Barbarian: Movie Review

Cast: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgard, Justin Long

Director: Zach Cregger

The house-set horror Barbarian works best if you know little of its premise.

Georgina Campbell stars as Tess, who's booked an Airbnb the night before a job interview in Detroit.

Arriving late at night in the pouring rain, she finds the place she's due to stay in already inhabited by another tenant, Keith (It's Pennywise himself Skarsgard). 

Unnerved by his presence and unsure of whether to trust him, Tess soon finds she has no choice to stay the night  - but then things begin to take a turn.

Barbarian is interested in providing an entertaining ride that takes some swerves in directions you can't foresee coming. It's cleverly crafted by its creator Cregger as different storylines seemingly intersect.

And Campbell is a sensational lead, albeit one who initially starts off doing the sensible things (doubting Keith, questioning her decisions, locking doors) before lapsing into some out of character narrative necessities aimed at simply propelling the horror elements of the movie forward.

Yet, with its eye firmly on smart decisions and rationale for why a horror film can work to the degree it does, Cregger manages to create the kind of unsettling film that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of the fourth season of the X Files or an audience-filled midnight movie screening.

Unfortunately to discuss the subtexts of the film here would be to spoil some of the elements of this fairground ride (albeit some feeling like very familiar territory cleverly retrodden), and while most of it is less interested in providing cheap jump scares and more concerned with sustained moments of elevated terror and tension, the film's ending feels cheap, silly and unwarranted.

It's almost as if the film is searching for an ending throughout and unable really to fully commit to it.

Granted, the journey is worth the ride, but with a nagging feeling in the final third of the movie that it's more interested in setting up some kind of prequel or anthology series from this world, Barbarian starts to loosen some of the grip it has on you early on.

Barbarian is thrilling, and some of its subversions are cleverly and deftly instigated, but it's let down by its lumpy ending which is more interested in letting off some of the pressure cooker of tension that's boiled up throughout ready to burst. 

While it's nowhere near as bad as some horror films have been in their rush to dump exposition, it does provide a solid outing for a Halloween freak fest and shows that creativity when it works can soar and induce a primal fear of the dark that's just hard to shake.