By Ezra Haber Glenn

As with many horror and action films (and probably much of real life), the build-up is better than the eventual resolution/climax.

Barbarian, directed by Zach Cregger. Screening at Somerville Theatre and AMC Assembly Row.

Justin Long in a scene from Barbarian. Photo: 20th Century Studios

Barbarian, the new horror film by Zach Cregger, turns an everyday sharing economy SNAFU into an ever-deepening descent into fear, horror, psychological torment, and depravity. Depending on your tolerance for suspense and danger, it will either amuse, captivate, or terrorize you. It will also drive you crazy because you can’t prevent characters from making bad choices.

It’s hard to describe too much without quickly stumbling into a minefield of spoilers, but the basic setup gives you a pretty good sense of what you’re getting into. Following a Stranger Things–inspired title sequence (aside: new ways must be found to evoke 1980s-era horror beyond this overused font-set…), we meet a seemingly savvy young woman traveling alone to Detroit for a job interview. Illuminated only by her phone as she checks the reservation from her car, Tess Marshall (played by Georgina Campbell) walks up to the porch of her Airbnb late on a rainy night, only to discover that the home is already occupied by another guest, Keith Toshko (Bill Skarsgård). (He’d booked the place for this same night, albeit through a different app platform.) He’s mildly confused and perturbed by the situation but suggests they roll with it, blending annoyance with, say, apologetic bemusement as Tess berates and questions him in an almost accusatory vein.

Keith presents Tess with a classic horror/fairy-tale trope. He’s like a sweet-tongued wolf. He’s cute and seems harmless, but everything about the situation is so not-right, and every neuron of good sense silently screams for her to just “Get Out.” (Later in the film, in the cultural tradition of horror audience talk-back, there’s a strangely timely reference to Jordan Peele’s more recent cautionary tale. Tess resolves to steer clear of dangerous temptation with a single word, “Nope.”) Skarsgård combines just the right blend of menace and attraction to pull off this delicate balance: he’s cute but awkward — and seems legitimately hurt that she is suspicious of his pure motives. Or is this just a manipulative “wounded puppy” ploy? Is he being chivalrous, or sleazy? Or perhaps this is a distinction without a difference…? (The actor is particularly well cast here: this is the same guy who played Pennywise the creepy killer clown in the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s It, only to be subsequently named one of the 100 sexiest men in the world the following year.)

In the end, Keith’s charm and the contrived circumstances — or perhaps the weaving loom of fate — win over Tess’s better judgment, at least temporarily. It’s late at night, a storm is coming, and every other hotel in town seems booked for a big convention. What could be the harm in sharing a house with a cute stranger for the night? (There’s even a complimentary bottle of wine from the host…)

To be clear: this movie could be subtitled “a Sequence of Increasingly Bad Decisions.” If you’re the sort of person who finds it uncomfortable to sit powerlessly watching people do the wrong things, save yourself the money and go see something else. But the fact is that these failures of good judgment are the exact type of disbelief that the genre asks us to be willing to suspend, just as a romance requires us to believe in destiny and love at first sight. (For an insightful and amusing treatment of this dynamic in horror films, see the Goddard/Whedon collaboration, The Cabin in the Woods.)

From this point, the plot descends — quite literally — to probe darker and darker aspects of humanity, from temptation and fear straight on to brutality, sadism, and heartless abandonment. Tess stays the night, wanders into the basement, and eventually discovers a series of secret doors, dark stairways, rough-hewn tunnels, hidden rooms, sordid sex/torture dungeons, bloody trails, and worse, which she and Keith explore in turn. (You see what I mean about bad choices….) There’s a lot to unpack here in a pretty jumbled and tangled — but nevertheless rich — mess of ideas and influences. Date-night audiences and film-school podcasters alike will enjoy tracing references to perverted motherhood via Freudian psychology à la Hitchcock’s Psycho, the twisted monstrosities of unnatural nature from It’s Alive and Prophecy, and even the reproachful social commentary of Bong Joon-ho’s recently-celebrated Parasite. (The name “Barbarian” only barely seems to fit the story here. Perhaps the word suggests a parallelism of structures and themes between these two similarly titled works: Who is the barbarian? Who is the parasite?)

Beyond the shared motifs of dark underground tunnels (and worse) lurking just below our seemingly calm everyday existence, the comparison with Parasite is salient in other ways, given Barbarian‘s setting in the abandoned Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit. When dawn breaks and Tess surveys the street, she realizes that this home is the sole occupied structure in a sea of blight and decay. Practically, the location provides the urban equivalent of horror’s classic cabin in the woods or remote space station: in the postindustrial ghost town, no one can hear you scream. But on a deeper level, these surroundings hint at much more, reminding us of the routinized violence — economic, social, and psychological — inflicted on so many once vibrant urban communities, in plain sight. The horrific is ignored.

In an innovative twist, the plot breaks abruptly a third of the way through, making a sharp transition in time and space to follow another character whose story will eventually intersect with that of Keith and Tess. Singing to an old Donovan tune as he confidently drives his sporty convertible, AJ Gilbride is an up-and-coming star in Hollywood, but (as we soon learn) the aspiring actor’s career is on a collision course with his own arrogance, entitlement, and rape-justifying sexism. (AJ is played by Justin Long, who leans into the character’s smarmy smugness, a refreshing opportunity for an actor who got his start playing the nerdy-sweet Brandon in 1999’s Galaxy Quest.) A second break jumps again in time and space to explore the deeper history of the house through a lovingly recreated ’80s flashback, the warm retro hues belying the corruption lurking just below the surface of polite society.

Georgina Campbell in Barbarian. Photo: 20th Century Studios

In addition to capturing the ruin-porn blight of Brightmoor (recreated and spliced from a number of locations, including both Detroit and Sofia, Bulgaria), the freewheeling freeways of Malibu, and the faded glory of Reagan-Era Detroit, Cregger’s direction and cinematography by Zach Kuperstein masterfully track and map the film’s complex underground spaces. Central to this feat is careful attention to light — when to use it, when to block it, how it plays across surfaces and diffuses through emptiness — resulting in some of the most innovative and haunting images in the film. Often, characters carry the source of illumination — a phone, a flashlight — adding additional elements of visual complexity and dynamism, as lights flicker and float (or fall and fail). In one sequence, seemingly designed to call our attention to the challenges of lighting design, Tess arranges a dangling bulb, an old mirror, and some random trash she finds scattered in the basement to jury-rig a precarious setup to illuminate a long tunnel. Be sure to watch this one in a good, dark theater.

As with many horror and action films (and probably much of real life), the build-up is better than the eventual resolution/climax. For the first 60 minutes or so, Cregger expertly titrates suspense, mystery, fear, and even humor in the proper proportions. But once we actually see the monster and get a clear shot of the gore, these tension-building admixtures become — paradoxically — less potent. To paraphrase Neal Stephenson’s definitive statement on the transition from suspense to action, “after that, it was just a car chase.”

Equally problematic is the director’s shorthand that equates aging (female) bodies — and, at times, motherhood — with monstrosity. It’s possible that there is a more nuanced point being made here — women and mothers aren’t horrible, but our sexist society imprisons them and warps their nature, transforming them into grotesques. But this subtlety is lost amid all the blood and gore. To be fair, the latter is not a failing that is unique to Barbarian. But it is odd for a film that ostensibly seeks to expose the true horrors of misogyny to so readily play into the culture’s juvenile fear of old naked ladies and sagging breasts.

But in the end, there’s far more that works than doesn’t, and a lot to chew on afterward as you emerge from the darkness of the theater.

Ezra Haber Glenn is a Lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning, where he teaches a special subject on “The City in Film.” His essays, criticism, and reviews have been published in The Arts Fuse, CityLab, the Journal of the American Planning Association, Bright Lights Film Journal, WBUR’s The ARTery, Experience Magazine, the New York Observer, and Next City. He is the regular film reviewer for Planning magazine, and member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. Follow him on https://www.urbanfilm.org and https://twitter.com/UrbanFilmOrg.