Hinting at women’s complicity in a film plotted around men’s violent treatment of women is, well, ballsy. That Cregger’s script doesn’t delve into the larger cultural conditioning and structures that encourage such complicity remains troubling. But the interpretive residue of these minor scenes lingers as the film advances, and in doing so they complicate a reading of gender blame in the story. Barbarian seems content not to ask why things happen, but to show us characters that keep imagining the best, in turn inviting us to imagine the worst.
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The 2022 horror film Barbarian is, at its core, a story about intuition and the risks of ignoring it. A sense of unease pervades from the first minutes when Tess, a researcher visiting Detroit for a job interview, arrives at her Airbnb in the middle of the night only to find the neighborhood eerily deserted, the key missing from the lockbox, and the place double booked – with a man. From then on the film catalogues red flag after red flag, and Tess’s persistent blindness to them. As writer and director Zach Cregger has explained in interviews, the screenplay’s genesis came from his reading national safety expert Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear, which discusses the dangerous consequences of women disregarding felt-in-the-body hunches. What better than a horror film, with its handy trope of the Final Girl – a character built to shrug off her intuition for the sake of generating jump scares and slaughter – to unpack this dilemma?
Tess, like all Final Girls, is given no inner life, no backstory other than the most basic context that brings her to the Airbnb house that serves as the film’s principal setting. It’s hard to say if her lack of depth in the screenplay is an intentional, self-conscious nod to the character trope, or an oversight. After all, AJ, one of the film’s many male characters, takes up considerable screen time processing his emotional turmoil. Not only that, but AJ’s development is much clearer: he faces a looming career nosedive following sexual assault allegations, and he is handling them – badly. The film frames his personal torment in turn as hilariously contemptible or undeniably monstrous, but still, itCs his inner life, not Tess’s, that gets the screen time. If we can’t access the inner life of the female protagonist, how are we meant to understand her experience of intuition? Some reviews have criticized the film for this flattening, while others have praised it for endeavoring to show the risk-analysis women like Tess engage in on a daily basis. But maybe Barbarian isn’t interested in a single character’s story so much as the entanglement among all of them. I think to understand how the film explores women’s intuition, we need to pay attention to the female characters beyond its Final Girl.
Take the film’s least gory but most horrifying scene. It’s the morning after Tess has endured her first disturbing night at the Airbnb with her unexpected and questionable co-tenant Keith. She hasn’t slept well for obvious reasons – despite having decided Keith wouldn’t kill her, she still harbored the will-he-rape-me fear that de Becker would likely agree was rational. Moreover, she was legitimately disturbed in the middle of the night when her locked bedroom door unexplainably sprung open, all while Keith was fast asleep in the living room. But everything seems less threatening in the light of day, so no matter: Tess goes to her job interview, and afterward she and her potential hirer, a documentary filmmaker, chat amicably. When the filmmaker asks where Tess is staying and Tess answers, we see the cogs of intuition in action. Everything in the filmmaker’s body tenses and her speech slows down. She asks Tess a series of questions, trying to understand why anyone – especially a woman – would stay in such a rundown neighborhood with an unknown man. Finally she pleads, Can’t you stay anywhere else? This moment has all the spine-tingling fright of the later scenes when Tess discovers the hidden door in the Airbnb basement. We are hoping for one thing to happen when we know something or someone else is around the corner. We are waiting for the moment Tess admits to her instincts and the would-be-boss offers her a place to stay. But of course the moment doesn’t come. Tess denies being at all worried, and heads back to the house.
Why not speak up? There is, admittedly, an awkward power dynamic here that transcends gender: would anyone want to lean on their would-be boss in a moment of near job-security? From Tess’s perspective, this scene exemplifies the specific, horrible bind of women’s intuition: they feel it but don’t act on it to minimize disruption, to avoid creating friction. As de Becker points out in his books, the centuries of social conditioning women have internalized activate in these moments, smothering intuition and insisting they not make a fuss. This conditioning comes from adapting to a culture in which raising your voice makes you shrill and showing your vulnerability makes you an emotional wreck. It’s the conditioning of the patriarchy – but that’s not necessarily what Barbarian is concerned with here.
Intuition in this scene is collective. There is Tess, and there is her future employer. How do we rationalize the other woman’s choice not to act on her intuition? Is she waiting for Tess to ask for help? Does she not insist on substitute accommodation out of respect for Tess’s choice? You cannot watch this scene without taking into consideration the racial politics that are at work as much as the gendered ones. The would-be-boss is white. Tess is not. A white woman senses a woman of color in distress, expresses concern, and does nothing. (Really, she doesn’t. She says she’ll call Tess the next day, but does she send a search party when the calls aren’t answered? Nope.) Intuition is muddled by more than gender roles. Power and whiteness are at play too.
The only other woman we see Tess interact with is one of the film’s monsters: the mother. Many reviews have avoided unpacking this character so as not to spoil the film: I respect this demurring, but I’m also fascinated by how preserving the thrills for the audience gives a hall pass to talking about the film’s deeper thematic implications. The mother is the danger in the house – not the unexpected man sharing the Airbnb reservation with Tess. Her presence is the not-rightness that Tess detected but didn’t act on when she parked her car outside in the dark, rainy night. As we learn in the second half of the film, the mother descends from a line of women abducted, tortured, and raped by the house’s original owner, a murderous predator called Frank. The mother hunts for Tess (she is the one who opened Tess’s door that first night) because she wants to take care of her, baby her, an impulse that some reviews seem to think is a natural consequence of the mother-monster having ovaries, however buried beneath grey flesh and superhuman strong muscle they are. Given her history, the mother’s relationship with nurturing is complicated, and she admittedly doesn’t get out of the house much, so her intentions toward Tess manifest with horrifying violence to any and all that stand in her way.
Do we really think that a woman born imprisoned by a sadistic rapist would yearn to have an adult child to care for? That she would leave the house at night prowling for babies-to-be, only to go back to her cell? No, but the film insists so, and gives us a clear reason in the flashback scene that shows Frank hitting the supermarket for baby supplies. This guy is a football field-sized red flag, but if the obsequious employee asking him how she might help him senses the danger, we wouldn’t know. He walks down the aisle she is busy restocking and she drops everything to help him. Her cooing demeanor telegraphs care and trust. She hovers over the shelves plucking off the items he asks for, but also items that he hasn’t, including a VHS tape on breastfeeding.
It’s this tape, played on loop in the mother’s room in the basement bunker of the house, that teaches her to think she needs a baby to care for. A tape that shows a white woman breastfeeding a white baby. A tape offered to a white rapist by a smiley, compliant white woman.
Is Barbarian suggesting that women, and white women in particular, are complicit in the violence they suffer at the hands of men? It’s hard to say. But the film seems interested in exploring, however tangentially, the consequence of suppressed intuition through these minor but exponentially powerful female characters. We know them in real life: the unwitting good girls, the patriarchy deniers who do their very best to see their boys succeed and keep their daddies happy, even if doing so endangers other women – especially, history has shown over and over, women of color. Judging from the scene when AJ complains to his mother on the phone about his sexual assault predicament, he’s the son of one of these women. We hear his mother fretting about her poor boy who is so unfairly being attacked. Oh honey, I know you would never do those things. She begs him to come home, tells him his father wants to see him, a fib that AJ falls for: He said that? Oh, the mother demurs, you know how he is.
Hinting at women’s complicity in a film plotted around men’s violent treatment of women is, well, ballsy. That Cregger’s script doesn’t delve into the larger cultural conditioning and structures that encourage such complicity remains troubling. But the interpretive residue of these minor scenes lingers as the film advances, and in doing so they complicate a reading of gender blame in the story. Barbarian seems content not to ask why things happen, but to show us characters that keep imagining the best, in turn inviting us to imagine the worst. All the while we assure ourselves we would have chosen differently. But would we? From the supporting characters to Tess, the women of Barbarian, in attempting to survive, choose the most positive reading of their conditions, and the results are deadly. The character of the mother-monster is no different. Cregger makes sure that we understand she exists because of unforgiveable, extreme male violence: she has been manufactured over generations of torture and rape to produce more children to meet the same end. In trying to do the job forced upon her and nurture a human, she kills several along the way. She is a mother gone rogue, but also a specific type of mother we’ve already seen in the film. Consider how Frank lies corpse-like in the back of the bunker, barely mobile after his difficult and debilitating career abducting and raping the women of Detroit. He whiles away time reliving his past in his collection of DIY porn, while the mother, Gollum-like with her wraith hair and sharp teeth, roams the house’s hallways, opening bedroom doors to check on her precious children who are not there. What is the mother of Barbarian if not a nightmarish empty nester? She has, by all accounts been fated to play the part. And yet: Had she not been gifted the breastfeeding tape, would she have broken free? Had the two women working at the property management agency been more curious about disappearing guests and their leftover luggage, might the horror have ended long ago?
Barbarian isn’t interested in the answers, but in raising the questions. It is, as a horror film, primarily tasked with entertaining its audience through suspense and fright. But how and to what end it engages in social commentary should interest us. Horror as a genre owes much to the creative lineage of women like Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, but the role of women in the horror film genre has historically had less to do with creative agency and more to do with passive utility. The critic Carol J. Clover famously illustrated how the bedrock horror films of the 1970s and 1980s were narratives for and about men that used the Final Girl, and women’s bodies in general, to process their fears. The horror film’s consistent function in the U.S. has been twofold: entertain an audience, but also probe and restore the male psyche through the projection of terror onto the female. Barbarian may be a horror film with a Final Girl at its center, but instead of seeing female bodies pile up, we see men’s: the nice guy dies first because he doesn’t believe Tess; the monsters die at their own hands or from narcissistic self-protection. The film doesn’t restore anyone’s psyche. It reveals our psyches as interdependent, and perhaps reluctant of restoration.
Barbarian is wildly riveting as a story, and unexpectedly complex in how it encourages us to examine our own monstrosities, the practices they come from, how they are reproduced. In a way, it might be asking us to think about how horror as a genre contributes to that culture of reproduction. The key here is “might be”: every choice in the film seems at once purposeful and incidental. The casting choice of Georgina Campbell as Tess, the Final Girl, might raise questions about how that character type has contributed to patriarchal structures of whiteness, and it might not at all; maybe she’s just a brilliant actor and perfect for the part (she is). Barbarian is a film about intuition, because it is a film about reading: what cues we register and how we interpret them, the hunches we listen to, or don’t, and the narratives that we shape and that shape us as a result. On one level it shows us the horror that results from ignoring the hair-on-end warning not to go in the basement, not to open the door. But it also hints at the subtle, collateral horror that results from ignoring less dramatic encounters with intuition: the feeling that you are making choices according to someone else’s agenda and script, the feeling that you are betraying human decency to meet a taught image of what your world should look like. Either way, we are trapped. Somewhere in the neighborhood there’s a basement we know in our bones we should avoid. But what does avoidance breed? In giving us more questions than answers, in provoking and not resolving, Barbarian leaves us unsettled and disturbed, as only the best horror films can.
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All images are screenshots from the film’s trailer.
