Barbarian (2022) is the horror film that opens with an Airbnb double-booking and ends somewhere you could not have predicted from that premise. Zach Cregger's feature debut is one of those rare genre movies that earns genuine gasps not by delivering more of what you expect, but by repeatedly replacing the floor beneath you with something worse. This review covers the film's structure, performances, and what it does with its Detroit setting without giving away its deepest surprises.
First impressions: an Airbnb nightmare
Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at a rented house in a Detroit neighbourhood that looks abandoned at street level. A man, Keith (Bill Skarsgård), is already inside. There was a double-booking. It's late, it's raining, and every other hotel in the city is full. The setup sounds mundane. Cregger weaponises that mundanity. Both actors play the early scenes with such understated unease that you spend the first act reading Keith the way Tess does: is he a predator, or just awkward? Bill Skarsgård, who spent years playing Pennywise for the It franchise, uses that accumulated cultural dread perfectly. You can't look at him without the prior association doing half the work.
But Barbarian isn't interested in confirming your suspicion. It pivots. Structurally, the film breaks into chapters that shift protagonist and tone so sharply that the first pivot feels like a glitch. It isn't. Each chapter peels back a layer of what the house actually is, and the layers get progressively uglier.
What lives in the basement
The film's centrepiece is what Tess finds when she pushes deeper into the house's underground rooms. Cregger films the descent with patient stillness. No jump cuts, no shrieking strings: just a handheld camera following a woman into widening dark. The production design team built something genuinely wrong down there. The specific geography of those tunnels, the particular objects placed inside them, the scale of what the house was once used for. It all coalesces into one of the most effectively horrifying reveals in recent horror cinema.
The creature design deserves separate mention. Barbarian gives its antagonist a physicality that sits in the uncanny valley: too human in proportion, too wrong in behaviour. The film holds back a full look for a long time, and when it arrives the choice to keep the creature sympathetic rather than simply monstrous pays off. Cregger wants you to feel the full weight of what produced this thing. The horror is not the creature. It's the history.
Justin Long and the film's structural gamble
The second chapter introduces AJ (Justin Long), a Hollywood actor flying to Detroit to check on a rental property he owns after a misconduct allegation tanks his career. It's a bold structural gamble. The film essentially restarts with a new character who doesn't know what Tess found, and it slows down to follow him through the same house with fresh ignorance. Some viewers find this break frustrating. It shouldn't be. AJ is the film's moral engine: a man whose complicity and self-interest are tested by exactly the kind of reckoning his house represents. Long plays him as someone who has told himself a story about his own innocence for so long the story feels real. The creature eventually tests that story in ways the script earns.
The Detroit setting is not incidental. Cregger shoots the neighbourhood around the house as genuinely desolate: cracked concrete, boarded windows, a street where nobody walks at night. The city's documented post-industrial collapse forms the backdrop for a property that was kept active through decades of isolation. It gives the film a kind of geographic plausibility that pure rural horror wouldn't have. Like the tunnel sequences in Neil Marshall's The Descent, the underground space in Barbarian feels physically real because the world above it has been established with such specificity.
Georgina Campbell at the centre
Campbell carries the film's emotional core. Tess is smart, methodical, and wrong about almost everything in ways that feel authentic rather than contrived. She uses her phone torch. She measures the room. She goes back down. Each decision tracks with her character's logic even when it contradicts survival instinct, and Campbell never lets Tess become simply reactive. There's a moment late in the film when Tess has to make a choice between self-preservation and something harder, and Campbell plays it without a word. It's one of the best pieces of physical performance in a 2022 horror film that also gave us Pearl and Mia Goth's face-melting showcase. The year was not short on talent.
Where the film earns its reputation
Horror films don't often manage to be genuinely funny and genuinely terrifying in the same sequence. Barbarian does it twice. The tonal whiplash is controlled, not accidental: Cregger uses dark comedy to lower your defenses before he puts them up again permanently. The pacing is tighter than the chapter structure suggests. At 102 minutes, nothing feels padded.
The script's single biggest achievement is its restraint about explanation. Barbarian tells you enough about the history of the house to understand the scale of the crime. It doesn't over-explain. The creature is never given a biological taxonomy. The full timeline of what happened is reconstructed by the audience from fragments. That silence is where the film's real horror lives, the same kind of productive withholding that drives the dread engine of It Follows: not what you're shown, but what you're left to complete yourself.
Verdict
Zach Cregger made Barbarian on a reported budget of around $4.5 million. It grossed over $45 million theatrically and became one of the most discussed horror films of 2022 because it does something studios with ten times the budget can't reliably manufacture: genuine surprise. It has a premise you think you understand, a structure you don't expect, and a moral argument it commits to. Not every element lands perfectly. A late-film flashback spells out what the film's restraint had been doing so well to imply. But that's one scene in a film that otherwise trusts its audience completely.
Barbarian is essential viewing. See it knowing as little as possible. Then watch it again knowing everything, and notice how early Cregger placed the signs.
Rating: 9/10