Barbarian starts at night with a heavy downpour and a thunderclap. So far, so good, for what seems to be a classic horror movie. Hold onto your ponchos.
Some two hours later you will have seen virtually every horror convention — from doors slamming on their own to weird monsters with mommy issues and subterranean torture rooms — ingeniously messed about with. Even the title is a misdirection.
Barbarian marks the auspicious feature film debut of director-writer Zach Cregger, someone well-versed in film tropes and with a subtle skill at social satire approaching Jordan Peele levels. He will also somehow make you laugh hard in oases of humor before the dread reappears.
Photo: AP
It starts on a rainy middle-of-the-night street of a half-ruined section of Detroit when a young woman (Georgina Campbell) finds her Airbnb-rented house weirdly occupied by a stranger (Bill Skarsgard).
“I don’t know what the protocol for all this is,” he tells her.
Their little awkward dance — checking booking receipts, offering to sleep on the couch — seems to point to a tiny tale of gender roles and microagressions. Yet somehow it will evolve into a hair-on-fire horror flick with eyeball-gouged skulls.
Photo: AP
Make no mistake: Cregger is playing with us every step of the way. Casting Skarsgard as the is-he-a-sweetie-or-not comes colored by his role as Pennywise in It, and even the film’s setting is a slight-of-hand — a bombed out section of Detroit with the Airbnb home in its center was actually filmed in Bulgaria.
Later, the arrival of Justin Long — playing a slimy TV figure of a new show tellingly called “Chip off the Block” — clouds things further, he being an actor long associated with good-guy comedy. Cregger is somehow leaning into Hollywood conventions even outside his own movie.
As good as the casting is, it is the house that is the real star, nicely appointed but cookie-cutter, in a sea of torn up and decayed homes. It has an alarming basement with a horrific room that has a soiled bed, a bucket and a camera.
But there’s more: An even creepier cavernous space below. You can almost hear Cregger cackling as our heroes face two horror-film ready basements.
“You’re safe,” says one. “I don’t think I am,” another replies. (They’re not, by the way, of course.)
One running joke is that Campbell spends so much time trying to escape the house and yet smashing her way back into it moments later that more than one person in the audience at a recent screening loudly implored her to get into her Jeep Cherokee and just drive away.
All along are reaches for real social issues — redlining, misogyny, character redemption, gun accidents and police misconduct, among them — that elevate the film from genre-gazing silliness. There may be a monster inside the house, but forces outside that structure keep that monster firmly inside.
Barbarian is firmly of it’s time — online house rental bookings, smart-phone flashlights and real estate square footage listings — and yet timeless, like an arm ripped off and used as a club. It was predictable and yet was impossible to predict. It’s worth booking one night soon.
Last Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected 41 sorties of Chinese aircraft and nine navy vessels around Taiwan over a 24-hour period. “Thirty out of 41 sorties crossed the median line and entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ (air defense identification zones),” it reported. Local media noted that the exercises coincided with the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taiwan. During the visit of then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, the largest number of sorties was on Aug. 5, “involving a total of 47 fighter aircraft and two supporting reconnaissance/patrol aircraft.
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and
At times, it almost seems that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is out to sabotage the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). As if on cue, with the recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers in full swing, Ma thought it would be a good time to lead a delegation of students to China and attend the 17th Straits Forum (海峽論壇) and meet with Wang Huning (王滬寧), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo member entrusted by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to be his second in command on Taiwan policy and to run the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in charge of subverting enemies,
Summer is in full swing and with the Penghu Fireworks Festival underway, it is peak tourist season in Penghu right now. For anyone planning a trip this summer, you won’t want to miss out on Penghu’s ocean scenery and excellent swimming. However, with literally hundreds of kilometers of coastline and beaches seemingly at every turn, it can be overwhelming to plan your trip. Here, then, is your guide to the beaches of Penghu. This guide covers beaches with road access from Magong (馬公). They have been sorted into three types: those with nice scenery but limited or no swimming, those where
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