Barbarian (

2022

) ½

I'm a sucker for horror films whose premise could easily be re-purposed for a romantic comedy. Granted this is a vanishingly small niche, and the only other film that I can think of that remotely fits the bill is Audition (1999), though if we're being fussy that film's premise is less a romantic comedy and more serious indie romance. Still, it's nice that the sub-genre has its second addition in the form of Barbarian. The creepy meet-cute here happens when Tess, a young woman who has come to Detroit for a job interview with a documentary filmmaker, goes to check into her Air B&B and finds the key missing from the lock box and the house already occupied by Keith, a guy who booked the same spot through a different service. Since it's late at night and starting to rain, Keith tells Tess she should wait inside, an invitation that Tess would no doubt refuse if the street the Air B&B was located on didn't look like it belonged in Somalia. Indeed, the biggest whopper that Barbarian asks us to swallow is that two people would willingly rent a place in a neighborhood this decrepit.

Unfortunately for Tess, the issues with her living arrangements will not be sorted out quickly: The agency that manages the rental property seems to have closed for the night, and every hotel in town is booked solid thanks to a convention. Who would have guessed that Detroit was the next hot tourist destination? So Tess and Keith are just going to have to spend the night together. Now if this were a romantic comedy Tess would be an uptight career-minded professional while Keith would be a sloppy man-child and the next 80 minutes would consist of them annoying each other in increasingly contrived ways until they finally end up smooching. However, Barbarian, despite its premise is not even trying to pass itself off as a rom-com, indeed it opts to go the opposite route and emphases the obvious danger of their situation. Namely, we're left to wonder when Keith will try to rape and murder Tess and how will she stop him.

Certainly, the film goes out of its way to make Keith as untrustworthy as possible at the beginning. The actor playing him has a bizarre, bug-eyed look to him that reminds me of the main character in Nightcrawler (2014). His movements are characterized by a nervous twitchiness that will make audiences immediately suspicious of his intentions. In addition to looking suspicious he acts pretty damn suspicious too, immediately giving Tess an unasked-for cup of tea. Worse still, he gives every indication of being the sort of guy that would identify as a male feminist.

However, Keith bucks the trend and turns out to be an alright guy and the two bond over a bottle of wine that Keith makes a big show of opening in front of Tess. Indeed, it seems like the pair are on the verge of a romantic moment when Tess lamely announces it's time for bed, and Keith meekly scampers off to sleep on the couch. It is interesting to contrast this scene with the more free-wheeling, sexually debauched films of the 1970s and 1980s like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984). Back in the good old days, Horror film characters would have casual sex at the drop of a hat, now they can't even smooch after a lengthy heart-to-heart. Hell, even the Final Girls, who developed a reputation as virginal as the years rolled by, got more coochie than poor Tess; she doesn't even make it to first base. Somehow, between the end of the Reagan administration and the present day, the American horror film became went from a scintillating bacchanalia to a prudish church meeting.

The next day, after Tess' job interview, things start to get a little weird back at the Air B&B. Tess goes down into the basement and a mysterious gust of wind snaps the door shut behind her, locking her down there. The wind shutting the door is a bizarre moment for this film because it seems almost like the deliberate action of a malevolent entity, indeed at this moment I briefly wondered if the Air B&B was alive al la the house from The Amityville Horror (1979), and was possessed of its own malignant will. However, as we will see the evil lurking within is much more mundane, so the inconvenient wind and the door that locks her in the basement are just extremely unlikely coincidences, made all the more unlikely because it seems to happen whenever somebody sets foot in the basement.

In any event, Tess discovers a secret corridor in the basement that leads to a chamber that looks like it was used to make rape/snuff films, and a stairwell leading even further down into the depths. Tess, displaying an uncommon amount of sense for a horror movie protagonist, decides to get the hell out of there rather than continue to plumb the depths. Fortunately, at this point, Keith gets back home and helps her get out of the basement. However, if Tess is not going to cooperate by being the stock horror movie idiot, then Keith is more than happy to step up to the plate so he marches immediately down into the mysterious abyss. Tess, presumably regretting not smooching him when she had the chance, reluctantly goes after him when he doesn't immediately return. Apparently, I was a bit too generous when I praised her for her good sense earlier. Beneath the house is a labyrinth of passages and corridors, Tess follows Keith's screams until she finds him, bearing a ghastly bite mark. In short order, a jump scare of a deformed, naked woman cuts their story short and punctuates the second act of the film.

Abruptly the focus shifts to AJ, a TV actor who seems like he has everything going for him until he is abruptly #metoo-ed by his new co-star. In a moment his career is in the toilet, and he's facing a costly legal trial just to stay out of jail. Sounds like somebody should have followed the Pence rule, and just never been alone in the same room with his female coworker, a rule of advice that sounds crazy until you're facing down ruination at the hands of an expensive lawsuit. Let's not feel too bad for AJ though, he is a massive douchebag in general, and it certainly seems like he did rape the girl. In any event, our Harvey Weinstein wannabe is gonna need some capital, ASAP, so he books a flight back to his hometown of Detroit to sell his rental properties for a bit of quick cash. One of those properties just happens to be the Air B&B that Tess and Keith were staying at. So naturally, it isn't long before he blunders into the dungeon too.

Eventually, we'll get an explanation for the naked woman and the massive underground dungeon, though it's not exactly the most compelling one I've heard. Apparently, it was built by a guy named Frank, who set it up in the 1980s as a way to house all the women he kidnapped and repeatedly raped. It looks like Frank kept this going for a while too, long enough to sire a whole generation of ill-begotten offspring that he would in turn rape. The result was a whole subterranean, inbreed kingdom beneath the decaying streets of Detroit. The naked woman we saw earlier was just one such product of generational incest. However, this does raise the question of where the rest of Frank's clan is hiding, we only ever see him and the woman from before, surely there should at least be a The Hills Have Eyes (1977) assortment of inbreed freaks living in the dungeon.

The film makes good use of its setting, with the over-strained public services of Detroit providing an answer to the age-old horror movie question of “why don't they just call the police.” Here the cops are too busy dealing with the rampant violent crime to pay much attention to the seemingly insane woman who says there is a massive rape-dungeon under a blighted urban street. Hell, the Detroit Police Department even has trouble providing the basic services, a point which is hammered home in a scene where Tess calls 911 and is unhelpfully informed by the bored-sounding operator that there are no units available to assist her. It would be humorous if it wasn't an increasingly common occurrence in urban centers across the USA. While the gradual Zimbabwe-ification of my country may be upsetting emotionally, as a mechanism for keeping the protagonists of a horror film isolated and alone it's certainly more satisfying than having them wander into a random spot where there just happens to be no cell phone reception.

Sure, the whole premise of underground rape-dungeon beneath the streets of Detroit is hardly original, as Don't Breathe (2016) already snagged the idea half a decade earlier. Indeed, one has to wonder why the filmmakers of Barbarian went with their particular form of a subterranean haunted house when any other would have set it apart from Don't Breathe (2016). That said, Barbarian does a much better job of exploiting its blighted setting. Here Detroit is not just a slummy urban center, it's a tiny failed-state embedded in North America; a place left to rot and fester by the larger world around it, where all manner of evil and savagery are not only possible but likely.

Politically, Barbarian has a message but I'm not entirely sure what that message is. It outright demands that we fear for Tess when she is welcomed into her Air B&B by the strange man who also booked it, and acknowledge the unique peril she as a woman is in, in this situation. While at the same time casually admitting that if she had been Tom instead of Tess she would be sleeping in her car while praying that a crackhead didn't take her for easy pickings. The film touches on the rampant sex pests in the entertainment industry, preying on naive young waifs, while at the same time showing how a baseless accusation could easily destroy an entire career in an afternoon. There is an implication that the rape-dungeon and the patriarch running it are the natural, albeit extreme, product of the early regressive age from which he hailed. Yet when we catch a glimpse of this earlier, regressive age, the city seems far more healthy and functioning than the images we get in the present.

It reminds me of Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018), in the way that it overtly signals social and political messages that are contradicted by the actual content of the film. As with the earlier film I cannot be sure if the filmmaker is a closet reactionary carefully camouflaging his ideas behind a mask of acceptable Hollywood doctrine. Indeed, the mere fact that both Guadagnino and Cregger are being so damn cagey is damning in its own right. If you're regurgitating the party line, you typically don't do it in a hushed tone. Though all this may be just the product of political blinders so tight that the filmmakers don't even realize their film contradicts the message they're trying to preach. In any event, a politically confusing film is more interesting than a lame propaganda piece, and the last thing I want from a horror film is a sanctimonious lecture, so points for Barbarian there.