REVIEW:
It’s Heretic meets Don’t Breathe, in a movie that starts out better than both of those movies, but by the time it crosses the finish line, ends up being much much worse. This one has an interesting enough premise. Two people double book the same Air B N B, rental house for a couple of days, at the same time. And since it’s the middle of the night when one of them shows up, she decides to stay there in the house with a stranger.
Tess, our protagonist, wakes up in the middle of the night to find her bedroom door opened. She approaches Keith, the other person occupying the house, and he says it wasn’t him. The next day, Tess goes wandering around the house and finds a hidden hallway in the basement. There’s even a bloody mattress and a camera down there. She gets locked in the basement, and when Keith shows up to help her, she tells him what she found. That’s when he goes down to check it out himself.
Without giving anything away, this movie becomes about the situation going on down in the basement. The threat isn’t either one of our main characters, so the idea of staying at a place with a stranger is more of a red herring than an actual problem, but it sure gets things started in an interesting way. Instead, this movie, and specifically the second half is all about something very disturbing happening under the house.
Heretic, with Hugh Grant, was also about a mysterious house with strange going ons in the basement. it also involved multiple layers of staircases and hidden hallways down there. But that movie was far better than this one, since it was peppered with interesting conversations and monologues, mostly delivered by Grant. His “Monopoly through the years” rant was especially memorable. Barbarian doesn’t have anything like that. In fact, like Heretic, it is best when it stays grounded on the first floor, before ever going into the basement. That’s when it is relatable.
At about the halfway point of the movie, they bring in a new main character and a new storyline, which is definitely creative. Suddenly we are following a whole other person, played by Justin Long, and for a time, we don’t know how he’s connected to anything that came previously. Long’s convertible, shore-line drive, where he talks on the phone about a sexual harassment case, is once again interesting. But then he gets to the house (yes, the same house,) and the two stories connect, and we are back in this ridiculous mess involving the basement.
It’s a strange thing when the best scenes in a horror movie have very little to do with the horror elements. The story of the strangers double booking the house is interesting. The story of Long’s sexual harassment case sounds interesting. But the story of the basement is mostly just disturbing and gross.
This movie might have worked better as a thriller than a horror movie. I wonder what would have happened if they ditched the whole basement story and had Ling show up at his house (yes, he’s the owner,) to find two strangers occupying his house that he had no idea about. As far as the thriller aspects, this director is clearly talented. A few years later, he went onto make Weapons, and it was far superior, taking the technique of cross cutting stories to the next level, showing us one story, then doubling back to another character in that story and showing us his or her perspective. That was a great movie. This one, Barbarian, on the other hand, not so much. It had potential and a nice setup, but definitely got worse as it went on.