Summary

• Barbarian cleverly uses Bill Skarsgård's horror villain trend to keep the audience guessing.
• The film surprises with multiple villains, including the Mother, AJ, and Frank, all with disturbing backgrounds.
• Barbarian builds tension with twists and turns, making Keith look suspicious, but the real horror comes from other characters.

Barbarian had interesting twists and turns that made it unpredictable and successfully built tension from beginning to end, and it had more than one villain.

Barbarian follows Tess (Campbell), who arrives at a rental house in an abandoned neighborhood, only to find out that the house is already occupied by a man named Keith (Skarsgård). After warming up to him, they agree to share the house, but at night, Tess finds her door open. The next day, she finds a hidden corridor in the basement, and when she and Keith look inside, they make a disturbing and deadly discovery. Unfortunately, Keith’s time in Barbarian is short, but it was enough for it to seize the biggest Bill Skarsgård career trend and flip it.

Barbarian Seized Bill Skarsgård's Villain Trend In Its First Act

Bill Skarsgård Has Mostly Played Villains In The Horror Genre

Cregger doesn’t do much for the audience to trust Keith but quite the contrary, and relies on Skarsgård’s track record for that.

When Tess arrives at the rental house at the beginning of Barbarian, she understandably doesn’t trust Keith and worries about her safety. Even after warming up to him and sharing a bottle of wine, Tess worries again when she finds the door to her room open in the middle of the night. Cregger doesn’t do much for the audience to trust Keith but quite the contrary, and relies on Skarsgård’s track record for that. Skarsgård gained worldwide recognition when he played Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Andy Muschietti’s It and It Chapter Two, though this wasn’t the first time he played a horror villain.

Skarsgård’s career in horror began in Netflix’s TV series Hemlock Grove, where he played vampire Roman Godfrey, who ended up becoming a villain. After It, Skarsgård played Mickey in Villains, where he went from bad guy to victim, and he will play Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. Skarsgård has earned a place in the horror genre and is associated with villains and antagonists, which Cregger cleverly seized in Barbarian to make the audience distrust Keith as much as Tess was doing.

How Barbarian Flipped Bill Skarsgård's Villain Trend (& Kept Tricking The Audience)

Barbarian Surprised The Audience With Its Villain Twists

The confirmation of Keith’s innocence isn’t the only trick Barbarian has up its sleeve, as it then introduces three villains, with different contexts.

Even when Tess and Keith are in the hidden corridor and Keith appears all of a sudden, Barbarian plays with the idea of Keith probably not being a good guy, and it isn’t until the Mother appears that it becomes clear Keith was on Tess’ side from the beginning. Unfortunately, the Mother brutally kills Keith in front of Tess before taking her with her. The confirmation of Keith’s innocence isn’t the only trick Barbarian has up its sleeve, as it then introduces three villains, with different contexts: the Mother, AJ (Long), and Frank.

The Mother is the main threat to defeat in Barbarian, and while she’s definitely an antagonist, it’s a direct consequence of her disturbing past with Frank.

AJ is an actor accused of sexual assault by a co-star, and though Barbarian at first focuses on him and his insistence that he’s innocent, it then shows him talking to a friend at a club, and it’s clear he’s not innocent at all. From then on, AJ keeps showing how selfish he is even when Tess keeps helping him escape and uses her as bait to save himself, but when he sees Tess survived, he tries (and fails) to rationalize his actions.

The Mother is the main threat to defeat in Barbarian, and while she’s definitely an antagonist, it’s a direct consequence of her disturbing past with Frank. Frank is the house’s original owner, and he kidnapped women, locked them in the house’s hidden tunnels, sexually abused them, and continued to commit multi-generational incest with his victims and the offspring of his abuse. Mother was a result of this, hence why her deformities and more. Barbarian made the audience suspect Bill Skarsgård’s Keith due to the circumstances and Skarsgård’s villain track record, but the real horrors were other characters.