[Swift]

Barbarian thoughts, having watched it twice...

Spoiler!

Firstly in the cinema without knowing a thing about it, bar the basic outline (airbnb stay goes wrong) and then again the other night to see my wife's reaction to it. The highlight of the second viewing is how Keith is handled knowing now that he's an innocent dude, just a bit awkward. That scene where he's sitting patiently at the table with the bottle of wine gives off weirdo vibes on the first viewing. Great misdirection in those scenes and a very good performance from Skarsgard portraying that.

Then the film swerves off down a new path (my wife momentarily thought the Disney app glitched out) and obviously the suspense is gone on the second viewing, so it pretty much just plays out as comedy whereas the first time round was comedic but with a mix of where-the-####-is-this-going? The 80s flashback is probably unnecessary and pulls the viewer away at a moment of high tension. The actual reveal of what's going on is silly and unsatisfactory. Oh it's a serial killer/captive women/incesty thing.

The film suffers from the typical horror movie poor character choices. Who books an airbnb without scoping it out online first? Who wakes up the next day, sees the absolute dump they're staying in, gets a warning from a local about the neighbourhood and still decides to stay there? For that matter, how does an airbnb even exist in that neighbourhood? Surely it would've been broken into and ransacked by now.

The ending disappointed me because I thought the film was going to have something interesting to say about cancel culture. Justin Long's character has a moment where he says "Am I a bad person? I think I might be a bad person. Or am I a good person who just made a bad decision?" and I was mentally applauding some nuance being added to that conversation... and then he just goes and throws a woman to her death.

Still it's a fun film, not great, and worth watching a second time just to see the first half of the movie play out with new eyes.