Critic Reviews

Barbarians is sometimes a comedy of ill manners, sometimes an exhilarating thriller, but it’s also an amusingly clever and sometimes violent parable about venality, vulgarity and territoriality. Barbarians may be an ambiguous title, but it’s apt.

Barbarians starts out as a tense psychological thriller unfolding against the tableau of a not-so-friendly dinner before morphing into something decidedly physical and creepy.

Some pacing issues result in a feature that feels a bit uneven, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t entertained throughout all the craziness.

Director and writer Charles Dorfman’s debut feature is a corker of a good time to watch and rife with some juicy subtext regarding class, British colonialism, and toxic (read: douchebag) masculinity.

The director carries out his ultimately banal aims with commendable dispatch, and it’s always interesting to see Moreno play a character who’s not a living saint.

As the violence escalates and whatever was getting out of hand gets seriously out of hand, Barbarians can turn downright riveting.

I’m torn on Barbarians, because while the film displays sharpened technical filmmaking chops, it’s an unbalanced invasion thriller caught between its subgenre intentions.

Dorfman does an excellent job of constructing a dialogue- and performance-driven chamber piece; but he shows less skill at staging fight scenes and raw terror.

Nothing about this moodily lit, dinner-party-from-hell film can compete with the real-life drama that unfolded in the middle of the Academy Awards. Or with any other home invasion thriller, for that matter.

Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.