Barbarian (2022)

Posted By: brian@brianschell.com October 27, 2022

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

A young woman rents a house to stay in while she’s working in town. We find out right away there’s been an apparent mistake and there’s already a guy there who also rented it. And then things happen. This movie is really great. Excellent cast, good story, and directed in a unique way that puts things together. Check this one out for sure.

Synopsis

Tess checks her phone about her rental place. It’s dark and pouring rain, so she hurries to the door. The key isn’t in the lockbox, so something isn’t right. The neighbors’ houses are all very dark; it looks like no one else lives around here. There’s a light on inside the house, so she rings the bell.

A guy named Keith answers the door; he’s renting the place. They’ve both booked the same place at the same time from different companies. She goes inside to work it out with the rental people. They both compare their reservation emails, and they’re both the same. He offers to let her stay a while until she works out where to go. She’s fairly paranoid about spending the night in the house with a strange man, so she takes a photo of Keith’s driver’s license.

Keith seems very reasonable and understanding of her precautions around him. She’s in town for a research position, and he helped found a band that she’s going to research. They soon hit it off. Eventually, it’s bedtime, and she takes the bedroom, and he takes the couch in the living room.

Late that night, Tess wakes up and sees her door is open. She hears Keith moaning outside her room and goes out to investigate. He’s simply having a nightmare. The next morning, she wakes up and finds that Keith has left for the day. She goes to her interview and finds that this is the worst-looking neighborhood in Detroit. All the other houses for blocks around are burned out or abandoned. Catherine, the woman doing the interview, warns her about that neighborhood.

She returns home and has a brief encounter with a scary guy outside. She has to go to the basement for some toilet paper and gets locked in down there. She searches for some tools to open the door but instead finds a secret door. Behind that, she finds a filthy bed, a bucket, and a video camera. It’s some kind of cell.

Keith returns, and she tells him what she found. He goes downstairs to look, but doesn’t answer when she calls for him. She doesn’t want to, but goes downstairs anyway and finds– another secret door! This one leads to a dark stone stairway down into the sub-sub-basement. She hears Keith calling for help.

She finds Keith, and he says someone else is down there, and they bit him. Suddenly, a naked woman with long hair runs out of the darkness and smashes his head into the stone wall repeatedly (Guess he wasn’t in on it after all).

We abruptly cut to sunny California, with AJ driving in his convertible down the highway. He gets a call telling him he’s fired from his new show. There are serious allegations of rape against him from an actress in the project. His financial advisor is dropping him as well. He can’t afford his California house anymore, but he has some properties in Detroit, so he goes there to sell them. It turns out that he’s the owner of the house from before.

It’s clear that someone has been staying there, which confuses him. He calls the rental place, and they say it’s been a few weeks since they rented to anyone. He goes through Keith and Tess’s things and makes himself at home. He hears someone in the basement and assumes it’s squatters; he also soon finds the secret door. He thinks this might increase the house’s property value – more square footage! As he’s measuring, he finds the other secret door.

He gets a little farther than Tess did and he finds a room with light and a working TV playing a breastfeeding instructional video. He soon runs into the woman, but his flashlight starts to fail. He falls into a trap and meets Tess.

We flashback to when the neighborhood was all new and clean– in the 80s. Frank goes to the store and buys diapers and plastic sheets. He follows a woman home and puts on a repairman’s outfit. The woman lets him in, and he unlocks the bathroom window then leaves. We see that he’s already got someone locked up in his basement.

Back in the dungeon, the crazy “Mother” forces AJ to drink from a bottle. Mother jumps down and hugs Tess like a baby. The Mother pulls AJ away to torment him, and Tess climbs out of the hole. She runs all the way upstairs to the locked door, and the homeless guy pulls her out. Turns out, the homeless guy knew about the house all along. “She ain’t even the worst thing that’s in there! She comes out at night, but don’t you be around here when it gets dark.”

AJ uses the light on his phone and tries to find a way out, but he goes the wrong way. Tess makes it to a phone, but she’s so filthy the cops think she’s on drugs or something and don’t believe her. So, the cops leave Tess back at the house, thinking she’s a crackhead. As night falls, she breaks a window, gets her car keys, and drives away– just as Mother storms out of the house. That goes badly for both of them.

AJ finds Frank, much older and lying in bed, and he’s got a whole collection of torture videos. Frank pulls out a gun and shoots himself. AJ now has the gun. Assuming Mother is dead, Tess goes back downstairs, and AJ accidentally shoots her.

The two make it out to the street and start walking. They find the homeless man, whose name is Andre. He says that “Mother” is Frank’s daughter, and they’ve been down there for forty years, but they’re safe there at his hideaway. Mother almost immediately breaks in, tears Andre’s arm off, and beats him to death with it.

The two climb up on a water tower, and AJ throws Tess off as a distraction; Mother dives off after her. AJ goes down, but Mother’s still not dead; she pokes out his eyes and squashes his head. Tess gets the gun and shoots Mother in the head.

Commentary

We live about an hour away from Detroit, and the film was pretty realistic, believe it or not, for some areas of town. The depictions of the police are pretty much spot-on as well. The acting was excellent, and the gore, what there is of it, is also good. The story all mostly makes sense, although we couldn’t figure out why Mother was so crazy strong.

As far as loose ends are concerned, we got a very brief glimpse of Frank, the original owner of the house, but it felt like a lot was missing here; why didn’t we get more of him?

The film starts one way and goes completely off the rails after a while. The second half definitely has “As Above So Below” and “Don’t Breathe” vibes. The surprises just keep coming with this one, and it’s on my shortlist for “best horror film” of 2022 so far.