A new horror film has been released on Netflix. “Barbarian” is rated 18+. MeinMMO author Schuhmann says: The film starts perfectly and is so exciting that you can hardly stand it. If the film had ended after 40 minutes, it would have been a huge hit in the genre.
This is how Barbarian begins:
A young woman, Tess, wants to check into a run-down house in the worst area of Detroit in the middle of the night. She found the house on Airbnb. The compartment where the key should be is empty. The area is bad, and her nerves are frayed.
A confused guy opens the door (Bill Skarsgård, the clown monster from “IT”). There must be a misunderstanding. Maybe a double booking. Or is the man a burglar, perhaps just waiting for a young, pretty woman to fall into his trap?
Why is he so interested in her staying the night? Why does he offer her tea and seem so keen for her to stay the night?
Barbarian | Official Trailer
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A brilliant beginning that is hard to bear because of the tension
What makes the beginning so good? Tess is not an idiot. You can tell from her face and every action how threatening she perceives the situation to be, which she has a complete overview of.
She knows that she is physically inferior to the man, that she does things that women simply don’t do. She feels how vulnerable and exposed she is at every minute.
The atmosphere in “Barbarian” is so dense and worrying that it is almost unbearable. The scenery is believable, the film avoids typical shock effects or cheap tricks, trusting only its atmosphere and the actors. That is great. The first half of the film is brilliant and runs straight towards a climax.
Barbarian breaks as soon as Justin Long appears
What is the problem? Without giving too much away, there is a break about halfway through the film when Justin Long shows up. This is the “typical young nerd” actor that Hollywood calls upon when it needs to cast a wimp. In “Die Hard 4” he was the computer nerd who drove Bruce Willis crazy.
Long works in horror films because he is not a hero and it is something special when someone like him takes courage and faces the supernatural. He was seen in Jeepers Creepers and Drag Me to Hell as a normal guy in unusual situations and was completely fine in both roles.
In Barbarian, however, he plays an actor who is caught up in a Me Too scandal and stumbles. He seems like an alien in the film, and that’s clearly how it’s meant to be, because he behaves like exactly the kind of idiot who doesn’t know he’s in a horror film.
While Tess feels oppressed and uncomfortable every second in the house, Long walks through the house beaming with a tape measure and is happy, as a property owner, about how much floor space the property has.
This isn’t all that bad, but it’s not good either, and the film breaks in tone so extremely that it stands out bitterly in comparison to the first half.
Barbarian also has the typical Jaws problem: the threat is much more threatening as long as it remains unknown.
Should you watch this? Yes, absolutely, just for the first half. If you turn the film off as soon as Justin Long appears, it is a better film experience, which is not because of poor Justin Long, but because the film completely changes direction with him and starts over again. In this second storyline, the tension curve is nowhere near as brilliant as in the original storyline.
Barbarian is on Netflix and is rated 18+. For more horror films rated 18+, we recommend our list.
Interesting for gamers: “Barbarian” is to be released as a video game. The makers of “Friday the 13th” are working on it.
Another horror film on Netflix that we highly recommend is The Circle, which sets a thrilling SF scenario in motion. 100 people are involved in a deadly game from which there seems to be no escape: A fascinating film on Netflix is like “Squid Game”, but the game only ends when only one person is left alive