Tonight’s feature is the recently released film “Barbarian”, written and direct by Zach Cregger and staring Georgina Campbell with support from Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long. This has built itself up quite the degree of hype recently and done alright for itself at the box office (That is to say, it’s made back substantially more than it’s $4.5m production budget). Does it deserve that hype? That’s what we are here to find out. As this is a new release I will tread carefully with the spoilers. They will be mild, but I’m not going to directly reveal the nature of the threat in the movie or tell you how it ends. I am going to go further than the trailer however (Which includes no footage from after the 40m mark, though it’s not actually hiding much of note with that). Anyway let’s dig in.
October Review Challenge – Day 26.
The film begins when our heroine Tess (Campbell) is heading to her AirBnB, she finds the place already occupied due to an apparent mix up. At first she doesn’t trust the other renter, Keith (Skarsgård) but eventually she realises he is okay and actually a decent guy. He agrees she can stay and take the bed while he takes the sofa and after a fairly restless night she wakes to find he had to head off. She goes to her job interview (the reason for the stay) and on returning Keith still isn’t back. Left in the house alone she becomes curious and looks around but ends up locked in the basement when the door closes behind her. While trying to find a way out she discovers a secret passage with a hidden room with a bed, a camera, a bucket and a bloody hand print on the wall.
Tess panics but hears Keith trying to get in (Tess has the front door key), she attracts his attention at the small window to the basement and he frees here. She tells him about the room and so he investigates. When he doesn’t come back Tess looks for him and realises there is another secret door behind the first. This is where we reach serious spoiler territory, so I’m going to skip a bit. Things happen in the basement, but around the 40 minute mark, after exhausting all the trailer footage we pretty much reset.
Enter The Douchebag.
We begin again, this time following “AJ” (Justin Long), a sitcom actor and apparently a bit of a douche. He’s facing financial ruin after a co-star made allegations of rape against him and as such having to sell a lot of properties he owns to pay for his legal defence. Once such property is the Airbnb that Tess and Keith were at. He decides to visit the property to assess it’s value. When he arrives he discovers the pairs belongings and suspects them to be squatters as there is no record of the place being rented recently.
While investigating the house naturally he too finds the basement (It’s clear he’s never visited the property), though instead of responding in shock to the first room he just starts measuring it up considering it an asset in the sale. On discovering the second door he too ends up in trouble. At which point we get another total change of scene and flashback to the 80’s for a sort of explanation to what is happening (and what happens next). That’s as far as I’ll cover the story, since this is fresh out and clearly the film makers wanted most of this to be a surprise
The Good, The Bad And The Unnecisary.
So the first thing to say about this is I really liked the first 40 minutes. I was thinking “This is going to be a 7/10 film at the minimum” for a lot of it. We had a 20 minute intro to the characters, then some creepy stuff happens and we are at the crunch moment of any horror film where the world gets turned upside down at that 40 minute mark. But then… then we start from the beginning again but with a less likeable character. We get about 20 minutes of this douche just going about his life before he starts investigating the basement and we’re back to where I thought we were nearly half an hour earlier.
Then once that segment is over we get our origin story which frankly was totally unnecessary. I’m sure they felt it was visually good to do it, but the character that introduces barely factors in to the story, what it tells you about the rest of the story could have been discovered by other means and the whole section is just a time waster. It’s especially a time waster when another character shows up in the main story that is a classic exposition dump character. This character basically informs the audience exactly what it is all about, making the whole flashback totally redundant.
More Padding Than A Padded Cell.
On a personal note, I really hate exposition dump characters, especially when their time in the film is so short that you know they were literally written in for that one purpose and especially when most of the info wasn’t actually necessary for the film. Along with the double start, the double explanation (Flashback and Mr. Exposition) I can’t help but feel that Cregger simply couldn’t decide which path to follow and so just did both. Either that or he realised he only had about an hour of material and desperately needed to pad it out.
The thing is you could edit this film down to around an hour. Take the first 40 minutes and the final 20 and you wouldn’t actually miss anything. At that point you have a pretty good hour long story, though it has to be said the final act is not great either. Not only do we have an exposition dump character we also have cops so incompetent that it breaks suspension of disbelief. The AJ character is also too far over the top at one point throwing his own gun away because he’s that much of an incompetent tool.
Conclusion
What is in the basement is actually well done and creepy. The actors do a good job and sound design and music add to the tension but it’s not enough to make up for the time wasting pace crash in the second act and the generic cheese of the third. If I was to rate each section we’d have 7/10 for act 1, 4/10 for act 2 and 5.5/10 for the conclusion. That averages at 5.5 but a film isn’t just three acts separately (Anthologies aside) and as a whole there remains some additional gaping plot holes that were never addressed. So with that in mind I’m marking this down as a 5/10. Disappointing.
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