BARBARIAN Is Extremely Wild (And Good-ish)

 First, a preface: I watched the new horror movie "Barbarian" knowing nothing about it except that it's a new horror movie that a lot of people liked. I like it too. I don't love it. I think it's worth watching, and if you are going to watch it, I think it's best done with little to no knowledge of what's going on here. With that being said, I'll be going into detail about the movie's reveals, and what it's trying to say with them.

 We start with a potentially interesting set-up of a rental house booked by two strangers. This does not have an interesting pay-off. The scares in the first half hour or so are dumb and bad and cheap, and that's my main issue holding back full praise for the film. It is the laziest kind of jump scares, where nothing is actually happening but there are music cues telling you things might, and fell-on-the-keyboard stings accompany innocent situations. Eventually, eventually, there is a pay-off in the form of underground tunnels. The first bit of good filmmaking happens here, as Tess (Georgina Campbell) only goes far enough to see evidence of some monstrous human activity, but when she tries to convince Keith (Bill Skarsgård) to leave, he insists on seeing it for himself, and ends up seeing much more. We see just enough to know it's not human, but a true horror monster, and then smash cut to... a TV actor accused of sexual assault having his career ruined. He's an all around shitty person, probably more disgusting than the monster because he's more real. Here, the movie flips from passé haunted house horror to a dark comedy, a welcome change. Cut to... the first days of the Reagan administration, where a creepy old man lives in the now-haunted house, in a then-nice neighborhood, and abducts a woman. Here the movie comes together in the literal sense. 80s man was kidnapping and assaulting women, that's what's up with the human dungeon room, the douchebro TV actor became the landlord of the only nice looking house on the street of what quickly became a slum, and Tess and Bill are caught in the middle. Thematically, now we have at least 2 threads worth following.

 The most obvious to me is the racial housing dynamic. A neighborhood can go from "good" to "bad" as fast as it takes all the white people to move out. A majority black area of a city sees no government money, gets no police attention, and is left to rot. Tess is working for a documentary filmmaker who wants to do a film on inner city Detroit, but freaks out at the mention of actually going to this district of rundown homes. The police assume Tess is a crackhead, because that's what any person in that area would be. The only money changing hands in this neighborhood is going to the TV actor, who is already morally reprehensible before we realize he's been renting out his Detroit property (despite having literally never been there!) to pay for legal fees. I liked the bit where the 80s neighbor said "this neighborhood's going to shit", and it obviously looks much nicer than the version of the neighborhood we're used to from the first two thirds of the film. This stuff is cool, and it's not a theme that horror movies usually dip into.

 Then we have an awful lot of sex crime material, which is right in the text and demands to be heard. The 80s man rapes (and maybe most disturbingly, tapes) many women. The modern TV actor learns this and is disgusted by it, calls the old man a monster, even though what he did is functionally not much different. Bill is a much kinder case, but he had the opportunity to #BelieveWomen and run away with Tess when she got scared. He emphatically did not believe that woman about something bad happening. He had to see it all for himself before he could believe woman, and it gets him killed. My main feeling here is that I'm happy it played out the way it did, because it's easy to see where the movie could have chosen to give the TV actor a redemption arc where he learns the error of his ways, but after the film went to such great lengths to make him unlikable, taking the "easy" way out was the right choice.

 There's some vague nonsense about generational trauma, maybe, I guess. The monster is the product of rape and incest but also only acts like a monster when she's denied her ability to be a mother. By the end the monster is sympathetic, fair enough, but the mothering angle is too vague to do anything for me (and as far as I can tell, it specifically does not tie in to the other stories. The TV actor's mom politely defends him from his criminal accusations). I'm so deeply bored of horror movies where the monster is a metaphor for how hurt people hurt people, but there's so much other stuff going on here that I think it's easy to look past.

 "Barbarian" is a cuckoo bananas mystery that escalates to absurd degrees as it goes. It's a good dark comedy for the third of the film dedicated to showing how awful the TV actor is (Justin Long's performance is great). It's interesting on an intellectual level. Is it scary? Honestly, I have to take a hard NO stance there, which is not a deal breaker to me as far as calling "Barbarian" a very fun time at the movies.

⭐⭐⭐⭐