Barbarian: There Goes The Neighborhood

My biggest complaint about Hellhole last week was its complete and utter absence of surprise. It tells exactly the story you think it’s going to tell in exactly the way you think it’s going to tell it (until the very end, but that almost sabotages the film rather than helping it), and I think the only reason I wasn’t able to anticipate actual lines of dialogue was that it was subtitled from the original Polish, and cliches often get lost in translation.

So this week I have Barbarian, which…it doesn’t exactly have the opposite problem, but it doesn’t not have the opposite problem. Basically, it’s an ambitious effort that does a number of things well in a novel fashion, but isn’t quite a slam-dunk because some of its more audacious moments don’t quite land.

Tess is in Detroit for a job interview, for a position working as a researcher on a documentary film. She gets in late at night, and she’s confirming details for the AirBnB she’s rented. She texts them that she’s there, they give her the code to the key safe, all good. She parks in front of the house - a cute little one-bedroom place - and opens up the key safe, only to find it empty. Then it starts to rain. Locked out of the house in a strange city in the middle of the night, in the middle of a rain storm, the night before her big interview. So she goes back out to her car to try and get it sorted out, when she sees a light go on in the house. She runs up and starts pounding on the door, and a man opens it up. His name’s Keith, and he booked the same house for the same night on HomeAway. They’ve been double-booked. So that’s awkward.

So it’s just Tess…a young woman in a strange house in a strange city in the middle of the night, finding herself face-to-face with a stranger who just happens to be there already. He seems friendly.

He asks Tess, “do I look like some kind of monster?”

It’s hard to talk about this one in much detail,  because the less you know about it going in, the better. Seriously, don’t even look at the IMDB listing before you watch it if you can help it. It’s a film that takes a couple of sharp narrative turns that contribute as much to a sense of overall uneasiness as the events of the story itself. They aren’t twists, exactly - in some ways this is actually a very straightforward story told in an off-kilter way. But the off-kilter narrative approach works to the extent that it wrong-foots the viewer, denies us the comfort that comes with the familiarity of a certain kind of story. You think you know how this is going to go, but you don’t, not really.

That said, just like it’s really a pretty straightforward story, it’s also got some pretty conventional beats to it, at least at first. It even lays it on a little thick at first with lots of ominous music and startles accompanied by sharp musical stings, but about halfway through the first act it starts to settle into a good sense of restraint. Once the initial obviousness is out of their system, .the filmmakers know when to let a setting or a detail or a reveal do all the work without overplaying it, and Tess is smarter than your typical horror-movie protagonist, acting exactly like a woman in a rented house with a strange man would reasonably act, even to the point of upending one particular horror cliché to a degree that got a laugh from me. And the story itself is told in crisp fashion, with very little wasted time or energy. Little moments convey a lot. It’s one of those stories where the details all slot together into a larger narrative mechanism, where little things end up being important later in a way that doesn’t feel contrived. The shot gets held long enough that you know this is going to mean something later, but it’s not usually clear exactly what, so when the payoff comes it’s satisfying. There are a couple of beats you’ll see coming, but they aren’t large ones, and there are just as many that will surprise.

It’s got a well-considered visual sense too. It’s shot mostly in shades of deep shadow and gloom, with dimly lit interiors to the house, nights that are solid black except for the sparsest of streetlights throwing the smallest pools of light, overcast days and long, dark corridors, with a soundtrack of deep synthesizer swells and prickly high frequencies…except when it isn’t that at all. About all I can really say is that it’s a film of contrasts, many of which work to drive a sense of discomfort and foreboding through sharp tonal shifts in the filmmaking. And most of these work, though not all. They’re jarring, but not too confusing. Where I think they’re the least effective is around the characters. Most of the performances are suitably restrained and grounded, but there’s at least one that is overly broad, to the degree that this character feels dropped in from another movie. It’s easily the film’s biggest liability, and I think that’s because the character sort of brings that other movie into this one, in a way that undercuts the dread and uneasiness managed by the first act. You get the sense that it’s trying to mix horror and comedy the way something like Us did (and did much more effectively), but where Us punctuated horror with stabs of comedy in a way that elicited nervous, otherwise-I’m-going-to-scream laughter, this film sort of shifts gears into comedy and backgrounds the horror instead, and that loses some of the film’s biggest strengths. The character is pretty well-realized and a more grounded take on it could fit really nicely into this film, but as it is it’s pretty distracting. One of the narrative turns could have benefited from being a little more fleshed out too, it communicates something economically (this film’s mostly pretty good about showing instead of telling) but I think going a little bit more into it could have restored some of the unease lost during the second act. And as the film goes on, it’s also a little on-the-nose with its messaging about suburbia and urban decay and the dangers of being part of a minority group in the face of institutional indifference. Not that that’s a bad note to hit, not at all, but it’s a little obvious in that respect and though not enough to ruin the movie, it was a little distracting.

As weird as it sounds, I’d like to see the filmmakers tackle something a little closer to conventional horror, because there’s evidence here that they have the chops to pull that off with style. What we have here is sort of a mixed bag, but in an interesting way. When it works, it works quite well and has some audacity to it, which is nice to see. Not all of the audacity works to its benefit, but I’d rather see a film screw up trying to do something interesting than screw up by bungling the obvious and predictable.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon