It was a little yellow house.
As the rain poured down, Tess Marshall hurriedly removed her bags from her Jeep and hustled to the house’s front step for shelter. And that’s exactly what this little nondescript Airbnb rental represented for her: a place to crash and take shelter after a long flight and before a hope-filled day tomorrow.
For come the next day, she was meeting with a respected indie documentarian for a possible job. And if she could land it, well, it could well open very important doors and set her career on an upward trajectory. At least, that’s what Tess had been planning and hoping for.
But for all her hopes, the first piece—that little yellow house—wasn’t working out the way it was supposed to. Not only did the lockbox not yield a promised key, but there was already some guy in the house saying he had rented the place himself. And on top of that, every hotel in Detroit was full, thanks to some huge medical convention.
Argh! Her life!
But then Keith, the young, pleasant-looking guy inside the house, invites her in. He even offers to let her stay the night. Then they could call the renters together and give them an earful in the morning. Hey, they might even get a free stay out of it.
But Tess is no fool. She’s seen horror movies before. And this is how it always starts. You know, some innocent-looking dude invites a pretty girl in—which was Tess’ role—and then horrible things happen from there.
The guy might drug her and, I don’t know, drag her down into the basement to do terrible things to her. There might even be some empty little room down there with a filthy mattress, a camera and an old bucket for a toilet. Or there could be a hidden passageway that wound around in long tunnels and deep stony staircases beneath the house. You know, the kind of lightless rocky passage that some twisted guy with a shovel took years to dig with a tortured gleam in his eyes. Oh, and small rusty cages for human prisoners. Let’s not forget those.
Or … maybe there is a dirty room hidden down there somewhere, filled with filth and a TV-VCR that never stops running disturbing movies. For that matter there could be some sort of creature in those murky, foul-smelling depths: something that screeches, growls and leaps with bared, rotten teeth from the pitch-black shadows!!
(Pant, pant!)
Hey, I mean Tess has seen all that stuff before. And the guy standing in front of her in the house’s little living room could represent any, or all, of those scenarios.
But then Tess privately berates herself. She’s letting her imagination run away with her again. That’s what she gets for having a moviemaker’s imagination. She needs to calm down, Tess thinks, rolling her eyes at herself.
Keith is just some guy. He’s in the same boat as she is. And this is just a little yellow house.
Just a little … yellow … house.
[Note: Spoilers are contained in the following sections.]
Several characters eventually find their way into this story’s mix. But Tess is the only one who tries desperately to help the others who find themselves in similar danger. Even when her own life is threatened, when she’s wounded and she can’t get police to take her seriously, she keeps trying to help and to save other victims. (Sometimes, she even tries to rescue others even when it seems absolutely foolhardy to do so.)
A strange, grizzled and ill-formed woman appears almost supernaturally strong—absorbing multiple attacks, including a great fall and being hit by a car. But that strength is never fully explained.
The above-mentioned woman is always fully naked, and we see her walk and run in and out of shadows with bare, hanging breasts. She, attacks people, drags them around and in one case, she attempts to forcibly breast feed someone.
We also see a repeating video of a woman breastfeeding and caressing her child (with a breast exposed). We’re told of a man named Frank who kidnapped and abused many women, exposing them to his twisted sexual desires. “He took women down there, and then he made babies with them,” a man says. “Then he made babies with the babies.”
A.J., a thirtysomething guy who owns the little yellow house, is accused of raping a woman whom he worked with on a TV pilot. When asked later about the event he downplays his role in it, but notes: “She took some convincing, is all. She came around.”
We see the above-mentioned kidnapper, a guy named Frank set up an abduction of a young mom in the past. Then many years later, someone finds his scores of VHS videos, depicting his many kidnap victims and his physical abuse and rape of them. (We hear a rape taking place on a TV screen but don’t see it.) We are also shown the cages and rooms the women were kept in, complete with bloody handprints.
In the present, people are chased, beaten, slashed with a knife, shot and killed. A man reports being bitten by something in the dark. And then he’s grabbed, and his head is smashed repeatedly into a stone wall until his skull is mush. Someone gets hit by a car and shot in the face. Another person takes his own life with a bullet to the chin. Tess is shot in the side at one point and has to run with the visibly seeping wound.
A woman is thrown off a tall structure. We see two people lying in a pool of blood on the road. A man is attacked, his arm is ripped off at the joint and then he’s beaten to death with the severed limb.
There are 60 f-words and some 15 s-words in the dialogue, along with uses of “b–ch,” “h—” and “f–got.” God’s and Jesus’ names are both misused about a dozen times; the former is combined with “d–n” twice.
When Tess arrives, Keith shows her an unopened bottle of wine—explaining how he understands her hesitancy to accept a drink from a stranger. They drink wine together and get a little tipsy. A.J. goes out drinking and gets quite drunk.
We find out that scores of unfortunate victims have been swept up, and sometimes destroyed, in the yellow house’s backstory. Tess and Keith talk about toxic relationships in their past, and how those kinds of interactions can leave a scar.
Someone drinks too much and vomits in the bathroom toilet. The Detroit police force appears totally callous and distant in this pic. Even cops who eventually respond to Tess’ pleas for help disregard her panicked ramblings, assuming she’s on drugs. They refuse to investigate.
Two adults are forced to drink what appears to be milk from a gross baby bottle. Being a horror movie of a certain stripe, Barbarian repeatedly immerses its characters and viewers in pitch-black and leaves them nervously waiting for whatever jump-scene happens next.
I once stumbled upon a list labeled: “Disturbing films for cinema extremists.” And though I’ve only seen a handful of the movies on that list—a list that included titles such as Slaughtered Vomit Dolls and Cannibal Holocaust—I very much think Barbarian will soon be welcomed into its ranks with a few hearty back-slaps of congratulations by those who “appreciate” such fare. For this is one of those disquieting horror pics that constantly turns unexpected, pitch-black corners while daring you not to blanche or squirm.
That’s not to suggest that this movie is exemplary in any way. If anything, it kinda throws every horror trope you can think of up against the wall just to see what sticks. And there is plenty of stickiness to go around—including bashed-in skulls; off screen kidnapping, torture and rape; abundant profanity; grotesque nudity and abject filth.
Frankly, when this kind of festering movie grime seeps into your head, it’s kinda hard to flush it back out. So, if you’re still considering, be forewarned.
And maybe follow your better instincts. At some point, I’m sure Tess Marshall wished she would have paid attention to hers.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
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