Barbarian | Definitely NOT a movie for me

According to comments on YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok, this is one of the best movies of 2022–2023. I decided to watch it since it had been ages since I’d seen a movie. It was exciting to start watching a movie after so long, but I found myself getting more and more disappointed… I really don’t understand how anyone could call this movie “the best.” Horror movies are getting worse and worse.

It's one of those movies where anyone who gets it thinks they're super cultured and a connoisseur of cinema, hahaha. I'm not saying I didn't understand it, but I feel like it was really poorly executed. It had potential, but then it turned into something really weird, boring, and absurd. And I read a lot of people saying that anyone who didn’t like this movie is because they “didn’t get” that the movie has a lot of “hidden messages” and connections that give more meaning to all that movie drivel.

The movie starts with little context other than a girl arriving at a house she rented through Airbnb, but it turns out she wasn't the only one who rented that house that day—there's already a guy inside, fast asleep. For some reason, it was all a mistake that led to both of them renting the house on the same day. At first, I thought the guy was a psychopath, and even Tess (the main character) thought the same thing—she didn’t trust him at all, but little by little he earned her trust. In the end, it turns out this guy was completely normal and not a psychopathic killer, since the real terror was hiding in the basement of the house.

To make a long story short, I basically walked through that neighborhood, which looks like a zombie apocalypse. It’s an almost abandoned place where, many years ago, a man lived in that very house—a man who was indeed a psychopath, a serial killer, and a rapist. He kidnapped his victims and had children with them, then had children with his children, and so on until he managed to create a kind of monster that lived in the basement—a basement with hidden passageways that looks like a maze. The concept is pretty good, but the story gets weirder and weirder. I don’t know, I just didn’t like that movie at all; everything seemed to make no sense and was really poorly executed… The actual plot of the movie is told in just a few minutes, and they don’t delve any deeper into it.

And to top it all off, halfway through the movie they throw in this super-sinister new character—I read online that many people said he was the best part of the movie because he represents the same rapist from the past “Blah blah blah.” Honestly, whatever little bit of the movie had me hooked, I lost it when this character showed up. They made a sudden cut and then presented these scenes with an almost “humorous” vibe—very colorful shots and comedic background music that didn’t fit at all with the film’s previous rhythm. I even started to think they’d accidentally put on a different movie on HBO...

This movie definitely put me off watching anything else for a while; I was bored out of my mind and thought it was awful.