the barbarian movie review

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

Writer/director Zach Cregger proves himself to be a bonafide jack-in-the-box horror filmmaker with "Barbarian," beginning with a nightmare that could happen to any of us—a double-booked Airbnb. Documentary researcher Tess (an excellent Georgina Campbell ) arrives at night in the pouring rain at a little house in a forgotten part of Detroit, and a sleepy guy named Keith is already staying there. He eventually convinces her to stay until they can get this sorted: she can see his proof of reservation, he’ll take the couch, and she can watch him open the bottle of wine someone left before he pours. 

Cregger, of sketch group The Whitest Kids U' Know and their Playboy magazine frat comedy "Miss March," knows well what he’s playing with here. The optics of this woman putting herself in certain vulnerability are uncomfortable, and his economic filmmaking nudges it just so. Soon enough, it's time to check out the basement, which, no big spoilers here, but you probably wouldn't want to go down there, or past the door that can be opened with a strand of rope. Effective dread comes in various sizes in this story, sometimes due to pushy plotting. And yet the creepy mysteries and wacky reveals are plenty visceral in “Barbarian,” even when they get willfully dumb.  

Did I mention that the other Airbnb guy is played by Bill Skarsgård of " It "? For further proof that casting is a vital part of moviemaking, consider Skarsgård’s inclusion, one of the film's unsettling pieces, as unsettling as the house's numerous secret, dark corridors. Here, the former Pennywise the Clown uses his casual presence, those circular eyes, and that imposing figure, supplanting it with a nervous rambling, going on and on when trying to explain that he cares for Tess feeling safe in this bizarre situation. Is it just a disarming act? Is Skarsgård playing another luring creep? "Barbarian" gets a fair amount of adrenaline from that question, and answers it in one of the film's best scenes. 

Later on, Justin Long shows up at the house. His Hollywood dude AJ is introduced zipping down some coastal road in a convertible, only to find out in a phone call that he’s being accused of doing something horrible to an actress. As someone who very likely did said thing, AJ is more concerned with his career and putting this behind him. Long is adept at playing the sincerely terrible nature of the guy, down to a good laugh-out-loud joke in how he gets involved with this mess at the Airbnb ("Barbarian" could be funnier, and its lack of more comic relief is a copout). A movie like this flourishes on the choices that characters make, and Long’s slick creep is its most sound construction.  

There’s nothing strikingly new to “Barbarian,” and its use of a murdered Detroit as a character doesn't do enough to shake off "Don't Breathe" comparisons, but the artistic impulses of Cregger's project make it a bold curiosity. The film has a compelling instinct of when to abruptly cut and fling us from one freaky moment to a different time zone or decade, allowing the viewer to breathe while then paying close attention to how the latest life story will fit in. And there’s an ambition in how these new elements are included, creating vignettes of sorts made of cinematographer Zach Kuperstein's different aspect ratios and extensive shots, filling in the movie’s thick atmosphere. The title “Barbarian” rings throughout, like the wailing choir and screeching strings from Anna Drubich's score; its significance creates a metaphorical house of mirrors, and disturbingly so.  

It’s almost, almost enough to distract from how the first two acts of “Barbarian” are missing the airtight cleverness that could make it a great horror script. The film flags when Cregger relies on convenient (to him) decisions of all kinds—for one, in a story that makes ominous doors redundant, he can be awfully forceful in getting characters to open them, peer in, and look around, sacrificing the believable behavior that keeps us truly sucked in. "Barbarian" then eventually just wants to be as bananas as possible, and the devolution can be glaring. 

And yet, for however straightforward his pathways can sometimes feel for his characters, Cregger does very well with the disquieting darkness that envelops them, which especially comes from seeing a wild movie like this in the theater. The swaths of pitch-black in "Barbarian" are no fun to stare at, and your heart rate may agree.  

Now playing in theaters. 

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Now playing

The Fall Guy

Brian tallerico.

The Long Game

Stress Positions

Peter sobczynski.

Sheila O'Malley

Under the Bridge

Cristina escobar, film credits.

Barbarian (2022)

Rated R for some strong violence and gore, disturbing material, language throughout and nudity.

102 minutes

Georgina Campbell as Tess

Bill Skarsgård as Keith

Justin Long as AJ

• Zach Cregger

Cinematographer

• Zach Kuperstein
• Anna Drubich

Latest blog posts

Retrospective: Oscar Micheaux and the Birth of Black Independent Cinema

Phil Lord and Chris Miller Made the Multiplex Safe for ‘The Fall Guy’

Initially Promising Dark Matter Sinks Under Weight of Prestige TV Bloat

Tomorrow There Will Be Fine Weather: A Preview of NYC's Upcoming Hiroshi Shimizu Retrospective

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• The Fall Guy Link to The Fall Guy
• I Saw the TV Glow Link to I Saw the TV Glow
• The Idea of You Link to The Idea of You

New TV Tonight

• Hacks: Season 3
• Star Wars: Tales of the Empire: Season 1
• Shardlake: Season 1
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz: Season 1
• A Man in Full: Season 1
• The Veil: Season 1
• Acapulco: Season 3
• Welcome to Wrexham: Season 3
• John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in LA: Season 1
• My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman: Season 4.2

Most Popular TV on RT

• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Them: Season 2
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Hacks: Season 3 Link to Hacks: Season 3
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Star Wars TV Ranked

Netflix’s 100 Best Movies Right Now (May 2024)

Asian-American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

TV Premiere Dates 2024

6 TV and Streaming Shows You Should Binge-Watch in May

• Trending on RT
• The Fall Guy
• The Idea of You
• Best Movies of All Time
• Play Movie Trivia

Where to Watch

Rent Barbarian on Fandango at Home, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video.

What to Know

Smart, darkly humorous, and above all scary, Barbarian offers a chilling and consistently unpredictable thrill ride for horror fans.

The less you know going into Barbarian , the better -- but be prepared for an ending that might rub you the wrong way.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Zach Cregger

Georgina Campbell

Bill Skarsgård

Justin Long

Matthew Patrick Davis

Kurt Braunohler

Movie Clips

More like this, movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

The Indie Horror Film That Everyone Is Suddenly Talking About

Barbarian capitalizes on the thing viewers love and hate most: the unknown.

This story contains major spoilers for Barbarian .

On the opening day of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival , one film was on everybody’s lips. As I ran into other critics around town, they kept asking, “Have you seen Barbarian yet? You’ve gotta.” That kind of chatter is typical at a festival, but the only wrinkle was that Barbarian wasn’t even playing at TIFF. It was just a small-budget horror film that had been plunked into theaters in early September, a so-called dead zone for new releases. The title is cryptic, and the trailer mostly avoids imagery from anything past the first act. Despite these hurdles, the movie became a word-of-mouth hit .

Now that it has started streaming on HBO Max, I’ve received a second wave of messages from friends who are discovering it and are floored, baffled, or simply want to compare notes. Small-scale films, unattached to any preexisting intellectual property, face significant challenges to gaining a foothold with the viewing public, so Barbarian ’s success is rare and heartening. It also speaks to a wryly intelligent selling point: The film’s story, much like its marketing, capitalizes on the simultaneous terror and appeal of the unknown.

Zach Cregger, the writer and director of Barbarian , has wittily described it as “Fincher upstairs, Raimi downstairs.” The first half is taut, high-concept storytelling that gives the audience no room to relax; the back half is a loopy, makeup-heavy monster movie. The film begins with Tess Marshall (played by Georgina Campbell) arriving one night at a Detroit Airbnb, only to find it has been double-booked: A mystery man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård) is already inside. Caught in a rainstorm and anxious about a job interview she has the next morning, Tess decides to share the space. She keeps her guard up against Keith and notes several red flags in the house. Every detail is loaded with tension, including the glass of wine Keith offers her and the fact that he talks in his sleep (although he graciously insists on taking the couch and leaving her the bedroom).

Read: The people who can see inside David Fincher’s head

Cregger mines her paranoia, the unsettling feeling that something is not right even as no actual threat presents itself. Get out of there , I wanted to urge Tess during the first 30 minutes, but I also understood the predicament she was in—she doesn’t want to appear rude to Keith or dash her chances at making it to the job interview. Her decision to stay is perfectly plausible. David Fincher sets one of the highest bars for depicting creeping dread; Barbarian doesn’t quite clear it, but it certainly offers a master class in wringing frights from both graphic violence and the viewer’s own imagination. (If you don’t want to be spoiled, you should stop reading further … and go watch Barbarian .)

After her interview, Tess explores the Airbnb’s basement and unearths a hidden door to a dank tunnel, which leads to a distressing subterranean room with a mounted camcorder and a bloody bed. She wisely flees, but Keith goes exploring and vanishes. Out of some mix of altruism and curiosity, Tess looks for him and finds even deeper tunnels—and a monstrous creature prowling within them. Keith is every inch the nice guy he presented himself to be, but unfortunately, he gets his head smashed to bits right as the audience figures that out.

I’d already be on board with Barbarian if it stopped there: a nice anxiety number followed by gory chaos in the basement. But just as the violence ramps up, Cregger cuts away from the entire situation and introduces a new character, AJ Gilbride (Justin Long). An entitled Hollywood actor, AJ is cruising down the highway singing along to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi.” The lighthearted switch is perhaps more of a shock than Keith’s skull getting pulped by a superhuman beast. AJ immediately comes off as villainous in his own right: He’s a sitcom star who has been credibly accused of rape by another actor, and his response to the charge is deep denial, both outwardly and inwardly.

But his connection to the story isn’t clear until, looking to fund his legal defense, he decides to sell his extraneous properties—including a home in Detroit that is, of course, the very same Airbnb we’ve become well acquainted with. Cregger’s brilliance here is that this second horror narrative is a mirror image of the first. Tess and the viewer spend the first act of the film on the edge of their seat, wondering what awaits them around every corner of the little house. AJ barges into the same situation with complete obliviousness, eagerly measuring square footage while ignoring all warning signs, such as the empty glasses Keith and Tess left out. Essentially, this horror movie gets to have it both ways: It offers an unselfish hero (Tess) whom audiences can support, and a wincing buffoon whose inevitable comeuppance they can root for.

Eventually, AJ finds his way into the basement, Tess reemerges, and the origins of the brute in the tunnels are revealed. Barbarian laces each narrative loop with sharp social commentary. Tess’s most reckless decisions are made with the goal of helping someone; she’s not stupid, merely noble, which infuses her arc with a sad vulnerability. Although the monster is the biggest physical threat in the film, AJ represents a vile, cowardly rot—the kind Cregger has likely noticed in powerful men in his industry.

The film never underlines who the titular barbarian is, but part of the fun is deciding for yourself where to pin that label. Plenty of horror movies are roller-coaster rides that drop us off after 90 minutes with little else beyond the message “Monsters are scary.” Barbarian serves up all the requisite thrills with panache, but it also provokes deeper, longer-lasting reflections. That balance is why the film has continued spreading so organically months after its release, and why it’ll keep tempting viewers down to the basement for years to come.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A woman staying at an Airbnb discovers that the house she has rented is not what it seems. A woman staying at an Airbnb discovers that the house she has rented is not what it seems. A woman staying at an Airbnb discovers that the house she has rented is not what it seems.

• Zach Cregger
• Georgina Campbell
• Bill Skarsgård
• Justin Long
• 1.1K User reviews
• 252 Critic reviews
• 78 Metascore
• 5 wins & 38 nominations

• (as Sophie Sorensen)

• (as J.R. Esposito)

• AJ's Mom

• Nursing Video Narration …

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia The script started out after Zach Cregger read the Gavin de Becker's book "The Gift of Fear," which encourages women to trust their intuition when confronted by obviously dangerous men. He used it as a writing exercise and began crafting a thirty-minute short that consisted entirely of a conversation in which a woman continues to ignore a mounting series of red flags. He liked it well enough that he knew he had the makings of a longer film and began conceptualizing a broader story for the characters.
• Goofs One of the characters drives an electric Nissan Leaf, bizarrely it has engine and ignition sounds dubbed over its movement.

Tess : Nope.

• Crazy credits SPOILER: There are three mini-scenes after the initial smash cut to "Written & Directed by Zach Cregger" credit, showing Tess sitting up in the street, walking away from the bodies, and limping away from the water tower as dawn breaks.
• Connections Featured in Chris Stuckmann Movie Reviews: Barbarian (2022)
• Soundtracks Lonely at the Bar Written & Performed by Benny Reid Courtesy of Seven Seas Music

User reviews 1.1K

• Sep 9, 2022
• How long is Barbarian? Powered by Alexa
• Why didn't Tess leave when she starts feeling uneasy?
• September 9, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Sofia, Bulgaria
• BoulderLight Pictures
• Hammerstone Studios
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $4,500,000 (estimated)
• $40,842,944
• $10,543,948
• Sep 11, 2022
• $45,352,337

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 42 minutes
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed

UK Edition Change

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Fitness & Wellbeing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Car Insurance Deals
• Lifestyle Videos
• UK Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Solar Panels
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Betting Sites
• Online Casinos
• Wine Offers

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

Barbarian review: The endless twists in this Airbnb horror film are a central part of its funhouse charm

A sleeper hit in the us, this is a movie that consistently turns the tables on its audience’s expectations, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey

Get our the life cinematic email for free, thanks for signing up to the the life cinematic email.

Dir: Zach Cregger. Starring: Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long. 18, 107 minutes.

In life, every chance is really a risk. And for women, every risk is a potential danger. That’s the tension that the horror film Barbarian so expertly exploits, all before it unfurls into a chaotic monster movie that consistently turns the tables on its audience’s expectations.

Tess Marshall (Georgina Campbell) arrives in Detroit for a job interview, only to find a man – Bill Skarsgård’s Keith – already staying in the Airbnb she’s rented for the week. The property, somewhat suspiciously, is the only intact home in one of the city’s many abandoned stretches, a mark of its industrial decline. Placed in a vulnerable position, Tess finds even green flags start to read as red. Why is Keith so insistent that he opens the house’s bottle of welcome wine in front of her, even though she’s already declined a glass? Isn’t it an odd coincidence that he’s seen the one low-budget documentary made by the woman Tess is interviewing for? “There’s a lot of bad dudes out there,” he tells her, so sincerely. What makes him think he has the authority to tell her that? There’s a smart bit of casting here: Skarsgård is a charismatic performer, but if you didn’t already distrust him because he most famously played Pennywise the Clown in the It remake, you might distrust him because he kind of looks like a Tim Burton claymation figure come to life.

I’ll withhold from sharing any more specifics. Barbarian ’s many twists are a central part of its funhouse charm. Debuting writer-director Zach Cregger, a member of the sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, has also mastered this film’s sense of space: the camera hovers at the top of staircases; it slides down corridors as if drawn to some unspoken doom; it peers around corners, steadying itself for a scare.

As a filmmaker, Cregger seems conscious of embracing and then twisting an audience’s expectations, leaning into certain tropes of the genre before forcefully pushing towards something far more realistic. Cops here don’t act like cops in the movies do. The fear of a woman’s ageing body – common in horror and inevitably laced with misogyny – doesn’t play as straightforwardly as you might think. Tess may not always make the right decisions, but she’s smart when it matters. Campbell has a great handle on Barbarian ’s shifting tone, which makes room for humour without veering into a realm of outright horror-comedy.

• Triangle of Sadness review: There are rivers of vomit in this class satire, but it’s all a bit pointless
• Bros review: A big gay romcom that’s a big old mess
• My Policeman review: Harry Styles is criminally bad in this clunky, ineffective period drama

At one point, Jeeper Creepers star Justin Long turns up as AJ Gilbride, a sitcom actor accused of sexual assault. What the film chooses to do with him, versus what we might assume it will do with him, is both surprising and smart. In all the chaos, Barbarian makes an important point: women are always left to pay for men’s cruelty.

‘Barbarian’ is in cinemas from 28 October

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Want an ad-free experience?

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

• Entertainment

‘Barbarian’ review: Breaking the rules of horror in brilliant fashion

Movie review.

Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t go into the basement. Don’t go inside secret dark and underground passageways inside the basement.

Bad things happen when these basic horror movie safety rules are broken.

But “Barbarian” — a must-watch for fans of “Black Mirror” and “The Twilight Zone” — may not be what you’d expect.

The brilliance of “Barbarian” is in director/writer Zach Cregger’s engrossing, twisted, absurd and genre-bending script. It starts with what could have become a funny story or the beginnings of a meet-cute and ends with the eyes of evil and social commentary on what makes a monster.

It’s a dark and rainy night in Detroit and Tess Marshall’s (Georgina Campbell) Airbnb is double booked. No key in the lockbox. No answer when calling the owners of the Airbnb. Stranger Keith Toshko (Bill Skarsgård), who is renting the same one-story, single-bedroom house on 476 Barbary, answers the door.

Tess knows she shouldn’t go inside a house occupied by a man she doesn’t know. She knows she shouldn’t sleep inside a house occupied by a man she doesn’t know. Tess is smart and resourceful. But it’s pouring. No other hotel rooms are available. She needs a place to sleep before a job interview with a documentary filmmaker. What would you do?

“Barbarian” is skillfully directed, smartly cast and superbly acted. Skarsgård is famously known for playing the monster Pennywise the clown in the movie remakes of Stephen King’s “It.” You can’t help but think:

“Do I look like some kind of monster?” asks Skarsgård, who delivers a wonderfully endearing, rambling and disarming monologue about why he waited to open a bottle of wine.

Skarsgård and Campbell have great chemistry together. For a moment, you wonder if their characters could become more than strangers. Then you remember that their stories exist within the confines of a horror movie.

Justin Long, who plays actor AJ Gilbride (the less you know about his character and how he ties into the story, the better), embodies someone you’d love to punch in the face. His performance interjects comedy under terrifying situations.

Meanwhile, Campbell is vulnerable but capable as the film’s heroine and damsel. She’s someone audiences can easily root for and become attached to. You don’t question her intelligence even as Cregger’s screenplay forces Tess to break key “stranger danger” survival rules — slowly leading and trapping her inside an underground maze full of secrets and horrors.

“Barbarian” systematically rationalizes questionable character decisions, dismantling defenses with logic, an appeal to humanity and the promise of unearthing mysteries. Bible stories and fairy tales have taught us not to eat apples because they might be poisoned, but Cregger is the snake luring Tess and the viewers to step away from the safety of the garden of Eden and to take a bite from an apple growing from the tree of knowledge.

Bad things will happen. We can step away from the danger. But we don’t. “Barbarian” and the house on Barbary operates like a Pandora’s box we can’t help but open.

With Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long. Directed by Zach Cregger. 102 minutes. R for violence, gore, nudity, language and disturbing material. Opens Sept. 9 at multiple theaters.

Most Read Entertainment Stories

• Baba Yaga music venue coming to Pioneer Square, plus other openings
• 'Boys in the Boat' actors come to Seattle for Windermere Cup
• 4 new cozy mysteries and eerie thrillers to get lost in
• 'The Fall Guy' review: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt pull off entertaining stunt WATCH
• Justin Timberlake gets soulful in Seattle VIEW

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

Filed under:

The horror movie Barbarian rules because [massive spoilers ahead]

Let’s get into what those big twists really mean, and how they all work together for a hard message

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: The horror movie Barbarian rules because [massive spoilers ahead]

A big part of the fun of watching Barbarian , one of the buzziest horror movies in the long lead-up to Halloween, comes from discovering all its twists and turns for the first time. But even more fun than that is what comes after watching it: thinking through how thoughtful those twists are, and how they change the kind of movie Barbarian is.

[ Ed. note: Spoilers for the entirety of Barbarian follow. For those who don’t want ending spoilers, our spoiler-light review is here . Warning: This article includes discussion of sexual assault and self-harm.]

Buried secrets

Barbarian ’s first act is coy, using the audience’s limited perspective to imbue everything in its small Airbnb setting with menace. When Tess (Georgina Campbell) decides to ride out a storm with Keith (Bill Skarsgård, best known as Pennywise from the It films ) in the small house they unwittingly double-booked on separate websites, Zach Cregger’s script immediately sets up two threats. The first is Keith, a strange man Tess does not know, played by an actor widely known for his role as a horror villain. The other is the house itself, which is nondescript to a point where it’s almost certainly wrong in some way.

In the film’s first 40 minutes, the biggest question is simple but compelling: Will the movie’s horror come from Keith, the house on Barbary Street, or maybe even both? At the end of the first act, the house appears to be the primary threat, as deep in its basement lurks a secret passage hiding a cell with a camera and a filthy cot, and a passage leading deep into a series of tunnels where something lurks. And that something kills Keith, leaving Tess’ fate uncertain.

Then the movie takes a hard pivot to Justin Long loudly singing Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi” while driving a convertible along the coast, in what appears to be a different kind of movie entirely. But this is where Barbarian ’s script starts to clearly state what it’s about. Once it does, the film starts to become thoughtfully recursive, coming at the same questions from multiple angles in a way that’s hard not to keep thinking about long after the film ends.

Long plays AJ Gilbride, a Hollywood writer-producer about to have what he believes is the worst day of his life. His pleasant car ride is interrupted by a phone call from his agent, telling him there’s going to be a story in The Hollywood Reporter about his lead actress on a promising series pilot, who is now accusing him of rape. As AJ processes his shock and fury, the fallout comes fast and hard: Their show is canceled, and no one wants to work with him. No more money is coming in, and AJ’s about to be broke. To mount the aggressive legal defense against his accuser that he wants, he’s going to have to liquidate his assets. Which happens to include a certain house in Detroit, on Barbary Street.

As AJ’s connection to the plot is revealed and he makes his way to the house, Barbarian also makes it clear that he’s scum, and he’s almost certainly guilty of assaulting his co-star, even if he’s blind to her experience: He insists he’s just “sexually aggressive” about not taking no for an answer. So as he makes the same discoveries Tess and Keith made before him, the audience’s sympathy is meant to shift. It’s hard not to hope that whatever lurks beneath the house will get this guy. Eventually, it finds him — and so does Tess, who’s still alive. And then there’s one final story pivot, back to the 1980s.

Who is the real monster?

Barbarian ’s final key player is Frank, an apparently single man who lived in the Barbary Street house in the 1980s, when its neighborhood was an idyllic, thriving suburb. He’s committed to staying in the house, even as his well-to-do neighbors begin their white flight, as the changing neighborhood puts their white-picket suburban dream at risk.

Frank, however, has other depraved interests: He’s a predator and serial killer, kidnapping unsuspecting women and imprisoning them in a secret labyrinth in his basement, where he forces them to have his children. He’s been doing this for years, raping and inbreeding until the final result is The Mother, the initially monstrous-seeming creature lurking in the modern-day tunnels. By the movie’s third act, she’s revealed as a poor wretch who seeks to bring others to her lair so she can mother them. It’s all she knows to do.

(If you haven’t seen Barbarian but are reading these spoilers to know whether it’s something you’d be comfortable seeing, know that in spite of the horrific subject matter being explored, the film does not actually depict any sexual violence. It’s left off screen, though AJ does find and play one of Frank’s videotapes, and the screams and cries of one of his victims are clearly audible.)

At first, the shock of the house’s history encourages a fairly linear sequence of transgression and consequence, from Frank’s horrific crimes to Tess’ pain. Each terrible sin sinks into the bones of a decaying suburb, keeping the house alive as a locus of suffering, even as its surroundings crumble. But looking at the three men at the center of Barbarian, another reading emerges, as a toxic cycle of male entitlement manifests across a wide spectrum, from subtle to overt.

At the most extreme end is Frank, whose unchecked monstrousness takes on a life of its own, one that by the end, he can no longer control. When AJ discovers him, sickly and decrepit, in a room deep in the tunnels below the house, he’s surrounded by recordings of his evil, and afraid of the consequences of discovery. When AJ threatens to fill the house with police, Frank shoots himself.

By having AJ be the last to confront Frank, Barbarian juxtaposes the two men. AJ’s disgust over Frank’s crimes is clear, but Cregger asks, How far is the distance between them, really? AJ clearly does not respect his accuser. He goes on a bender with a friend where he admits to overriding her protests. He drunkenly calls her after the story breaks in the press, even though his lawyer has told him clearly not to. And he speaks of her almost exclusively as “that fucking bitch.” Yet he still believes he’s a good person, one who hasn’t crossed some imaginary threshold from man to monster.

Keith’s role in this is easiest to overlook, since Barbarian effectively ends with no further revelation about him. He is, as far as we know, exactly who he said he was: just a guy who double-booked an Airbnb. But a conversation between Keith and Tess lays early groundwork for Barbarian ’s themes of how male entitlement breeds violence. After Keith persuades her to stay in the Airbnb with him, she asks whether he would have done the same if she’d been the first to arrive, and whether he’d even think of that as risky behavior. Keith, caught off-guard, doesn’t appear to have even considered this.

Keith’s obliviousness is the end of him. When Tess finds the tunnels, she makes her way back upstairs in a panic, telling him they have to leave the house. But he refuses to take her seriously, insisting that he check out what’s wrong before they take any action. Out of concern for him, Tess waits and doesn’t escape the house. He would’ve lived, had he believed her. And she would have been spared a lot of suffering if he wasn’t so pointedly, symbolically dismissive about her personal experience not being proof enough for him.

The horror of status quo

Over and over again, Barbarian coils around this core idea of male entitlement and how its consequences spiral outward. It plays with viewers’ sympathies, as each new sliver of character backstory can cause disdain to shift to pity, only to pivot back again. A less thoughtful film would have AJ, confronted with the extreme endpoint of his transgressions, launching a redemption arc and saving Tess. In Barbarian , the opposite happens: He speaks passionately about his need to fix his mistakes and help the people he’s harmed, but then he immediately sacrifices Tess to have a chance of surviving The Mother. To him, there is nothing connecting him to Frank. He sees himself as a victim of a woman who’s out to get him. Grievance as an ideology is terribly hard to shake once it takes root.

Viewed through this lens, Barbarian becomes a film about how male entitlement and indifference has helped build a world that allows evil to fester and rot. It is present in the desire for a carefully cultivated suburb, which Frank’s neighbor abandons the second he sees it changing. It’s present in the police who answer Tess’ call for help, but prove hostile and dismissive to someone they clearly see as a lower-class woman of color, not worthy of their service or protection. It’s visible in the little slice of the American Dream that compels a man to claim a property as his, a place to let whatever dreams or nightmares he has take root. It grows stronger every time a woman is not taken seriously in order to support a patriarchal status quo.

Tess does ultimately survive AJ’s attack, and so does The Mother, who, it seems, wants to do what she’s always done: bring Tess back to her den to take care of her and nurse her wounds. Barbarian ends abruptly, with Tess getting her hands on a gun and killing The Mother at her most tender, human moment. It doesn’t feel like a victory. It feels like a desperate choice made by a woman with no options left. Tess’ options were chipped away for decades before she even entered the house on Barbary Street, by men who had nothing but their own interests at heart. And they were curtailed even by the men she meets in the present, even the kindliest one. In killing the woman in the story who has suffered most at the hands of these men, Tess doesn’t seem like she’s finally free. She’s just another consequence of the barbarians who built the world around her.

Dead Boy Detectives proves yaoi would save a repressed Edwardian schoolboy

Ridley scott’s alien introduced the perfect sci-fi villain, case closed: dead boy detectives is a hell of a good time.

‘Barbarian’ explained: Unpacking all the twists and the real villain in Airbnb horror

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Warning: This article discusses spoilers for the twisty new horror film “Barbarian.” If you haven’t seen it yet, check out our nonspoilery review here and more with the cast and director here .

That one-word title looms large over “ Barbarian ,” one of the most delightfully twisted horror films of 2022, in which a woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) stumbles into a nightmare when she finds her rental house already occupied by a stranger.

It’s a roller-coaster horror ride filled with suspense, scares, surprising laughs and some of the most delicious cinematic twists since last year’s “Malignant.”

What Tess discovers in the basement leads her into a labyrinth of unimaginable horrors — some closer than you might think. But who’s the real monster in filmmaker Zach Cregger’s Airbnb-of-horrors solo feature debut ?

The nice guy and the meet-cute from hell

At first, signs point to said handsome stranger, Keith (“It” star Bill Skarsgard, also an executive producer, cannily playing off his Pennywise persona), who turns up the charm to get Tess to lower her guard and spend the night, else brave the storm outside. After a few nice gestures and good conversation, she ignores her instincts and says yes — even as Cregger’s script and Skarsgard’s delivery create a sizzling ambiguity around Keith’s motivations.

“My only note to Bill [Skarsgard] was, ‘Don’t lean into creepy. Lean into nice,’” Cregger said. “The nicer you are and the more disarming and friendly and appealing and nonthreatening that you behave, the more the audience is going to be convinced that you’re bad.”

Inspired in part by security expert Gavin de Becker’s book “The Gift of Fear,” “Barbarian” conjures a minefield of misogynist red flags for its heroine to navigate even before she crosses paths with shouting local Andre (Jaymes Butler), sitcom actor AJ (Justin Long) and a violent tunnel dweller known as the Mother (played expressively by Matthew Patrick Davis).

Review: The less you know about ‘Barbarian,’ the more you’ll enjoy one of the year’s best horror movies

Writer-director Zach Cregger delivers a fresh genre surprise in the cult movie in waiting ‘Barbarian.’

Sept. 7, 2022

“[Keith] insists on bringing her luggage in, he makes her tea that she said she didn’t want, he says, ‘Pretty name,’” said Cregger. “These are not appropriate things to be doing in this situation. But he’s not aware of it, because he thinks he’s being nice.”

Is there something more sinister about Keith that Tess can’t see? Does it have anything to do with the doors that open and close in the middle of the night? The question hangs in the air as Tess makes a series of chilling discoveries in the basement, where a hidden door leads to a shadowy hallway and a secret room where very bad things have clearly occurred.

Beyond lies yet another door leading to the subterranean lair of the film’s apparent titular monster — the volatile Mother.

The mother under the stairs

“She was described as being 7 feet tall, naked, her face looking like it was the product of inbreeding, and having an impossible strength,” said Davis, the 6-foot-8-inch actor and musician behind the most surprising character in “Barbarian.” He was cast after a Zoom audition in which he stripped to his underwear and mimicked biting the head off a rat with a pickle he found in his fridge.

“ I was very aware that this could be funny in the right way or the wrong way,” Davis said of his “Barbarian” performance. “When you’re in it, you have no idea how it’s going to be perceived. You’re aware that it’s a big swing and that it is bonkers and that, you know, you’re sitting there naked in Bulgaria with boobs taped to your chest. Are people going to buy this?”

Before filming began last summer, he received advice from legendary creature performer Doug Jones , including the fine line between physical expression and nonverbal overacting and another handy pro tip: Get prescription creature contacts made, else risk biting it while chasing your co-stars through those dark tunnels.

You’re sitting there naked in Bulgaria with boobs taped to your chest. Are people going to buy this?

— “Barbarian” star Matthew Patrick Davis

But Mother’s backstory is also the film’s most tragic. To inform her emotional state, Davis studied profiles of feral children and adults, diving deep into “a dark, disturbing YouTube rabbit hole” of research. As he sat in a chair for three hours getting into prosthetics and makeup each day, he watched the videos to prepare.

“It opened me up to the reality of the lives of people that have been deeply abused, raised in cages, raised like animals, kept in the dark and never spoken to in their formative years,” he said. “It allowed me to have empathy for this character. This is not just a scary character for scariness’ sake. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that she’s a victim.”

“I think that she’s the most empathetic character in the movie. She has never had a chance,” echoes Cregger, who also credits Davis with inspiring him to write certain gestures into Mother’s well-worn maternity VHS tape, which come full circle in the film’s bittersweet final scene. “And Matthew plays it with such tenderness.”

How ‘Barbarian’ brings bonkers horror back with an Airbnb nightmare you won’t predict

The creator and stars of ‘Barbarian’ discuss one of the scariest movies of the year.

Sept. 9, 2022

The sins of the father

After introducing Mother, the textbook horror movie monster we expect, Cregger challenges us throughout the film to reconsider who the actual barbarian of the story is. First seen in a Reagan-era flashback, Frank (Richard Brake, who starred recently in Amazon’s “Bingo Hell” and killed Bruce Wayne’s parents in “Batman Begins”) is her inverse — an average suburban family man on the outside and a true monster within.

Borrowing from serial killer films “Angst” (1983) and “Elephant” (both Gus Van Sant’s 2003 feature and the 1983 Alan Clark short of the same name), Cregger builds unease as the camera follows Frank to the store, where he stocks up on a suspicious grocery list, and as he stalks a young woman to her home.

It is revealed that he has kidnapped, raped and impregnated several women in the secret chambers beneath his house without repercussions for decades, and that Mother is the daughter of another of his victims, born into miserable captivity.

But it’s telling that it’s not Tess who learns Frank’s horrible truth in the film. Instead, it’s AJ (Long, playing deftly against type) whoruns from Mother to a section of the tunnels where even she dares not follow.

Enter the Hollywood actor

Introduced cruising carefree down Pacific Coast Highway singing along to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi,” the narcissistic Hollywood star has recently stepped into his own version of a nightmare: an accusation of sexual assault that threatens to unravel his successful career.

“Because I’m an actor, and I know the world of actors very well, I was writing from an amalgam of people in my life,” Cregger said of conceiving the character of AJ. “I was trying to think of, ‘What’s this guy’s horror movie?’ Before he gets into the real horror movie — what’s the horror movie that he thinks he’s in? The collapse of your career and reputation due to your own bad behavior. This guy thinks his world is ending.”

AJ, who at first appears to be a ridiculous comedic figure, is revealed to be arguably the scariest character in the film. In Detroit to liquidate his rental home to cover his impending legal fees, he is the embodiment of male privilege and casual misogyny, his puffed-up bravado masking an inherent cowardice and refusal to take accountability for his actions. (Although not explicitly addressed in the film, Cregger says he deliberately wrote the men of “Barbarian” to be white males.)

When AJ discovers the ailing Frank and judges him by his brutal crimes, the audience is invited to wonder: Just how different is he from the monster staring back at him?

Frank, at least, seems to know he can’t escape what he’s done. AJ’s brief moment of clarity reverts to gaslighting self-preservation as he commits one final heinous act, attempting to hide his true nature behind a well-practiced nice guy veneer — a quality Long borrowed from watching men deliver empty apologies on “The Bachelorette.”

“There’s a glimmer of accountability,” said Long, “and I just love that Zach refuses to take the conventional way out.”

As for Tess, it’s her innate sense of empathy — the one that repeatedly sends her toward danger to help others, at her own peril — that helps her understand Mother before she sets them both free. “She’s someone that is used to traumatic situations and is able to understand how to survive in this situation,” said Campbell. “By the end of the film, I feel like she gets her own agency and is able to get out of the pattern she found herself in again and again and again.”

More to Read

Review: ‘Home Alone’ with fangs, ‘Abigail’ is a comedy that goes violently wrong for kidnappers

April 16, 2024

Review: ‘Blackout,’ a new take on one of horror’s oldest myths, is claws for celebration

April 12, 2024

Review: Despite starring a possessed stuffed animal, the dull ‘Imaginary’ is close to unbearable

March 7, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Jen Yamato is a former film reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Review: In ‘Wildcat,’ director Ethan Hawke — and daughter Maya — bring a literary life to screen

May 3, 2024

Review: In ‘Evil Does Not Exist,’ a woodsy community confronts malice of a modern stripe

Entertainment & Arts

Kate Beckinsale, after a ‘rough year’ and hospitalization, returns to the red carpet

Rumer Willis hopes being transparent about Bruce Willis’ health will give people hope

• Newsletters
• Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

Barbarian Is the Smartest, Funniest Horror Movie in Ages

Score one for un-elevated horror..

For a certain kind of movie, the greatest tribute you can pay is not being able to sit through to the end. At least, that’s what I like to think the two people who sprinted out of my screening of Barbarian on Friday night were trying to express by their abrupt exit. I’d like to tell you exactly what it was in this tense and twisted movie that might have prompted them to head for the doors, but I was a too busy suppressing the fight-or-flight instinct myself.

Barbarian topped the box office when it opened in early September, which isn’t unusual for horror movies, whose fans tend to turn out in droves and then vanish almost as quickly. But it’s since defied conventional wisdom by holding onto its audience. Last weekend, it actually added 550 screens . And having seen it with a crowd, albeit one that was two people smaller by the time the credits rolled, it’s easy to see why.

Written and directed by Zach Cregger, Barbarian is a prime example of what you might call un-elevated horror. Where some directors and studios have used the “ elevated horror ” label to market scary movies like Get Out and The Witch to people who wouldn’t ordinarily be caught dead in one, Cregger’s movie revels in the genre’s stock elements: a spooky house on a deserted street, doors that open and close of their own accord, a woman standing at the top of a rough-hewn staircase that descends into inky darkness, shakily asking, “Hello?”

Barbarian doesn’t feel the need to signal that it’s better than genre clichés by constantly winking at them, nor does it deploy them with the punishing determination of David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies. But Cregger has thought about why they work, and he keeps paying them off in unexpected ways. When Tess (Georgina Campbell) turns up at a short-term rental in a particularly bombed-out section of Detroit only to find it’s already occupied by a man named Keith (Bill Skarsgård), alarm bells immediately start ringing, and his jittery attempts to set her at ease only make matters worse. She surreptitiously snaps a picture of his driver’s license, and you keep waiting for the moment when she’ll plug his name or likeness into a search engine and find out that he’s an escaped serial killer. But instead she just gazes at it fondly, zooming in on her iPhone to get a better look at his face, and though when she returns to the rental home in daylight, she realizes the neighborhood is much worse than she thought—theirs appears to be the only house within miles that isn’t crumbling entirely to ruin—she sticks around anyway. The movie justifies this vaguely, with a tossed-off line about how every room in town is booked because of some convention or other, but of course the real reason Tess stays is that the movie requires it, and because we want her to.

Barbarian ’s script thinks through its problems as much as it needs to, and no more: It knows that horror and logic are enemies at heart, and the trick is to make us desire the knowledge of what’s behind that door more than we care why it’s opened. Its best trick is that there’s more than one door. ( Spoilers for Barbarian follow .) When Tess gets stuck in the house’s basement—the door locks from the outside because whatever, it just does—she finds a hidden passageway that leads to a windowless room containing a filthy mattress and a video camera, along with a bloody handprint smeared on the wall. Not long after, she realizes there’s a hidden door behind that hidden door, that one leading to a rough-hewn staircase leading down into the earth. Eventually, we realize there’s another door beyond that one, too. But the movie’s real trap doors aren’t physical but structural. Tess starts descending those stairs about 40 minutes into the movie, and the farther down she goes, the more unbelievable it seems that there’s nearly an hour to go. But just as an unholy figure rushes out of the darkness at her, the movie cuts away, and suddenly we’re in another time and place, watching a callow young TV star, AJ (Justin Long) drive his convertible down the California coast.

Naturally, AJ’s story winds its way back to Tess’s. That neatly kept house in an otherwise abandoned neighborhood turns out to belong to him, an ill-advised real estate investment that becomes his only asset after his career abruptly collapses. AJ too makes his way down to the basement, albeit with the brash cocksureness of a man too dim to conceive of anything he can’t handle, and soon both of them are trapped in a cage and the story seems to be at another dead end. But Cregger cuts away yet again, this time searing our eyeballs—by now well-adjusted to dimly lit interiors and Stygian pits—with the incandescent green of heavily fertilized lawns and brightly painted houses. Because there are no cues to orient us, it takes a while to determine where we are, until we realize the question isn’t where, but when. We’re back on the same street some 40 years earlier, before white flight gutted the neighborhood and left it a shell of itself. (The fact that both versions of the street were constructed from scratch in Bulgaria adds to the feeling of synthetic displacement.) Reagan’s economy is sending the markets into a downturn, and his neighbor apologetically tells the gruff, affectless Frank (Richard Brake) that he’s about to put his house on the market. But Frank vows that he isn’t going anywhere, and having seen the future, we know how true that is. Frank goes shopping for “baby stuff,” and we watch him stalk a woman to her house, slipping into a utility worker’s coveralls and surreptitiously opening the lock on her bathroom window before making his way out. If you’re up on your Netflix serial killer series, you know what happens next.

Or maybe you don’t. Because Frank isn’t just murdering women, or imprisoning them and forcing them to bear his children. He’s doing that and forcing those children to have children with each other, and then forcing those children to etc. We don’t see any evidence of this, fortunately, beyond a stack of videocassettes with labels like “puker” and “gas station redhead,” but the product of these concentric circles of incestuous rape is what’s stalking the house’s subterranean tunnels, a mutated woman obsessed with making visitors her “babies” and yet strong enough to rip a man in two. (That is not a figure of speech.) Generations of retreat from the outside world has produced something truly monstrous—exactly how many generations fit into 40 years is not an equation you’re meant to solve—but the outside world isn’t much better. This corner of Detroit has been left to rot, and the authorities have their hands full making sure the rest of the city doesn’t go the same way. Horror movies love finding ways to disable their protagonists’ cellphones , but Barbarian doesn’t have to, because when Tess calls the cops, they don’t come, and when they eventually do come, they don’t help.

Before Barbarian , Cregger was best known as a member of the sketch comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U’ Know. As the career of Jordan Peele has demonstrated, there’s a lot of crossover between comedy and horror, the genres most dependent on technique and timing: Either a gag or a scare can be ruined if it’s off by a fraction of a second. But even more than Peele, Cregger does both at once. Barbarian isn’t horror-comedy, but it makes you laugh at its audaciousness, as well as, sometimes, to keep yourself from screaming. (There’s also a sequence involving Long’s character and a tape measure that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.) Especially as it nears its climax, the movie leans into its own absurdity, building to a final act that is, quite deliberately, more silly than it is scary.

It’s also (and I’ve saved this for last so as not to frighten anyone off) quite smart. Barbarian doesn’t have an overriding thesis or big statement to make, because its intelligence is intuitive rather than programmatic. You can make what you like of the fact that Tess, who is Black, has come to Detroit to interview for a job with a white documentary filmmaker whose latest movie is about jazz; that the only other significant Black character in the movie is a homeless man who drags her out of the basement and warns her not to go back to that “bad place”; that AJ is a gentrifier as well as an accused rapist. The subtext—about racism and urban renewal, toxic masculinity, Reagan-era paranoia and its ramifications in the present day—stays subtext, there to be mined by those who don’t mind making ever-so-slight fools of themselves. (The copy of Jane Eyre conspicuously placed in Tess’ luggage can stay just where it is, thanks.) Fortunately, you don’t have to dig under its surface to think Barbarian ’s a blast.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Barbarian’ Review: Justin Long Is the Ultimate Toxic White Guy in Clever Horror Thriller

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on LinkedIn
• Show more sharing options
• Submit to Reddit
• Post to Tumblr
• Print This Page
• Share on WhatsApp

The power of a well-placed needle drop is something writer/director Zach Cregger clearly understands. After honing his chops as part of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, which aired a sketch show for five seasons in the late aughts, Cregger has set his sights on horror. As Jordan Peele proved with aplomb, comedy and horror are two very different sides of the same coin, both using absurd premises to elicit physical reactions from their audience. For his clever horror thriller “ Barbarian ,” Cregger clearly took a page from the Peele playbook. With a chillingly relatable Airbnb setup, “Barbarian” mines multiple real-life scenarios and fears to unleash some truly unhinged terrors. It’s no “Get Out,” but it’s a hell of a lot of fun — with a little something to say as well.

Opening with a bang, “Barbarian” starts on the edge of sinister and barrels toward the darkness, with a few diverting rest stops along the way. The movie begins as Tess (Georgina Campbell), headed to a job interview, arrives at her Detroit Airbnb, where she’s surprised to discover an unexpected roommate in the form of suspicious charmer Keith ( Bill Skarsgård ). Playing on Skarsgård’s natural creepiness and icon status in contemporary horror, tension is high from the jump as Keith insists Tess not be put out by the mix-up. When she’s unable to book another place, he’s overly enthusiastic about offering her his bed and a glass of wine. He makes a big show of opening the bottle in front of her, so she won’t think he’s poisoning her.

Tess lets her guard down when she learns Keith is part of a well-known Detroit artist collective, as he explains his little Airbnb jaunt as “scouring this side of town looking for our next little nest.” Just a few glasses in, and she’s giggling up a storm as Keith playfully tosses the comforter over his head. Despite being spooked by a creaky door and Keith’s sleepy murmurings, Tess survives the night. When she drives to her job interview, she finally sees the neighborhood in the daytime. The yellow-painted house stands out amongst the derelict homes, a stark illustration of why people keep telling Tess to be careful in the neighborhood.

Alone at the house after her job interview, Tess is lured into the basement by a mysterious door that either won’t stay shut or closes on its own. Once down there, she discovers an almost comical labyrinth of hidden doors, abandoned rooms, dark hallways, and narrow staircases. Each new discovery verges on the verge of hilarious and hair-raising, as “Barbarian” narrowly walks the line between the comically absurd and absurdly terrifying. Just as she’s ready to pack her bags and run, Keith convinces her to wait while he checks it out, and it’s as unclear as ever where he stands.

But before we can find out, the movie cuts to a blood-pumping needle drop of an entirely different nature, introducing an entirely new character to start the second act. Cruising quite ridiculously to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi” in his convertible, Hollywood actor AJ ( Justin Long ) is gleefully answering an important call from his team about whether his pilot got picked up. His windswept joy quickly drains from his face when he learns he’s been accused of sexual assault by his co-star, and Long delivers a one-man master class as he slowly realizes his entire life is about to go up in flames. Forced to sell his assets to pay for legal fees, he hops a plane to Detroit, where he owns a few rental properties.

Like Keith, AJ is another study in white male shiftiness, exuding movie star charisma as he reveals himself as the poster child for every toxic male trait in the book. Not only is he a rapist, he’s a landlord, an amoral gentrifier in a historically Black neighborhood who has never even set foot inside his trussed-up rental property until now. He yells rudely at the people who maintain his property, calls women “lying bitches,” and sees nothing wrong with a little coercion during sex. Every time he’s about to get what he deserves, he finds a way to let a woman take the fall.

That’s all before the unexpected third act reveal — yet another abrupt swing that earns “Barbarian” its title by dragging us into the realm of the barbaric. With all of the backstory built up, “Barbarian” has more than enough room to go full-blown horror, and its left turn of an explanation feels like icing on the cake of an already satisfying social thriller. For his bone-chilling denouement, Cregger throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix, which he gets away with due to the precision and austerity of the first two acts. The finale offers more than a few jump scares and stomach-churning shocks. Though the final explanation may feel like a mish-mosh of extreme terrors, the ride is far too much fun to take issue.

“Barbarian” opens in theaters on September 9, 2022. 

Most Popular

You may also like.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Barbarian review – gory, secretive horror is all bark, no bite

A committed performance from Georgina Campbell is a rare highpoint in a competently made yet increasingly frustrating shocker about a sinister basement

T he campaign for gnarly, mostly one-location horror Barbarian has been scarily subdued. Just the one trailer – light on plot, heavy on mystery – and that punchy one-word title, a rare example of restraint, crafty less-is-more marketing we don’t see often enough in the exhausting era of trailer teases, teaser trailers, trailer countdowns, digital trailers, extended trailers and final trailers.

I’m going to remain as tight-lipped about the specifics, and not just because a strictly worded pre-screening email insisted upon such, but because there are depressingly few pleasures to be had here, and one of them is at least, for a while, playing detective trying to figure out just what on earth is buried at its centre. It’s in the opening stretch, the set-up laid out in the hugely effective preview, that this game works so well.

It’s late, and Tess (Georgina Campbell) is arriving at her Detroit Airbnb in the middle of a rainstorm, only to find that there’s someone already in it. Double-booked Airbnbs have weirdly become something of a trend of late, from Katie Holmes’s Covid comedy Alone Together to Winona Ryder’s gonzo thriller Gone in the Night to last week’s Netflix romcom Love in the Villa , but it’s explored with the most thought-through detail here, the awkward ins and outs of how to then cope with such an aggravating clerical error (or is it? etc). Tess is stuck with Keith (Pennywise himself, Bill Skarsgård), who is being disarmingly nice about it all, and after realising that other options aren’t possible for the night (a convention is in town and hotel rooms have all been snapped up), she reluctantly agrees to stay.

It’s obviously a recipe for disaster, but writer-director Zach Cregger initially works hard to sell us on the “nope” of it all (Tess even says “nope” at one point, when considering a risky move). She takes a picture of his ID, she locks the bedroom door, she refuses to drink anything she hasn’t seen him prepare, she’s … aware of the danger she could be in as a woman (the two have a discussion about the differences they face in such a situation). It then makes the ensuing descent into the basement and into full horror that much more mystifying, as Tess, a recently smart and careful woman, turns maddeningly dim-witted, acting in ways that make no sense outside of the construct of a horror movie written by someone unable to find justifications for why a character would act so foolishly. Each eye-roll and head-shake takes us further away from the film, losing us and any real suspense, characters downgraded to chess pieces.

The reveal of what lies down below is less surprising than the structure Cregger then chooses to deploy as we are taken to different periods, locations and viewpoints (there is more Justin Long than one would expect), interestingly bold until one realises such diversion is merely that, a way of distracting us from what is essentially a pretty ineffective monster movie. It’s competently made (Cregger could perhaps work better with a script he hasn’t written) but curiously flat, and in recalling films from Don’t Breathe to The People Under the Stairs, only serves to remind us how devoid this is in comparison.

The way Cregger casually drifts close to hot-button topics and then decides to avoid them completely could almost be a knowingly middle-fingered statement on how he’s deliberately choosing not to fall into the “elevated” horror trap, the what-if-we-just-lived-in-a-society option over what-if-I-told-you-how-we-all-lived-in-this-society thesis. But even that extremely generous reading would require a writer-director with a firmer hand on his material, and here it feels more like someone blindly throwing a net out wide, hoping something might get caught in the process. It’s a defiantly unscary lump of Midnight Madness schlock that gains nothing from showcasing an awareness of the #MeToo reckoning or the damage of gentrification other than box-ticking.

It’s a shame that Campbell, an actor of immediate intimacy and warmth, hasn’t found a breakout more deserving of her talents. I’m still haunted by her devastating, Bafta-winning work in Paul Andrew Williams’s BBC3 drama Murdered By My Boyfriend , one of the most effectively gut-wrenching and nuanced stories I’ve ever seen of the specific horrors of domestic violence, and while she gives this her very best, the material never reaches her lofty level. It’s frustrating to watch an actor of clear intelligence glumly navigate a character of deep stupidity, and Cregger’s thin attempt to explain her decision-making as based on the trauma of a toxic relationship is an on-paper construct rather than anything that makes sense for a real person.

As Barbarian progresses, and as my interest diminished, it becomes clear that the secretive trailer is less artful withholding and more deliberate deception, because if more cards were laid out on the table, the majority would balk at the very silly game being played. The big secret here is that sadly it’s not very good.

Barbarian is released in US cinemas on 9 September and in the UK on 28 October.

• Horror films

Most viewed

• International
• Today’s Paper
• Join WhatsApp Channel
• Movie Reviews
• Tamil Cinema
• Telugu Cinema

Barbarian movie review: The buzziest horror film of the year delivers bang for the buck thrills

Barbarian movie review: directed by debutant zach cregger and starring georgina campbell alongside newly minted scream kings justin long and bill skarsgård, the sleeper-hit horror film is giving audiences sleepless nights..

With the horror film Barbarian, you get three movies for the price of one. Not all of them work equally well, and a last-ditch attempt to bring it all together is almost too ambitious, but you can’t help but admire debutant director Zach Cregger’s audacity. Unlike India, where filmmakers are positively terrified of tackling the genre in its purest form — our scary movies are usually watered down with romance or comedy — Barbarian somehow combines three vastly different styles of horror filmmaking into a wildly original romp that lives and dies by its own rules.

Like so many desi horror directors, Cregger also switches between tones, but the delineations in his narrative are deliberately defined. A second-act tonal shift is so provocatively jarring that it will take a moment for you to recover. Cregger anticipated this, perhaps; he leaves around 10 seconds of inaction immediately after smash-cutting to an entirely different setting, presumably to give you time to pick your jaw up from the floor. Like how Marvel movies these days go silent after big reveals, in anticipation of the din in the theatres. I’d imagine that watching Barbarian with a full crowd at midnight wouldn’t be too different from the experience of watching Avengers: Endgame with an opening day audience. Certainly, it’ll play differently than it does at home, on Disney+ Hotstar.

Barbarian opens with 30 minutes of pure unease, as a young woman in town for a job interview checks into a creepy Airbnb that she discovers is already occupied by another man. It’s raining, it’s nighttime, and there’s nowhere else for her to go. Before you can scream at her to get the hell out of this situation, she has accepted the man’s suggestion to come in and plan her next move. Things get weirder when he offers her some wine, and convinces her that all the hotels in the area are fully booked because of some convention.

Played by Bill Skarsgård, Pennywise himself — ingenious casting that subconsciously adds to the upsetting atmosphere — the man is a walking, talking red flag. The scenario is made more tense by the dude’s unendingly suspicious attempts to put our heroine at ease by suggesting that he’s  not  a creep. But Cregger’s screenplay offers moderately believable reasons for our protagonist (played by Georgina Campbell) to stick around, even if you, as a seasoned consumer of horror movies, are left scratching your head as to why she’d go through with this. But that’s part of the fun of watching horror movies. And also, if she’d behaved sensibly in the first place, Barbarian would’ve ended five minutes in.

But now, we get to the tricky part. This film is best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible. Certainly, Barbarian’s brilliant marketing was mounted almost entirely on this premise. And suffice it to say, I will not be revealing any further plot details here; everybody deserves to experience the narrative whiplash that I felt at the end of act one for themselves. And by the time the final act rolls in, offering yet another stylistic departure from what we’ve seen over an hour or so, you’re either going to be clinging on to the ride for dear life, or you’d have pressed the panic button and checked out already.

But even though Barbarian plays fast and loose with tone and texture — the first act is a psychological thriller rooted in relatable reality, while the second resembles a darkly humorous social satire , and the third a more traditional horror picture, complete with a monster and a maze — the themes remain consistent. On one level, Barbarian is a post-MeToo men-are-trash movie; yet another suspicious attempt by a male filmmaker to comment on (and inadvertently overcompensate for) the behaviour of their tribe. But on the other hand, it’s a film about urban decay and toxic relationships. Cregger visualises these ideas by showing us the literal decrepitude of modern-day Detroit — the Don’t Breathe comparisons are unavoidable in these moments — and then by suggesting that all men have secrets buried in their basements.

But in a way, he overshadows the fine print of his own screenplay by calling attention to the film’s structure and visuals. It falls short of self-sabotage because that would imply failure, and Barbarian is far from that. But it certainly distracts from the core messaging, and  that  is unfortunate. On pure inventiveness alone, though, Barbarian stands out in a cluttered horror marketplace, even if the shady guys that it attempts to call out can be rather difficult to identify.

Barbarian Director – Zach Cregger Cast – Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård, Justin Long Rating – 3.5/5

It is imperative we teach our kids how to behave Subscriber Only

Heeramandi review: Part history, part myth, full-on Sanjay Leela Bhansali

Gen Z has a new situationship in their lives: Their

How DDA built the middle class dream and shaped modern Subscriber Only

The Idea of You does disservice to Anne Hathaway

16th edition of the Habitat Film Festival to begin in Subscriber Only

India's dark chocolate market is growing. Who is taking the Subscriber Only

Heeramandi costume designer on working with Bhansali

The complex journey of transgender rights in Christianity Subscriber Only

Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a 'Rotten Tomatoes-approved' critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police. You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at [email protected]. He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More

• Disney Plus Hotstar
• horror films
• horror movies
• Movie Review

The Canadian police has made arrests in connection with the killing of Khalistani separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey last year, a  CBC News report said. Nijjar, a 45-year-old Canadian citizen, was attacked and shot multiple times in a gangland-style incident while leaving a gurdwara in Surrey on June 18, last year.

More Entertainment

Best of Express

May 04: Latest News

• 01 At least nine killed in strike on displacement camp in eastern Congo
• 02 German foreign minister says Russia will face consequences for monthslong cyber espionage
• 03 Heavy rains over Texas have led to water rescues, school cancellations and orders to evacuate
• 04 IPL 2024 points table update: KKR bolster position in top-two, MI all but out of playoffs contention
• 05 Hyderabad man sets Guinness World Record for typing alphabet backwards in less than 3 seconds
• Elections 2024
• Political Pulse
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Gold Rate Today
• Silver Rate Today
• Petrol Rate Today
• Diesel Rate Today
• Web Stories
• Premium Stories
• Express Shorts
• Health & Wellness
• Board Exam Results
• Brand Solutions

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Barbarian’ turns paint-by-number horror elements into something more

Zach Cregger’s twisty, clever script elevates this story about a double-booked Airbnb

“Barbarian” has a typical horror movie setup. Tess (Georgina Campbell) is in Detroit for a job interview. On a dark and stormy night, she arrives at her Airbnb, but somebody else is already there. Keith (Bill Skarsgard), who rented the house from a different service, tries to be helpful, but he’s awkward and a little creepy. He suggests they both spend the night there. If you were a young woman traveling alone, would you stay in a double-booked rental with someone whose sunken eyes make him look like Steve Buscemi’s unsettling character in “Fargo”?

But “Barbarian” does something unusual. Writer-director Zach Cregger’s script takes these various paint-by-number horror elements — a vulnerable debutante, an unfamiliar house, a hidden room — and colors outside the lines.

Cregger, who was born in Arlington, is part of the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U’Know . But while “Barbarian” is dryly funny, his foray into fright isn’t exactly a horror comedy, and that’s a good thing.

Winding through as many twists as there are secret passages in the basement, the script is more than just clever — it’s intelligent, and its characters, for the most part, are more emotionally shaded than usual. They don’t behave the way horror victims are supposed to act; when Tess first discovers a secret passage, she doesn’t immediately enter it. “Nope!” she tells herself, though her tune changes, if only out of necessity. This is a film that respects its audience; instead of over-explaining every turn, Cregger places enough clues so you can figure it out yourself.

Cinematographer Zach Kuperstein works with Cregger to immerse us in this spooky living space. The house, which is in a rough part of Detroit (the city’s long decline and attempted resurgence are part of the plot), is the most dangerous place in the movie, and we get to know its layout, from the plain, utilitarian furnishings to the horrifying (and perhaps biologically symbolic) underground passages. It becomes so familiar that when the action calls for a change of venue, it’s unsettling since we no longer know where we are. That which scares us is exactly what draws us in — like a typical horror character, we want to see what’s in those hidden spaces.

The cast sells the film’s tangled conceit. Campbell takes what seems like a run-of-the-mill woman in distress and invests her with not just toughness but maturity. Skarsgard plays his part with the right level of ambiguity; he seems sensitive but shifty enough for us to wonder whether he’s the eponymous brute. And it would be a spoiler to explain how Justin Long’s character is dragged into this hell: On one level, he’s a mustache-twirling cartoon villain — all the better to root for his demise — but he’s given a chance to break out of his glib arrogance.

In the end, one wonders who the barbarian really is. Is it Detroit? Is it America? Is it us? Through its parade of screams, “Barbarian” asks an important question: Can we trust anyone to keep an eye out for us — parents, law enforcement — or do we need to learn to fend for ourselves?

R. At area theaters. Contains some strong violence and gore, disturbing images, strong language throughout and nudity. 102 minutes.

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Barbarians’ Review: Unexpected Visitors

In this new thriller set in the countryside, tension mounts between two men until a home invasion takes it to homicidal heights.

• Share full article

By Lena Wilson

The new thriller “Barbarians” might look familiar to those acquainted with the director Lars von Trier’s 2009 film, “ Antichrist .” Both movies center on a wealthy couple in the countryside destined for violent encounters, as portended by a dying fox. But where “Antichrist” depicts a crisis of femininity, as a wife is overtaken by madness, “Barbarians,” in the directorial debut by Charles Dorfman, is all about masculinity.

The couple in “Barbarians” is Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Adam (Iwan Rheon) — she a wildly successful sculptor and he a mediocre director. It is Adam’s birthday, and he must decide whether to commit to his girlfriend and buy a dreamy, rural estate with her. That choice becomes less clear-cut when his longtime frenemy, Lucas (Tom Cullen), a real estate developer who owns the house, arrives for dinner with his girlfriend, Chloe (Inès Spiridonov). Lucas appears to be everything Adam isn’t: swaggering, successful, tall. Tension between the two men mounts until a home invasion takes it to homicidal heights.

I find the idea of a small man feeling emasculated by his thriving girlfriend tiresome enough in real life, and Dorfman, who also wrote the script, doesn’t manage to elevate it for the big screen. Aside from some cool aerial shots and an always excellent Cullen, there’s not much worth fussing about.

Despite their biblical names, Adam and Eva learn little from their time in Eden. The film hinges on Adam’s ability to kill: He couldn’t put the fox out of its misery, but his stomach becomes stronger as he proves his masculinity through brute strength.

“Antichrist” may have been chauvinistic in its own right, but at least it was interesting to watch. “Barbarians” doesn’t provide much excitement at all.

Barbarians Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV , Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.

Lena Wilson is a project manager at The New York Times and a freelance writer covering film, TV, technology and lesbian culture. More about Lena Wilson

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

The Netflix stalker series “ Baby Reindeer ” combines the appeal of a twisty thriller with a deep sense of empathy. The ending illustrates why it’s become such a hit .

We have entered the golden age of Mid TV, where we have a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence, our critic writes .

The writer-director Alex Garland has made it clear that “Civil War” should be a warning. Instead, the ugliness of war comes across as comforting thrills .

Studios obsessively focused on PG-13 franchises and animation in recent years, but movies like “Challengers” and “Saltburn” show that Hollywood is embracing sex again .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Weapons: Alden Ehrenreich Joins Zach Cregger’s Barbarian Follow-Up

As he develops his follow-up to hit horror movie Barbarian , writer/director Zach Cregger has been quietly building the cast he needs for his latest, Weapons . Alden Ehrenreich is the most recent addition to an ensemble that already includes Josh Brolin and Julia Garner.

Weapons is mostly being kept under wraps, but we have previously heard it described as "an interrelated, multistory horror epic that tonally is in the vein of Magnolia ", focusing on missing high school students. Which would not really surprise us given the terrifying intensity and invention of Barbarian .

New Line snapped up the rights to back the new film, which at one point had Pedro Pascal attached to star before his commitment to other gigs including Marvel's Fantastic Four took precedence. In a coincidental quirk, Garner is also in Fantastic Four , but in a smaller role as Shalla-Bal.

Cregger is in pre-production on his latest, so no word on a release date yet, but he'll start shooting next month. As for Ehrenreich, he was seen in Fair Play and a little film that did well at the Oscars called Oppenheimer . He has a role in Marvel's Ironheart series (still waiting to learn when that one will drop this year) and is attached to crime drama Switzerland .

Netflix: The Judge dethroned 'Anyone But You' as the No. 1 movie in the US

A fter “Anyone But You” held the number 1 spot in the Top 10 on Netflix in the United States, a new movie has finally arrived to take it down from the top and leave it in second place. That movie is “ The Judge “.

This drama is a classic of cinema, which was released in 2014 and stars multiple great talents, notably Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) and Robert Duvall (The Apostle) in the lead roles as father and son.

Directed by David Dobkin and nominated for an Oscar , the title explores themes of family dynamics, forgiveness and redemption, delving into the complexities of relationships and the impact of past decisions on the present.

The Judge reaches Top 1 movie on Netflix US

Although “ The Judge ” was released 10 years ago, the movie continues to be a success and a strong trend. This week, it has managed to secure a place in the US Top 10 on Netflix , currently sitting at the top.

Flix Patrol reported that the drama has become the most-watched in the American catalog , displacing the rom-com released in 2024 starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell .

The narrative has been categorized as a legal thriller that combines courtroom intrigue with personal drama, backed by strong performances from its lead actors, especially Robert Downey Jr. (Avengers: Endgame).

The popular star was joined by a long list of industry greats, but he worked closely with Robert Duvall , Jeremy Strong , Dax Shepard , Vera Farmiga , Billy Bob Thornton and Leighton Meester , among others.

The story follows Hank Palmer, a big-city lawyer who returns to his childhood home, where his father, the town judge, is suspected of murder, and he sets out to uncover the truth, but on the way he is reunited with his family.

Despite the mixed reviews, which stated that the plot was too conventional and melodramatic, it performed moderately well at the box office, grossing over $84 million worldwide.

More must-reads:

• Harry Styles' upcoming projects: What is the actor doing next?
• Anne Hathaway's The Idea of You is the new Top 4 on Prime Video US
• Netflix: Bill Skarsgard's Barbarian ranks Top 7 worldwide

site categories

Neve campbell says studio stepped up her pay for ‘scream 7’ after she spoke out, alden ehrenreich joins new line horror thriller ‘weapons’ from zach cregger.

By Matt Grobar

Matt Grobar

Senior Film Reporter

More Stories By Matt

• Jack Paglen In Talks To Script New ‘Maze Runner’ Movie For 20th Century Studios
• Yul Vazquez Latest To Join Paul Greengrass Pic ‘The Lost Bus’
• Mike Flanagan In Talks To Direct Next ‘Exorcist’ Movie For Blumhouse, Universal

Alden Ehrenreich ( Fair Play ) is the newest addition to the cast of Weapons , New Line ‘s horror thriller from writer-director Zach Cregger .

Related Stories

Jeff Bridges Returning For ‘Tron: Ares’

Lola Kirke Joins Ryan Coogler’s Supernatural Thriller

Cregger will also produce Weapons alongside his Barbarian producing team, Roy Lee of Vertigo and J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules of BoulderLight Pictures. Vertigo’s Miri Yoon also produces.

Ehrenreich is coming off of Chloe Domont’s acclaimed romantic drama Fair Play , which Netflix snapped up following its debut at Sundance, as well as Christopher Nolan’s Best Picture winner Oppenheimer , which had him starring opposite Robert Downey Jr. as a Senate aide. Also in 2023, the actor starred in Elizabeth Banks’s box office hit Cocaine Bear for Universal opposite Keri Russell and the late Ray Liotta.

Up next, Ehrenreich will next be seen as a lead in the Disney+/Marvel miniseries Ironheart . The thesp is repped by CAA, Linden Entertainment, and Felker Toczek Suddleson.

Must Read Stories

Skydance’s exclusive negotiating window closing – will ellison walk.

Ryan Gosling-Led ‘The Fall Guy’ Headed For $28M Opening, Below Forecasts

‘across the spider-verse’ bucks superhero fatigue big-time at no. 3, the furiosa will fly as ‘mad max’ prequel battles ‘garfield’ for memorial day title.

Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy.

Read More About:

Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Mattel’s ‘Masters of the Universe’ Moves From Netflix to Amazon for Summer 2026 Release, Travis Knight to Direct

By Angelique Jackson

Angelique Jackson

• Britt Hennemuth Exits Vanity Fair to Join Universal Pictures as Senior VP of Production Development and Special Projects 7 hours ago
• Yara Shahidi to Executive Produce ‘Paint Me a Road Out of Here’ Documentary (EXCLUSIVE) 1 day ago
• Marvel’s ‘The Fantastic Four’ Adds Paul Walter Hauser 1 day ago

The long-awaited live-action “ Masters of the Universe ” movie is one step closer to becoming a reality, with Amazon MGM Studios and Mattel Films dating the project for worldwide theatrical release on June 5, 2026.

Travis Knight (“Kubo and the Two Strings,” “Bumblebee”) is on board to direct the film adaptation of the popular franchise, with Chris Butler writing the screenplay, following initial drafts written by David Callaham and Aaron and Adam Nee. Mattel Films’ Robbie Brenner, Escape Artists’ Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal and Steve Tisch are producing.

Popular on Variety

Casting on the project has yet to be announced, but news that “Masters of the Universe” is officially back on track is a welcome bulletin for fans of the popular Mattel franchise, which began in 1982 as a line of action figures, followed by the animated series “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” in 1983.

The Amazon MGM/Mattel-backed movie comes after a previous (and pricey) live-action adaptation was scrapped at Netflix, with the Nee brothers at the helm and Kyle Allen announced to star. In July 2023, Variety exclusively revealed Netflix was no longer moving forward after nearly $30 million had been spent on developing the project.

The project’s implosion at Netflix was just the latest false start for He-Man and friends, who’ve been journeying to the big screen since 2007, Variety’s Matt Donnelly wrote, explaining that “it’s a long road that’s crossed through two other studios, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures, and countless writers and directors like Jon M. Chu and McG.”

He-Man and “Barbie” are just the tip of the iceberg for Mattel Films, which has built a robust slate based on the company’s dozens of children’s toys. Among the properties in active development are “Barney,” produced by Daniel Kaluuya; “Bob the Builder,” with Anthony Ramos starring and producing alongside Jennifer Lopez; “Polly Pocket,” written by Lena Dunham and starring Lily Collins; “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots” starring Vin Diesel; an “American Girl” doll movie; a “Hot Wheels” movie produced by J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot; and a Magic 8 Ball movie with Blumhouse.

Now dig into a VIP+ subscriber report …

More From Our Brands

Kentucky derby livestream: how to watch the 150th running online this weekend, savannah vs. charleston: which southern city has the best luxury hotels, fanatics exec appeals injunction in draftkings noncompete case, be tough on dirt but gentle on your body with the best soaps for sensitive skin, the boys season 4 trailer: wrathful supes, gen v cameos… and homelander on ice oh my — watch, verify it's you, please log in.

'The rule of cool' is Blizzard's solution to Diablo 4's barbarian problem and it's going to 'juice up the other classes' to compensate

Necromancers are first on the list.

It doesn't take a Diablo 4 expert to look at all the weapons barbarians carry around and wonder what the other classes are doing only using one or two. Barbarians are Diablo 4's strongest class by far and it mostly comes down to the fact that, in a game about powerful items, they get to have four of the strongest ones at all times.

Despite what some players think, Blizzard is very aware of barbarians' inherent advantage and is going to try to lift every other class up to their level, starting in season 4.

For context: Diablo 4 classes gain the majority of their power from weapons. All your skills deal damage based on the strength of your weapons. And each weapon can have the strongest Legendary powers, or aspects, in the game on them, like a passive that causes skills to deal up to 40 times more damage than normal.

So let me reiterate the problem: Barbarians get four weapons.

Season 4 'Loot Reborn': Diablo 4's biggest update yet Season 3 feedback: Will vault dungeons return? Solo boss farming: Blizzard's answer to the group advantage

In an interview last week, I asked lead class designer Adam Jackson how you balance a class with such a massive advantage over the others, especially with the introduction of season 4's new Tempering crafting system that lets you stack even more powerful stats onto your items.

Understandably, Jackson looked like he aged a thousand years as he reflected on the difficulties of trying to wrangle this class in: "The fantasy is really cool. And we like the fantasy. We also think that it feels really awesome that you have access to more weapons and you get a little more Legendary power flexibility and things like that."

"Minion necromancer should feel crazy good." Adam Jackson, lead class designer

The answer to this problem, he explained, could be "something really kind of lame," like only activating Legendary powers for weapons the barbarian is actively swinging or changing how they work for barbarians only.

Comic deals, prizes and latest news

Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors.

"Rather than do that," he said, "what we're thinking right now on the team is we're trying to juice up the other classes, in their mechanics and other things, to keep up with that, and now the classes have parity that way."

Jackson implied it'll be an ongoing process over the next major balance patches, but pointed to necromancers as the first class in line. In season 4, their undead minions will be more powerful than ever before. Your bone mages can cast your Bone Spear skill—which gains every bonus your character would get for using it—and the golem can call down a hail of Bone Spikes on enemies. On the early playtest server, or PTR, last month, necromancer minions were strong enough to nearly one-shot Uber Lilith all on their own—which Jackson said isn't far off from where they'll be when the season launches next month. "That's important to us; minion necromancer should feel crazy good."

To get there, Blizzard had to apply what Jackson refers to as "the rule of cool." 

"If you can't tell why it's awesome, like if we only increase damage numbers or something, that's not enough for something like a class mechanic," he said. "We want to make sure these things feel different and awesome and cool.

"We added these things [to the necromancer] because we wanted to measure up to that cool factor that the barbarian has. Having weapons is something you can see and you're always engaging with in your inventory. And that's kind of what we're trying to hit for the classes, like these mechanics and things that they get in their powers feel very unique and the fantasy is there, and also is impactful. So you can look forward to more of that in the future."

Sorry, barbarians, it sounds like you won't be the only class blasting through season 4's toughest dungeons when it launches on May 14. It's the necromancers' time to shine.

Tyler has covered games, games culture, and hardware for over a decade before joining PC Gamer as Associate Editor. He's done in-depth reporting on communities and games as well as criticism for sites like Polygon, Wired, and Waypoint. He's interested in the weird and the fascinating when it comes to games, spending time probing for stories and talking to the people involved. Tyler loves sinking into games like Final Fantasy 14, Overwatch, and Dark Souls to see what makes them tick and pluck out the parts worth talking about. His goal is to talk about games the way they are: broken, beautiful, and bizarre.

Blizzard snuck in surprise quality of life changes into Diablo 4's massive list of season 4 patch notes

Elden Ring lead Hidetaka Miyazaki won't say how long the DLC is since everyone thinks he lowballed the main game: 'Everyone told me I was lying and that's not remotely enough time!'

After two long years in early access, my favorite indie Elder Scrolls-alike is getting its full release⁠—and it'll let you fly around in your own airship

Most Popular

• 2 Best ultrawide monitor for gaming in 2024: the expansive panels I recommend for PC gamers
• 3 Best wireless gaming keyboard in 2024
• 4 Best gaming laptops in 2024: I've had my pick of portable powerhouses and these are the best
• 5 Best gaming chairs in 2024: the seats I'd suggest for any gamer
• 2 Flexispot E7L adjustable standing desk review
• 3 Starforge Systems Navigator Pro review
• 4 Indika review
• 5 Gigabyte Aorus FO32U2 review