Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Barbarian
2022 · Zach Cregger · Barbarian on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how many houses on the street are boarded up. (setting)
Cregger opens on a Detroit block the city stopped maintaining. One house has its lights on and its yard kept. That tidiness against a ruined street is the first thing here that feels wrong.
Payoff: The fear is grounded in a real geography of neglect, so the block is telling you something before anyone speaks.
Watch Bill Skarsgard's face when he offers Tess something. (performance)
Every accommodation Keith makes reads two ways at once. Courtesy, or setup. Skarsgard gives you no tell, and casting an actor you already know from horror pushes you toward one reading.
Payoff: You will catch yourself judging him on movies you have seen rather than on anything the scene shows you. In the reading: index-of-equivocity. A gesture that fits two opposite situations with nothing to decide between them is what the reading calls an index of equivocity.
Watch the doorways Kuperstein holds a beat too long. (camera)
Kuperstein frames hallways, stairs, and open doors so that you scan the edges of the shot instead of the face in the middle. The camera drifts slowly toward openings you would rather it left alone.
Payoff: Your attention gets trained on what might be just outside the frame, which is where the film keeps its threat.
Listen for footsteps and movement you cannot see. (sound)
Off-screen sound does the work when the image gives you nothing. Anna Drubich's score punctuates rather than explains, and long quiet stretches leave room tone and the acoustics of a space to carry the scene.
Payoff: Sound tells you where to be afraid, so the space around the frame becomes more alarming than the space inside it.
Count the doors and stairways that lead further in. (staging)
The house keeps offering one more opening. Cregger builds it vertically, a kept surface above and dark space below. People here advance toward openings instead of backing out of them.
Payoff: Going further into the property is the film's basic movement, so track how far in each person has gone.
Once you have seen it
Watch the cut that leaves Tess behind. (structure)
Cregger strands his protagonist at maximum tension and starts again elsewhere in a comic register, the Psycho move. The continuous character in this film is not a person. It is the address.
Payoff: Your allegiance has nowhere to land, so you attach to the property instead of to anyone renting it. In the reading: dispersive-situation. Weakly linked characters and cuts that stop guaranteeing whose story this is are what the reading calls a dispersive situation.
Watch how far down the tunnels go beneath the rental. (staging)
Upstairs is a short-term rental with a lockbox and the etiquette of strangers sharing a house. Below it sits a dressed record of years of captivity. Somebody bought the materials and poured that concrete.
Payoff: The horror under the house is not older than the house. It is what the house was built to hold. In the reading: originary-world. A squalid, unformed layer under the social surface is what the reading calls an originary world.
Watch what a flashlight beam actually shows you underground. (light)
Kuperstein lights the lower levels with only what a character is carrying. You get a patch of wall, a doorway, a stretch of corridor, never enough to assemble a room.
Payoff: Losing the floor plan is the point, since you cannot plan a way out of a space you cannot picture.
Carry this in: Watch the block, not just the house. One property is kept up and everything around it was left to rot.