Barbarian (2022)

 What I was thinking of while watching this was how it is just the perfect kind of designed horror film. You might ask, why. Because there are scenes designed specifically for us to yell at the screen, "Noooo! Don't fucking go down there! What do you think you are doing?! Don't do that! Go the other direction! Leave!"

And, of course, they do exactly what we scream at the screen not to do. 

Never ever never ever walk into that dark room in a basement. And even if you do that, never ever never ever go down the cavernous dark tunnel further into whatever it might lead. If Keith decided to be a stupid idiot and do it doesn't mean you have to. 

I love how AJ curses and everyone is taken aback by him. He's just a scumbag who works in Hollywood and debates raping a costar for a sitcom pilot. He just makes things more and more worse, even calling her while drunk. They tell him to lay low and he ends up at a rental property in Detroit, this lone Airbnb among a downtrodden neighborhood. Tess' belongings there and Keith's...AJ investigates, mainly because this property could bring him some much needed financial help. 

There is something ingenious about how measuring tape and just enough Justin Long comic approach in his desperate character can alter the effects of a dark area most of us go <i>Nope, Nope, Nope</i> to! Big props to Craig Kregar in how his team shoots the basement and it's tunnels for Tess as opposed to AJ. I was applauding that in my head big-time.

However, where the film lost me was the way Richard Brake's incest daughter seems superhuman. I just don't think I got past the use of Tess' SUV to smash the tunnel dweller Mama into the house and later when AJ hurls Tess off the top of a tower and Mama leaps off to break her landing...Mama would never have lived through either of those instances, much less recover enough to snap the neck of a homeless man, or choke and gouge the eyes of AJ.

But how the homeless man seems to be presented one way as dangerous only to later be seen as a help, exposition revealer, and voice of reason was Bravo to me. And how a flashlight is used to add a layer of eerie and yikes in the tunnels where mama is... wonderful.