MOVIE REVIEW: The buried secrets of BARBARIAN make for the year's smartest, scariest horror.
It’s the dead of night and barraging rain on Tess as she pulls up to an inconspicuous, modest house somewhere in Detroit. She’s in town for a job interview and booked the place on Airbnb for an overnight stay that immediately becomes a headache. After running through the storm she finds no keys in the lockbox, no one will answer her calls, and, worst of all, the homestead appears to be already occupied.
The two try to figure out alternative accommodations but eventually land on sharing the house for the time being. They get friendly over mutual interests and wine and go to bed. All is well and good … until it’s not. Tess has a seemingly harmless but strange experience that night.
This is not writer/director Zach Cregger’s debut work in either department but it is his first stab at something of this caliber. Cregger is known by most as a key player inwith the late Trevor Moore.would be a highlight in many accomplished horror directors’ careers; that it’s coming from someone with Cregger’s previous work background is some kind of miracle.
Cregger has also concocted a scathing satire that is neatly baked into the story about the violence of men toward women, the ways it has been historically perpetuated behind closed doors, and the way the suffering they’ve inflicted crawls its way into the light. This fits nicely into one of my favorite types of film: the one concentrated on the dark underbelly of American domesticity and complacency, that looks at the grime and filth under the surface dead-on and confronts the rot.
However, it also succeeds where many other horror films that are ostensibly About Something do not: It remembers to be a good horror movie. The thematics and commentary fit in naturally so as to not take away from this as just a real fucked-up good time. As far as genre flicks that take wild swings to both subvert and celebrate all that makes movies like this great, it’s this year’s. Scary, funny, brutal, smart, and perverse – this is the stuff that future classic horror midnighters are made of.
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