It’s hard to genuinely surprise moviegoers these days. Many of them have seen too many movies. They know the ropes too well. That has especially become the case with certain horror genres. How does someone even try to reinvent the slasher thriller in the year 2024? Or the haunted house movie? There are too many well-known tropes now, and a lot of movies understandably try to focus less on surprising their viewers and more on exceeding their expectations in different ways.
But then there are films that still make unpredictability look shockingly easy. Perhaps no movie of the 2020s so far has done that as well as Barbarian. The horror film from writer-director Zach Cregger came seemingly out of nowhere in the late summer of 2022 and quickly garnered a reputation for being a thriller that you should go into knowing as little about as possible. That’s because Barbarian is, to put it incredibly simply, a wild ride unlike any other horror movie in recent memory.
It’s now officially streaming on Hulu — just in time for the Halloween season.
A demented thriller that will keep you guessing
Barbarian wastes no time before putting you in an uncomfortable, uncertain place. Its opening scene follows Tess (The Watchers star Georgina Campbell), a young woman caught in the rain in a dark, quiet subur. She arrives at the Airbnb she’s rented in Detroit only to discover that someone else, Keith (The Crow‘s Bill Skarsgård), is already there. They both assume that the rental was accidentally double-booked, but when Keith invites Tess to just share it with him for the night, she’s forced to make numerous quick decisions about how much she should trust this total stranger she’s just met.
To say much more about Barbarian‘s plot would be to spoil all the fun. The places that the film goes following Tess and Keith’s initial meeting, however, are as shocking as they are — at times — genuinely horrifying. Barbarian never overly telegraphs what it is about to do, either. The film, in fact, offers very little warning about where it is ultimately going to go, and that’s a large part of its brilliance. It forces you for almost the entirety of its 102-minute runtime to sit in the present moment with its characters and, therefore, discover new information at the same pace they do.
Watching it feels like finding a mysterious thread and simply following it to see where it goes. The film’s plot is, on paper, ridiculous, but it ends up making a crooked kind of sense because of how patiently Cregger takes you through it on a step-by-step basis. It doesn’t hurt that Barbarian also has a goofy sense of humor about its story. The thriller pulls off several truly audacious, jarring, and effective transitions over the course of its runtime, including one midpoint break that manages to give viewers a much-needed sigh of relief and simultaneously prompts them to continue sitting forward.
A horror movie that refuses to be just one thing
Quite frankly, there aren’t many modern horror movies that feel as well-rounded and satisfying as Barbarian. There are moments when it achieves a suffocating level of terror that leaves you frozen in place, but then there are instances when it gets you to burst out laughing as well. It’s a familiar underdog Final Girl story, haunted house thriller, monster movie, and pitch-black comedy all wrapped into one, and it really does need to be seen to be believed.
While it frequently bounces between horror and comedy, too, the one thing that Barbarian consistently does is keep you on the edge of your seat. Once you turn it on, you can’t turn it off, and you’ll be glad by the end that you didn’t.
Barbarian is streaming now on Hulu.
