When I first watched the trailer for Barbarian film my initial thoughts were that it looked stupid and uninteresting, and I placed it on my do not bather to see mental listing.
20th Century Studios
Then on Facebook and Twitter I saw from various quarters of the horror community that the film had interesting twists and sociological commentary that couldn’t be explored without spoilers.
Well, with my curiosity engaged I changed my mind and took in a late-night screening this past Friday.
I need to listen to my intuition. This film was bland, and uninteresting and an insult to the audience’s intuitive intelligence.
Every narrative film is fiction and ever fiction has a plausibility envelope. Actions within that envelope are accepted as possible and within the realm of the characters and nature of that fictional world, actions beyond that envelops shatter disbelief and destroy the story’s illusion of reality. The boundaries of plausibility envelop vary with the genre of the story. In a superhero film Drax can be swallowed by a huge beast and emerge unscathed by its digestive acids but in a thriller such as JawsQuint cannot survive the maws of a shark. Dramatic fiction has tight boundaries on its envelopes while fantastic fiction has more distant edges. However, a thriller/horror without supernatural or science-fiction elements to push that envelope has a limited range of actions before disbelief is compromised. Barbarian ignores all constraints of reality and all illusion of reality vanishes like fog on a bright hot day.
In the screening I attended laughter erupted during dramatic moments because no one present could accept anything presented as ‘real.’ The violations of plausibility that I witnessed were not ones restricted to people with advance of obscure knowledge but ones everyone understands as to how the world functions. If person A plummets from a height and person B plummets a moment later, we understand that B lands on A, but Barbarian would have us accept the A ends up atop of B.
Some spoilers follow but honestly you should just skip this movie.
A middle-aged or older woman who has never been properly fed cannot survive being crushed between an automobile and a structure much remain a terminator level of threat. The same malnourished woman cannot simply lift a full-grown man of normal size straight up more than seven feet. If someone falls from fifty or more feet they are not, if they survive, going to stand and walk away.
There is very nearly but not quite a Psycho level twist about half-way through the film’s running time, but unlike Psycho where the hand off to a new set of leads were to characters, we had some establishment and level of engagement with Barbarian throws us cold into a new principal character and one so utterly unlikable you can only root for his demise.
Barbarian wasted my time, precious hours I can never reclaim.
