Barbarian

  What happens when an attractive young documentary film researcher stumbles into the horror genre? 

You get an acid vision of post-Reagan America. We are, after all, experiencing the America that grew out of the Reagan trickle-down economics and bubble-up right-wing populism. The film’s title is a concise summary.

As we see, the monster’s father stayed in the ostensibly proper Detroit suburb when civilization left. The once idyllic American neighbourhood is now a ruin. In a clash of elements an Air BnB now conceals — and feeds — an underground horror chamber where the ideal of nursing motherhood has turned monstrous. The monster stalks the night — and the rental above— for prisoners she can force into being her sucklings. As she kills the non-obliging, her parody of nursing does keep at least Tess alive. 

In the final irony, the end titles play against the ‘50s rock classic Be My Baby. That romantic anthem has become a monster’s fatal compulsion. Indeed the female monster is a bitter amplification of the imprisoned wife in Jane Eyre, the novel discovd incestuous ered in a tenant’s suitcase. 

The documentary context extends from heroine Tess’s responsible profession down to the porn studio in the cavern. The monster supplies her now helpless old father with videos of the prisoners they have tortured — presumably starting with the housewife we see him setting up for abduction. In contrast, in Tess’s new project a woman filmmaker covers the reclaiming of abandoned properties— whether neighbourhoods or values.  

Once confronted with a normal man — the TV producer AJ — the monster’s father kills himself. But how “normal”  is AJ? 

As the plot’s ostensible hero he is totally compromised. He’s the absentee and oblivious owner of the property now so poisoned. He has come to liquidate it in order to pay his legal charges to defend against a rape charge. As he describes the incident to a buddy and as he indiscreetly tells the woman’s answering machine, she has a strong case. As the monster is a perversion of motherhood  AJ is a perversion of romantic manhood. 

In exploring the property he has so long neglected he so obsesses over his measurement that he fails to see the dangers around hi

He even fails as the film’s “hero,” despite his part in freeing Tess. While his shooting her may be accidental, he instinctively sacrifices Tess to deflect the monster, to save himself. As befits such a film-centered hero AJ has his eyes gouged out. 

The monster’s female nature may be unusual, but the sexual threat is largely accorded the male: from the monster’s rapist father down to the rapist AJ. She is the product and victim of her father’s rapes. Indeed the threatening atmosphere is so sexual that in his first scenes with Tess Keith may well be innocent. But the scene ripples with sexual danger. His nightmares and her mysteriously opening doors catch the danger in their minds — and in the underground of their world. 

With these themes and strategy this is a contemporary take on the classic horror genre, extremely polished and effective.