150 Word Review: ‘Barbarian’ (2022)
Welcome home
The real villains in director/writer Zach Cregger’s Barbarian are Airbnb hosts, and he isn’t wrong. Real estate in this country is a nightmare. Cregger’s low-budget horror movie is a stylish haunted house story that zigs and zags in unexpected directions.
His scare tactics are good old-fashioned fun: dark basements, bloody handprints on walls, gory head trauma — classic stuff. Barbarian also manages to mix witty social commentary with brain splatter successfully. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Cregger is a Wes Craven fan.
Georgina Campbell is our hero, who makes the mistake of renting a house on a business trip to Detroit. Bad news: the rental is double booked, and she has to spend a long rainy night sharing the place with Bill Skarsgård’s creepy Keith. What happens next? I won’t tell, but there are monsters on the loose in Motor City, and not all of them are landlords.
