like in Men.
Only, paradoxically, Cregger seems to take everything, including the thesis, less seriously than Garland did. He seems to want to play more, also with the skills and expectations of his spectators. With a touch of cunning, with some slips of taste and a pinch of quackery, but without ever being annoying or intrusive. And with the ability to affirm, feminist issues aside, that the rot that the glittering and glossy America of Reagan’s hedonism has always hidden in the cellar is now free to roam the desolate streets of a country that has experienced, and is still experiencing, a profound crisis, and not only economic.