Barbarians Review: Guess What Genre Is Coming to Dinner?

Charles Dorfman’s Barbarians is essentially two films in one: a comedy of manners concerning two yuppie couples that are incapable of facing reality, and a home invasion thriller. Genre-splicing has become a trend that any number of recent films, such as Titane and Whaler Boy, have successfully pulled off, but in the case of Barbarians, its two halves are so disjointed that they crumble apart into shapeless lumps.

The film opens with an infomercial for a country home, cloyingly presented by real estate developer and social media huckster Lucas (Tom Cullen), with his girlfriend, Chloe (Inès Spiridonov), in the role of the contented housewife. Having shadily acquired the property, Lucas plays up its proximity to a prehistoric monolith known as the Gateway Stone. The home, meanwhile, has been converted into a model of “contemporary design.” Framed by the trappings of an elite lifestyle, Lucas delivers a sales pitch peppered with PR lingo and costume changes. The infomercial is so transparently unreal that we’re led to expect that the idyllic life that it represents will come crashing down as soon as the lies can’t support their own weight.

Living temporarily in the farmhouse are Lucas’s friend Adam (Iwan Rheon), a film director and pathological liar, and his partner, Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno), who’s renowned for her archaic-looking artworks, including the “bespoke sculpture” that serves as a centerpiece for the property, a reproduction of the Gateway stone. It’s a glaring reference to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that never amounts to anything, much like the promising collision between the primitive and the curated in Eva’s artwork and the house itself.

On the morning of the dinner party that Adam and Eva are throwing at the farmhouse, Lucas and Chloe make their way there by car. As Lucas rehearses for Chloe the spontaneous outburst of emotion that he plans to succumb to for his next video post, the botched execution of which we later witness, the seams between Lucas’s online persona and his real narcissism begin to show. The technique of including camera phone videos (indicated by narrow framing) that contradict what we see elsewhere, nicely echoes the infomercial opening.

The moment of highest tension is the dinner party itself—all trivial conversation that oozes with evasions and deceptions that are underlined by choppy editing. But such moments, depicting the infiltration of social media personae into real life, set up expectations that the film’s transformation into a home invasion thriller ends up failing to satisfy.

Charitably viewed, the home invasion represents a radical incursion of reality into the artificial lives of the partiers. Except that character development goes out the window to clear space for violence that lacks even the inventiveness of shlock. In order to fulfill the demands of the new genre, Barbarians is forced to table its own themes. There’s just enough in the plot to motivate the invasion, but the invaders themselves never feel threatening because they’re so undeveloped. All the conflict up to this point has been between the couples at the party, but the invasion reduces the consequences of their lies and betrayals to generic comeuppance.

Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be. Even the intertitles come across as transparent signals of artiness, so perfunctory that they only distract. One is left with the sense that, instead of arising organically, the genre switch-up was imposed on the film in the earliest stages of its conception, in keeping with the trend of hybridity in the culture at large, which only sabotages the themes that Barbarians raises but never resolves or complicates.