Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022) is the reason I double check my Airbnbs. In this thriller horror movie, a nightmarish situation unfolds when a woman and a man double‑book a shitty looking Airbnb. It doesn’t end well (it ends in the rubble of a Detroit house that hides generations of violence). I love horror films! Especially ones with female(ish) villain/antagonist characters. I always love seeing what trope the female monsters take – “mothers, monsters or whores”. Last year I took a class with Summer Forester, called Women and War in the Middle East, and I read a paper that tried to make sense of women who commit unimaginable political violence, murders, violence in war etc. I’m drawing on this particular reading called “Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics” by Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry to understand how in Barbarian (2022), the main female monster is understood.
I’ve always wondered, why are there so many female monsters? Why is it so easy to villanize womanhood? In Barbarian, the “monster” is named Mother. And, she’s a monster living in a giant underground basement of a house for more than 40 years. She’s 6 feet 8 inches tall, gargantuan proportions, matter hair, naked white body, no ability to speak, and epic strength. You can tell she’s the “monster.”
The reason she’s the monster is because of Frank. In the movie, flashbacks to a hppaier “white picket fence” America back in Raegen era reveal a man named Frank. He spent decades spent decades abducting women, imprisoning them in underground rooms, and fathering children with them—children who were, in turn, assaulted and inbred. I hated watching this part, but Mother is the last of last of those descendants: feral, gigantic, and desperate to nurture whatever human stumbles into her tunnels. as animalistic, but the film repeatedly frames her actions as warped caregiving: she bottle‑feeds Tess, cradles a camcorder playing a nursing tutorial, and ultimately throws herself off a water tower to save Tess’s life. Using Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry’s reading, I think popular culture slots violent women into three reductive tropes—mother, monster, whore, thereby stripping them of political context and restoring patriarchal “normality.” When women’s violence is monstrous, the narrative pathologizes the woman and lets the system that produced her off the hook . Barbarian weaponizes that very expectation: we enter anticipating a freakish killer, then discover she is the living evidence of men’s unchecked power. But, it also tried to humanize her by showing us that her actions aren’t just scary and violent. It’s all she knows. She’s never left her house. And all she knows about the world is from one education DVD in her captive basement, on how to rear and nurture young babies.
But, I don’t want to just analyze her. I want to analyze the men in the movie. I think they’re the real monsters — respectable men who build or exploit brutal systems that hurt women. I choose to analyze AJ Gilbride, a character we are first introduced as a white able bodied guy riding a beautiful red sedan without a hood, in a picturesque ocean side road. He’s the kind of villain twenty‑first‑century capitalism loves: a slick Hollywood bro who can monetize anything— even a torture labyrinth. When he discovers the hidden hallway beneath his Detroit Airbnb (where the Monster lives), his first thought is not Who suffered here? but How much can I list this for? Tape‑measure in hand, he tries to convert trauma into real‑estate value. To me, he’s the real barbarian. Not the “monster.” AJ’s entrance shifts the film from gothic nightmare to #MeToo parable. He’s an actor who’s accused of sexual assault (He admitted to his guy friends that it just “took some convincing” but they were both totally into it), and he arrives in Detroit AirBnB to liquidate the property and fund his legal defense. He descends into the tunnels, tape measure in hand, giddy over “livable space” even as bloodstains darken the walls. That instinct to monetize is its own violence, turning trauma into square feet and victims into line items. But at the end of the film, there’s a small moment of redepmtion. The three characters, AJ, Tess the girl, and a homeless man sit by a makeshift fire a few blocks outside the house they were trapped in, after having almost escaped the clutches of Mother. AJ says,
“I did that” (Alluding to having SHOT the girl while runnign away from Mother in the tunnels)
“It was an accident,” says the girl.
“Doesn’t matter. It was my fault,” says AJ.
“I hurt somebody. It matters. I might be a bad person. Or maybe I’m a good person who did a bad thing.” He pauses for a moemnt of reflection and with tears in his eyes, and almost genuine concern, he says, “I can’t change what I’ve done but I can fix it.”
The homeless man interjects, “You ain’t gonna do nobody no help if you get yourself killed” pointing to the dark outside. Mother arrives almost immediately after. Rips Frank, the homeless mant o shreads and runs after the two characters, her ‘babies.’ And his almsot redemption arc evaporates the moment danger looms. He throws Tess off the water tower to buy himself seconds, proving that his earlier remorse was never about repair, only optics. Where The Mother kills to protect her “child,” AJ kills to protect his brand. In the final scence, Tess, the girl, is lying on the road, with Mother crooning and towering over her. She has a gun in hand, the same gun that AJ shot her with. And Tess whispers “I’m sorry” before ending The Mother’s suffering. Her apology acknowledges the creature’s stolen humanity and invites the audience to grieve, not simply recoil.
I think of this film often, especially its succint title, because it forces me to rethink: Who is the monster, the barbarian? Is it easy to point to The Mother’s grotesque form which is mostly because of the the violence impressed upon her body by her father/grandfather/abuser Frank. Or is it Frank and AJ , men who embody the systemic barbarism that mainstream society rarely names?
