A highly effective subset of genre cinema, “real estate” horror exerts a chillingly familiar grip on home-owners and renters alike. The creeping damp patches of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water, the structurally unsound apartment in Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow: they’re linked by the sense that a home, offering sanctuary and safety, is in some way corrupted. As safe as houses? Don’t count on it.
Zach Cregger’s excellent Barbarian, the smartly structured and utterly terrifying latest addition to this subsection of horror, takes a novel angle, in that it focuses on a “home away from home”, an Airbnb rental property in a derelict suburb of Detroit. Tess (Georgina Campbell) is unsettled when she discovers that the lettings company has double-booked her into the same property as a male stranger (Bill Skarsgård). But it soon becomes clear that she has much more to worry about.
The film flirts with humour, offering brief, much-needed respites from the inexorable tension and touching on the question of whether an underground torture complex can be included as square footage on a sales listing. But for the most part, it’s one of the most bracingly effective chillers of the year.
