Barbarian
Ten Second Review: Second guessing and a great soundscape will keep you on the edge of your seat.
I’ve seen a few horror films this Halloween season. It’s been a mixed bag on quality but I’ve yet to be scared. Barbarian certainly changed that!
Tess is in town for a job interview. When she turns up at her AirBnB she finds someone already staying there. She reluctantly decides to share the house for the evening, but her initial uneasiness may have been better placed than she could have possibly imagined.
From the first scene I was gripped by Barbarian and remained gripped till the lights went up. From the tension building to the outright scares, the “action” scenes to the slower scenes, the subversions to the reveals; this was just a joyous exploration in horror.
All the main actors were great and that is to include those who you route for and those you route against. I daren’t say more to avoid any major spoilers.
They play well with a script and direction that made me feel uneasy the whole time. There’s some stylistic clashes, but each work so well in the moment they are used that I’m inclined to forgive the feeling of jarringness and suggest it adds to its own style.
All of this would be edging if it weren’t for what has separated Barbarian from the pack for me this year; it actually delivered. Smile, Halloween Ends and Prey for the Devil all felt as though they didn’t make the most of their set ups, this did. There’s a classic Hitchcock piece where he says that if you give an audience five minutes of boring dialogue between two people sitting at a table and then have a bomb go off, your audience gets a few seconds of shock and fright. If you show them there’s a bomb at the beginning, you give them five minutes of tension waiting for it to go off and then the shock when it eventually does. The key is that it does still have to go off at some point or that tension becomes disappointment.
In Barbarian that bomb goes off.
I love sitting at home clutching a pillow watching horror films, but nothing is quite like watching horror on the big screen. If you can, go support this one, we’ll want more like it!
