Barbarian · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

One house on the block has its lights on. The rest are boarded, sagging, gone back to weeds. Tess arrives late at a rental in a Detroit neighborhood the city stopped maintaining a long time ago, and the tidiness of the one occupied house is the first thing here that feels wrong. Cregger opens on real estate. Everything the film does later is folded into that image: a maintained surface, and all around it the evidence of what was allowed to rot.

Then a stranger answers the door.

Deleuze has a name for what the next forty minutes do, and it beats "suspense." In his taxonomy of the action-image there is a mode he calls the small form, where the big situation is withheld and we get acts instead, each disclosing a sliver of what stands behind it. Inside it sits a figure he calls the index of equivocity: a gesture that fits two incompatible situations equally well, with nothing in the image to decide between them. That is Keith, entire. The double-booking, the negotiation over who sleeps where, every accommodation he offers reads as decency or as procedure. Kuperstein's camera gives no tell. It holds doorways a beat past comfort and keeps compositions dense enough that you scan the edges instead of the face. Genre normally resolves an equivocal index within a scene or two; Cregger runs it cold for most of an act, and by running it that long he makes it the subject. Skarsgård's casting puts a thumb on the scale from outside the film, since we arrive already knowing what he has played. Our foreknowledge becomes a false index. The movie uses the history of horror as evidence, which is fair, because that is how we watch.

Then a door opens onto stairs going down.

Every frame, for Deleuze, is a closed set implying an outside, and the outside comes in two kinds. The relative out-of-field is the next room, a space you could walk into. The absolute out-of-field is pressure from somewhere not locatable in space at all. Horror lives on the second kind and normally keeps it unlocatable, the thing that is never quite anywhere. Barbarian gives it an address. What lies outside the frame turns out to be under the floor and can be measured in feet, and that conversion, dread into floor plan, is the engine.

Down there Kuperstein takes the light away. What remains is whatever a flashlight beam or a phone screen can reach: a patch of wall, a doorway, a length of corridor, no way to assemble them into a room. Deleuze calls this an any-space-whatever, space that has quit its job as a setting for action and become disconnected fragments carrying raw feeling. You cannot orient. Seeing stops leading to doing, and off-screen footsteps and Anna Drubich's score take over the mapping, sound being the only instrument still reaching past the beam.

Here is the concept that opens the film. You can watch Barbarian as a twist machine and have a fine time, but twist vocabulary cannot explain why the last act plays as an indictment rather than a reveal. Deleuze's naturalism can. Built from Stroheim and Buñuel, it describes films working on two floors. On top, the derived milieu, the concrete social setting with its manners and transactions. Beneath it, the originary world, less a place than a condition, unformed and squalid and made of appetite, where characters are not people with motives but drives with bodies.

Barbarian stacks this literally. The derived milieu is a short-term rental, with its listing and its lockbox and its etiquette of strangers sharing a house. The originary world sits directly underneath, a tunnel system dressed to record years of captivity. The Mother is the drive-figure exactly as Deleuze describes one: she has a name that is a function rather than an identity, and Matthew Patrick Davis plays her as pitiable, which is the right reading, since a drive is not a decision and so cannot be a villain. The villain is upstairs and decades back. Richard Brake's Frank built this, and that is Cregger's revision of the concept. Deleuze's originary worlds are geological, primeval, found. This one was poured. Somebody bought materials. The horror underneath the house is not older than the house; it is what the house was for.

And then the film abandons her.

Deleuze diagnosed a postwar crisis of the action-image, and one symptom was the dispersive situation: several weakly-linked characters, slackened causality, cuts that stop guaranteeing the person on screen is the person the story is about. He found it in Altman. Cregger imports the symptom into a machine otherwise running at full sensory-motor power, as a designed effect rather than a loss of faith. The debt to Psycho is exact, strand the protagonist a third of the way in so allegiance has nowhere to go, but the purpose differs. Hitchcock proved the film was never about Marion. Cregger proves it was never about a person. It is about the property. Occupants are temporary; the address is the continuous character. Which is why the Justin Long stretch lands as satire and not detour. He arrives in a comic register, playing a particular male self-regard, and he arrives as the owner. The man holding the deed goes down into what the deed is sitting on.

The history, when it comes, is nobody's memory. No one in the present is remembering. It arrives as a stratum. Deleuze separates the ordinary flashback, a dated scene standing in for a former present, from what he calls sheets of past: layers of time coexisting like an archaeology you move through rather than a tape you rewind. Barbarian earns the second description because its layers are stacked in space. Going down the stairs and going back in time are the same gesture, and the boarded block outside is that record read at ground level.

The craft debts are worth naming, because horror is a discourse and Cregger is fluent in it. Texas Chain Saw gives him the deformed captive-innocent and the worst thing in a house living in its understructure. The People Under the Stairs gives him captives inside the walls and the class logic of the trap. Audition gives him the structural principle, a long genre-neutral first act that hard-pivots, so misdirection is the machine rather than a garnish. The Descent gives him the vertical crawl and the discipline of lighting a scene with only what a character carries. [REC] gives him the grammar that turns the frame's edge and off-screen sound into the threat. Cregger's addition is the braid: Audition's tonal pivot and Psycho's allegiance transfer through one cut, landed on a real American geography rather than a folkloric one. Forward, the influence is partly industrial. Made cheap, marketed by withholding, it returned a large multiple on word of mouth, and the campaign's job was to protect the structure rather than sell it. A shape can be the product. Permission slips like that are how the art moves.

Watch it again and the equivocity does not dissolve. It migrates. Knowing what Keith is does not make his kindness legible; it exposes the first act as proof that our reading instrument was calibrated by movies rather than by evidence. The figure it migrates to is the Mother, who stays two situations at once for the whole runtime, threat and the thing that was done to somebody. The film refuses to settle her, and it is right not to. It leaves open the question naturalism always leaves, once you notice the concrete was poured on purpose: what exactly is in the basement?