A House with Dark Corners and Darker Secrets

Georgina Campbell in "Barbarian"
Photo Credit: RottenTomatoes.com

With several modern horror movies, we’ve been given films with deceptively simple premises like “It Follows,” “It Comes at Night,” and most recently “X,” but offer much more to their stories than we anticipated.

The latest horror film to pull this off is writer-director Zach Cregger’s “Barbarian,” a tense terror that begs you to go into it knowing as little as possible.

Tess Marshall (Georgina Campbell) travels to Detroit suburb for a job interview.  When she arrives at the home she’s renting and finds out that it’s been booked by a young man named Keith Toshko (Bill Skargård), the two decide to share it.  Not long afterwards, they find out that the house holds a disturbing secret.

While I don’t want to delve too deep into Campbell and Skargård’s performances for fear of going into spoiler territory, I’ll say that they share a great chemistry as their characters get to know each other.  They exhibit the apprehension of whether or not to trust each other at first, but then begin to warm up to one other as the tension of their situation eases, at least for a little bit. 

Although Cregger’s screenplay has a couple of contrivances that are present for the sake of moving the story forward, what makes up for this is the sheer all-bets-are-off unpredictability of the narrative.  In all seriousness, go into this movie knowing nothing more than the basic premise because, beyond that, you’ll be seated on a scary thrill ride that’ll leave you guessing at every wild turn.  In the middle of this, Cregger’s able to weave in some thematic depth to add to the persistent chills without it becoming heavy-handed.  To say anything else about the story would give too much away, but trust me, it’s not short on surprises.

This is Cregger’s first solo directorial effort, with his first two movies, “Miss March” and “The Civil War on Drugs,” being co-directed with Trevor Moore.  As a filmmaker on his own, it’s clear that Cregger has quite a bit of potential to display.  Right from the beginning of the film, Cregger’s able establish a disquieting setting as we have the initial awkward meeting between Tess and Keith, as well as the assimilation into the area that’s unfamiliar to them.  And, between the scares and the occasional humor, Cregger’s able to balance the two while maintaining the tension throughout as the movie becomes more and more surprising.  When it comes to framing the house’s interior, the cinematography by Zach Kuperstein captures the halls, corners, and deeper parts of the house in unsettling ways, adding to the tension of the unpredictable scenario as you keep wondering if someone or something is waiting near by.

With “Barbarian,” Cregger has shown himself to be a talented director hiding in our midst, and you shouldn’t wait any longer to see what he has hiding from you in this film.

Grade: A-