Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

A woman renting an Air BNB discovers the house holds a myriad of terrifying secrets. 

There was an awful lot of hype around this film when it was first coming out, mainly due to the fact that Bill Skarsgard plays a character in it. But it turns out the movie is very well made too, comes highly recommended by all my Horror-loving pals, and recently dropped on Netflix for your delectation. So make sure that damned flashlight works, and lets get into this! 

Poor Tess (Georgina Campbell) isn’t having a ton of luck when it comes to the Air BNB she booked, as it seems the place has been double-booked and is already inhabited by a nice-looking guy called Keith (Bill Skarsgard). We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop as far as Keith goes, and indeed, he does act a little oddly when it comes to the welcome bottle of wine and insisting Tess take the bed while he takes the couch, but it turns out the house has far worse secrets occupying the basement. 

It’s almost like the place is haunted from below, or occupied by someone or something trying to surreptitiously make its presence known but in a disturbingly nurturing way. And sure enough, Keith disappears and Tess, because she’s a genuinely caring person, decides to invade the basement and whatever creature is awaiting her there, to in theory rescue Keith. But just as the monster (Matthew Patrick Davis), or the first of them anyway, is revealed, we and Tess both get cut abruptly off, and segued into the next vignette! 

The current owner of the house aboveground being used as the Air BNB, AJ (Justin Long), presently has lots of troubles, mostly stemming from an accusation of rape from a fellow television actor. Both fighting the lawsuit his costar is bringing and countering with one of his own is quite a costly prospect, and so the rather smarmy AJ is coming out to inspect the house property to see if he can squee-gee some extra money out of the place. Nevermind that the neighborhood is rundown and it looks like every other house in the area has been condemned for health code violations, the folk doing historic videos of the nearby areas won’t come anywhere near here, and even the homeless folk camped out near the house won’t go in there. 

Indeed, AJ’s greed seems to know no bounds, even after he discovers the door in the basement that leads to a series of tunnels with rooms and gleefully goes about measuring the place so he might rent out this extra space, it never seems to occur to our idiot landlord that a few of these terrible rooms are still occupied. And when the monster catches AJ and slings him into the equivalent of an oubliette, we meet back up with the unfortunate Tess, who is miraculously still alive. It could be said that at least now Tess isn’t alone and with help can get them out together, but AJ clearly demonstrates time and again that he’s only out to save one person – AJ. 

Time for a separate vignette, this one clearly back when the house was actually a house with a paint-job and a lawn and neighbors and all, many fabled years ago when a man called Frank (Richard Brake) lived there. 

We recognize Brake from his character Doom-head in Rob Zombie’s crazed romp 31, and just based on this fact alone, we know that Frank is going to be a very bad man. And we’re not wrong, for one minute Frank is buying baby supplies in the supermarket, but the very next minute he’s following a young woman at the gas station that caught his eye, with clear premeditated mayhem in mind. 

Back here in the present, after we were presented with the origin of the evils that occupy the tunnels and prison cells here under the Air BNB, the question of who the real monster is resurfaces. Somehow, Frank still exists and the creature running around the tunnels, while utterly grotesque in appearance and manner, actually has a moment or two of empathy afforded to it – or rather, her. 

Indeed, it seems the tunnel monster has a clear predisposition as far as gender goes, for she reacts quite violently to Keith, and AJ eventually, while trying incoherently to speak to Tess and actually eventually help her. Given what Frank had subjected the tunnel monster to, who could blame her? 

Not even the cops (Derek Morse, Trevor Van Uden) want anything to do with the monstrous house, the obviously strung-out junkie woman sans ID trying to convince them to break into the house that she has no key for, or the purported man Tess sobbingly swears she needs to go back into the basement to save. Only a neighborhood homeless man, Andre (Jaymes Butler), full of neighborhood lore about the monster in the basement, actually tries to help poor beleaguered Tess, even as she manages to escape the house but not the nightmare of the monster, and the monstrous things that normal humans do to each-other when they’re selfishly in nothing but survival mode. 

Barbarian seems like an odd name for such a monster-ific movie, but the actions of the various men throughout the film are certainly barbaric and brutal, so perhaps not. Cheer on Tess as our potential Final Girl in Barbarian, on Netflix now!