|Jay Ditzer|
Barbarian plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, October 18th, through Sunday, October 20th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
Half the fun (well, maybe a quarter of the fun) of going to the movies is the trailers shown before the main event. Do I want to see—or avoid—a new release? Well-made trailers are almost like tiny little movies themselves, and indeed, there’s an art to making a good trailer. The first rule of good trailers is “let viewers know what the movie is about but try not to give away too much.” There’s a reason they call them “teasers.”
In spring of 2022, 20th Century Studios released a teaser for their then-upcoming horror movie Barbarian. The most interesting thing about this trailer? The viewer couldn’t understand how good of a trailer it was until they had seen the full movie.
THE TRAILER
It begins with a peal of thunder and a nighttime shot of a lonely little house. A woman (Georgina Campbell) with a rolling suitcase steps onto its porch, enters the combination in a key lockbox, and finds it empty. “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” she mutters. She rings (and rings) the doorbell. A groggy young man cautiously opens the door. The man is played by Bill Skarsgård, so your spider-sense should tingle a little bit. The woman verifies the address, 476 Barbary (Barbary / Barbarian… IS THIS A PORTENT?), and we figure there’s been a snafu with an Airbnb-type rental property.
If you say “Airbnb” and “barbarian” over and over, they start to sound the same—definitely a portent.
The man invites the woman inside, since it’s night and it’s raining. CSNY’s “Our House” fades up on the soundtrack. She steps inside. We see shots of the woman looking around the house, which appears normal enough. They introduce themselves—he’s Keith, she’s Tess. Keith volunteers to sleep on the couch and lets Tess have the bedroom, helpfully mentioning that its door has a lock. We see Tess snooping through dresser drawers. She finds Keith’s driver’s license and she takes a picture of it with her smartphone, and as we hear the little shutter-click noise, “Our House” cuts out on the line “By the evening sunshine through… .” She lies down in bed. Cut to black.
Then comes the sound of a door creaking open. Tess sits up in bed and we hear footsteps running away. An ominous, low tone swells on the soundtrack. We see Tess looking down into a basement. “Keith…?” She opens what appears to be a secret door. A title card ridiculously announcing “FROM A PRODUCER OF IT” pops on screen. Cut back to Tess exploring with her phone’s flashlight. Another secret door. The sound of dripping water. We peek over a flight of stairs. “Help me,” Keith moans faintly. Another ridiculous title card informs us that “…AND AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF THE GRUDGE…” Tess looks for Keith. “…AND THE RING.”
Tess keeps walking down a dark hallway that looks like a shortcut to Hell. Suddenly, Keith comes crawling toward us and the music swells. Then a series of quick cuts: Tess further exploring the basement, a video camera, a VHS tape being put into a VCR, what looks like a makeshift operating room, some guy we’ve never seen before shining his cellphone’s flashlight and screaming in terror, Tess running… and then it cuts to a wide shot of the front of the house, except this time it’s a bright, sunny day and the house looks decidedly pleasant and non-threatening. We then get a quick shot of Tess screaming.
BARBARIAN.
ONLY IN THEATERS AUGUST 31.
I saw this trailer several times during that spring and summer and while I certainly didn’t hate it, the teaser didn’t herald Barbarian as a must-see cinematic gem. Barbarian was also delayed a bit and didn’t hit theaters until Sept. 9. Nevertheless, on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2022, I watched Barbarian with my friend Fred. I assumed the trailer had probably given away half of the plot and I hoped that the movie would at least be serviceable and not, you know, stupid.
Here’s where things get good… before you sit back and realize that things simultaneously do, in fact, get a little stupid.
ACT 1
[From this point forward, there are many, many spoilers for Barbarian. You’ve been warned.]
As seen in the trailer, Barbarian begins with Tess arriving at the Airbnb to discover that it has been double-booked, and, not to put too fine a point on it, the first third of Barbarian is pretty much the trailer expanded and fleshed-out from 3 minutes and change to 40 minutes, except there’s a decidedly rom-com “meet cute” tone as Tess gets to know Keith over a bottle of wine. In fact, you could take the scenes from the first act, re-edit them a bit, put a vintage upbeat pop tune on the soundtrack (“Walking on Sunshine,” maybe) and make a fake trailer for a fake rom-com.
“There’s always gonna be people that project some kind of dynamic onto us that serves them,” Keith says to Tess meta-textually toward the end of the first act, and I feel bad for projecting a meet-cute vibe on them. “It’s up to us if we want to play ball or not.”
Spoiler: They don’t play ball.
This is when the scary stuff begins in earnest. For starters, daylight shows us that the house is in a run-down Detroit neighborhood called Brightmoor. Also, not only are there secret rooms in the basement, but this basement has its own basement, and there are several ominous indicators—dirty mattresses, rusty kennel cages, excrement-stained buckets, incongruous video cameras, bloody handprints—that this hidden network can’t be explained away as “extra storage.”
Tess finds these secret areas and wisely decides to check the fuck out of this rental and leave a very scathing one-star review. However, Keith shows up and insists on investigating for himself. He seemingly vanishes and Tess tries to find him, and she does, when a terrified Keith comes crawling out of a dark tunnel whispering, “Somebody’s down here, something bit me,” right before a heretofore unseen humanoid creature runs up behind him and repeatedly slams his head into the walls. The monster drops what’s left of Keith and then shrieks in Tess’s face. Cut to black.
WTF? If you try to reconcile the film and its trailer, you might conclude, however momentarily, that Barbarian is a very short movie, but we’ve still got about an hour to go. The rug has been pulled out from the viewer’s expectations. We now have no idea what to expect. Well-played, producer of IT and executive producer of The Grudge and The Ring.
ACT 2
Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi,” an upbeat major-key, reggae-tinged, pop song begins playing under a still-black screen. We fade in on a beauty shot of the ocean, pulling back to reveal that Donovan is playing on the stereo of a convertible being driven by Justin Long. What the hell is he doing here?
Long, arguably the biggest “name” in the cast, IS in the trailer for maybe 3 seconds, but his appearance is so brief you don’t register that it’s him unless you watch the trailer again after watching the movie. Long’s name is also on the Barbarian poster, but 1) I don’t really pay attention to new movie posters and 2) I think the studio screwed up including his name because, again, the sudden gear-change is a nice surprise that disorients the viewer.
His character is singing along all footloose and fancy free when he gets a call from his managers. Long is playing an actor named A.J. who just shot a pilot but the exposition tells us that an actress said he was sexually aggressive, and she has complained to the studio and the press.
A.J.’s reaction tells us that he’s an entitled jackass who probably did behave inappropriately with the actress. And we learn that A.J. is fucked—a scene with his accountant confirms that assumption—so he has to fly to Detroit in the hopes of liquidating some of his investments.
Wait, Detroit? You don’t suppose A.J. owns the worst Airbnb ever?
Indeed he does. And soon he too goes exploring in that creepy basement. However, when A.J. stumbles upon the secret rooms and corridors with bloody handprints, he is elated: More square footage = higher resale value!
Measuring tape and flashlight in hand, he keeps exploring and finds a room with a TV playing an educational breastfeeding video. Now he’s getting creeped out. Then his tape measure spools back and he panics, running further into the network of tunnels. The monster from Act 1 starts chasing him, A.J. falls in a pit (?) and the monster closes a gate on top of the hole. A.J. is disoriented, freaking out, and when his flashlight illuminates a dirty and disheveled Tess, also stuck in the hole, she shushes him.
Cut to black.
ACT 3
Open on an exterior shot of 476 Barbary, but this time Blightmoor looks like Brightmoor proper. Also, it’s shot in a different aspect ratio. A stern-looking guy named Frank (Richard Brake) gets into a big 70s-style sedan and the car radio says that Reagan has inherited the worst economy in 50 years. Cool, we’re gonna get the origin story for this house.
Frank goes to a hardware store. He’s shopping for stuff like plastic sheets and diapers. Oh dear. He buys his supplies and puts them in his car. A woman across the street catches his sketchy attention. He follows her home, pulls some power company coveralls out of the trunk of his car, approaches the front door, tells the woman there’s an issue. Once inside, he unlocks a window, then leaves.
Frank arrives back home at 476 Barbary. A neighbor tells him they’re moving because the neighborhood is going to hell. Frank says he’s staying put. He goes inside. We hear a woman screaming as Frank heads down into the basement.
The dots are unpleasantly starting to connect, right?
ACT 4
The monster sends a baby bottle down to Tess and A.J., who refuses to take a swig—rightfully so, but then the monster jumps down, drags him to the bedroom with the breast-feeding video and makes A.J. suckle from her breast. (HOW IS THIS VHS TAPE THAT HAS APPARENTLY BEEN ON A CONTINUOUS LOOP FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS NOT DETERIORATED ALL TO SHIT)
As A.J. is getting his dairy on, Tess manages to escape, squirming partially through the basement window. An unknown figure pulls her out just as the Mother reaches for her.
Meanwhile, A.J. finds a room in which Frank, now aged and bed-ridden, is laid up. We see a shelf of VHS tapes with labels like “Ruby,” “Brenda,” and “Asian Biter.” A.J. pushes a tape labeled “Gas Station Redhead” into another inexplicably fully operational VCR. A woman screams on the VHS tape; A.J. realizes what Frank’s “hobby” was as Frank finds a gun and commits suicide.
Tess goes back for A.J., who accidentally shoots her with Frank’s handgun. No good deed goes unpunished. A.J. helps Tess out of the house. The monster is nowhere to be found, because horror movie. They hide out with a homeless man in his camp under a water tower but the Mother comes barging in and rips off his arm and beats him to death with it—there’s no kill like overkill. A.J. and Tess climb the water tower. Tess falls behind. A.J. drops the gun and it looks like the end for our heroes.
True to character, A.J. rationalizes that he can escape if Tess provides a distraction, so he shoves her from the top of the tower. She plummets in slow motion but the Mother jumps after her. Fade to black.
A.J. looks sees that Tess is somehow lying on top of the Mother. A.J. runs down to her and immediately starts prevaricating: “I didn’t even let go; you started to slip!” Jackass.
The Mother suddenly pops up (because falling from a 10-story height is easily surviviable), digs her thumbs into A.J.’s eyes and then rips his head in half (vertically—the hard way). So no redemption arc for him. She then tries to get Tess to go back to the house. Tess, not unsympathetically, says she can’t. She gets the gun and points it at the Mother’s face. The Mother kisses her fingertip, touches Tess’s forehead and says, “Baby.” Tess shoots. BANG! “Be My Baby” needle drop.
Title card: WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ZACH CREGGER
(I have no proof of this, but I’m pretty certain they licensed the rights to whatever song with the word “baby” in its title that fit their budget. I also think it immediately cheapens and undercuts the poignancy of the Mother croaking out “baby”—the monster is a victim here, too.)
Cut back to Tess walking away as the credits roll (whadayaknow, Bill Skarsgård is one of several executive producers) and the viewer braces themselves for a mid- or post-credits stinger that mercifully doesn’t happen. Barbarian has ended.
Overall, I really liked Barbarian, but there were a couple of massive problems that have nagged me ever since.
1. FRANK’S COMPOUND
Barbarian is just one of umpteen movies in which somebody has somehow managed to single-handedly build an elaborate underground complex complete with ventilation, soundproofing, security cameras, electricity, toilets and running water, and even Wi-Fi.
From what little we see, Frank is a self-sufficient fellow, but he did all that construction with a backhoe and sociopathic ambitions? Add to this that Frank apparently built his labyrinth by himself, without anyone noticing, and we’re really testing the limits of one’s willing suspension of disbelief. Putting it differently, twenty-four people are listed under “construction” in the credits, and they almost certainly built Frank’s complex on a soundstage, not two stories underground.
2. THE MOTHER
I’m pretty certain that decades of human inbreeding would result in offspring with severe physical and developmental disabilities, not a horror-movie monster with superhuman strength and agility (and possibly flight; see below). I’m not a geneticist or animal husbandry expert, but come on.
3. THE FALL FROM THE WATER TOWER
Here’s the big one. I’m no physicist either, but unless you can teleport or you have super-powers, if you jump from a tall structure after another person has jumped (or been pushed) from that same structure, you can’t pass them on your way down, hit the ground before they do and then catch them. This isn’t a “Road Runner” cartoon and that’s not how gravity works. What it is is sloppy screenwriting and should have been corrected—perhaps by an executive producer of The Grudge?
THE VERDICT
When you watch a lot of movies (and television), you see a lot of tropes over and over. It’s what makes substandard works seem formulaic or unoriginal. Had the trailer spelled out the bigger picture, nobody would be talking about Barbarian today.
What we have here is a case of structure over story. I won’t say it’s a case of style over substance; Barbarian has much to recommend it, even to jaded viewers like me. However, it’s not what happens in Barbarian but how it’s presented to the viewer. Not to flog a dead premise but disguising the trailer as a preview of a standard-issue horror movie (I even assumed it had a supernatural angle) was a very clever and very effective device that elevates Barbarian, at least during your first viewing, and presenting the story nonchronologically seals the deal.
Afterall, if you pick at the loose threads in almost any movie, you’ll find stuff to complain about, so the viewer needs to understand when to suspend that disbelief and, in the words of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song, really just relax and not worry about the crazy gravity around that water tower.
Edited by Matthew Tchepikova-Treon