Kira Dye
Lantern Staff
One of the latest horror movies to come out recently is Barbarian, which features: Bill Skarsgård of Stephen King’s IT, Justin Long from Tusk and up-and-coming actress Georgina Campbell. This movie is a hot mess but in the best way possible. Barbarian leaves the audience wanting more even whilst knowing there is nothing more to be said. It is through-and-through a good movie from every angle the movie takes.
To describe Barbarian without much to spoil, a girl named Tess (Georgina Campbell) rents a temporary house in Detroit during a job interview. However, she soon finds out that a man is already living in the same house – Keith (Bill Skarsgård). Tess finds out that the house she walked into has much more in store than it seems.
After seeing the disappointment of The Invitation – possibly one of the worst movies ever made – I purchased my ticket to see Barbarian. After only watching two-thirds of the trailer, I was ready to be slightly entertained by a stereotypical horror movie. However, what I ended up watching was so breathtakingly disturbing, I had to sit in silence for half an hour after the viewing. To put it bluntly, this movie has never been made before, in any sense. The movie has just the right amount of laughter, suspense, aesthetics, plot twists, confusion and jump scares that make the perfect horror movie concoction.
The movie plays an excellent portion of the story with its environment, allowing the largely-abandoned houses in the area to demonstrate a sense of eeriness, quite literally, surrounding the house. To drive home the concept of how little the trailer tells you, there seems to be a visual “halfway point” during the movie that changes all expectations you may have gotten about the film from the trailer.
At the center point of the movie, the story shifts away from Tess and Keith and focuses on AJ (Justin Long). This is not only a fantastic device to keep you waiting after seeing one of the most shocking points of the movie, but it also brings in new characters and backstory that will help to explain the further plot and intertwine with the previous half of the movie.
What the trailer portrays the movie to be is a hilarious contrast to what Barbarian actually is. I ended up loving the movie so much, I saw it twice in theatres. After the second viewing, my friends and I went out to eat afterward and tried to think of different angles the movie could have taken, which we concluded would be none. Barbarian is one of those movies you want all of your friends to go watch after seeing it, and it becomes your new obsession for the weeks that follow. This movie is somewhat like Get Out in that sense, however with not nearly as much hype. Whenever I mention the title of the movie to anyone, their first reaction is, “What? I’ve never heard of it,” which makes it all the wilder when going to see it.
The movie keeps the audience on their feet every time they are about to fall. It continues to build the plot until the very end of the movie when everything comes together in the neatest way possible. This movie has jumped to the top of my favorite horror movies of all time, which is accompanied by the likes of the original Scream, Ready or Not, Creep and more. If you are looking for an original horror movie to see this spooky season, Barbarian will not let you down.
Butler Lantern 