At its best it is inventive and unpredictable, with a nervy visual style that takes note of the lurking evil beneath the banality of its domestic space.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Like the best horrors, it's 'about' stuff -- gentrification, abuse, toxic masculinity, taking responsibility. There's also plenty of jump scares.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 30, 2022

Barbarian is a timely depiction of youth anxiety toward a territorial older class and an older generation’s disdain for an entitled, aimless youth.

| Nov 8, 2022

Barbarian serves up all the requisite thrills with panache, but it also provokes deeper, longer-lasting reflections.

| Nov 4, 2022

A gleefully scary and inventive tale that’s full of disarming twists and #MeToo undertones.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2022

For the most part, it’s one of the most bracingly effective chillers of the year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2022

Wildly unpredictable, Barbarian begins as a tale of awkward circumstance, before mutating into something intensely claustrophobic, satirically amusing, and in its best moments, both.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 28, 2022

Broaching everything from cancel-culture, red flags and general dating dynamics in the 21st century, Cregger leans heavily on the usual horror tropes, but somehow manages to deliver something truly unique.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 28, 2022

A frighteningly tense, craftily structured horror-thriller...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 27, 2022

As a filmmaker, Cregger seems conscious of embracing and then twisting an audience’s expectations, leaning into certain tropes of the genre before forcefully pushing towards something far more realistic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 27, 2022

Ultimately, Cregger takes an unconventional route down a familiar path.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 24, 2022

Cregger clearly regards the whole thing as a superior video game -- except that he’s the one pushing all the buttons and our expectations are just part of the mechanism.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 21, 2022

Barbarian feels more like a modern, gory Twilight Zone scenario—conceptually striking and a little eerie, but limited by its own cleverness.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 3, 2022

Much like the luckless main characters, audiences will be left off-balance by "Barbarian," an inventive, nerve-shredding horror film whose greatest shock is its unpredictability.

| Sep 29, 2022

Cregger takes a simple premise and spins it into a series of unexpected permutations. Some tropes work better than others, but we’ll give him credit for inventiveness.

| Sep 24, 2022

Cregger started off a sketch comic, co-founding The Whitest Kids You Know, but knows exactly how to conjure up dread, utilize jump scares, and play the tension-and-release-and-oh-hey-here’s-even-more-tension game that characterize best-in-show creepfests.

| Sep 22, 2022

What Barbarian offers, in addition to a full runtime of unexpectedly horrifying imagery mixed with surprising twists, is the chance for all of us to reflect on who could potentially show up as anti-character witnesses at our own good samaritan trials.

| Sep 19, 2022

Barbarian is a leap of faith. It lets the viewer in slowly, before trapping them in a damp and dingy bunker of exploitive fright that’s almost impossible to escape.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 12, 2022

Horror films are often launching pads for distinguished careers and Mr. Cregger leaves his audience eager to see what he’ll do next.

| Sep 8, 2022

The social horror of Jordan Peele is felt as an influence, but Barbarian's thrills are more of the throwaway B-movie variety than those of "Get Out" or "Us," and its attempts to elevate itself have the opposite effect and knock it down a notch.

| Original Score: C | Sep 8, 2022