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Cinema’s worst decision-makers tend to be found in horror movies. In the lots-of-fun new thriller Barbarian, the characters waste no time setting a new bar. As the film opens, a young woman named Tess (a revelatory Georgina Campbell) arrives at a home rental in a dilapidated, seemingly abandoned Detroit neighborhood in the middle of the night. After some struggle getting inside — no keys sit in the lock box as promised, and the help desk number leads straight to voicemail — Tess discovers, when a 20-something-year-old man (Bill Skarsgård) opens the front door, that the place has mistakenly been double-booked. Inconvenient as it is, the horror-movie fan in us wants Tess to drive to a hotel and worry about getting a refund tomorrow morning. We can’t be sure she’ll be safe with a stranger played by the actor who rose to fame as Pennywise the Clown in the recent It (2017) adaptation. And in a neighborhood seemingly left behind, who will hear her cries for help if he turns out to be a wolf in handsome-young-man clothing? But Tess, who has a job interview with a local documentarian tomorrow, decides to stay the night anyway, despite her ringing inner alarm bells. 

She eases a bit when she and the sweetly awkward Keith — if that is his real name — talk over a bottle of red wine and bond over her prospective employer’s obscure last movie, whom Tess assumed nobody saw but her. They both make it to the morning; in a different movie, a romance almost certainly would develop. (They come awfully close to kissing good night.) But the horrifying secret history of the house will catch up with its latest visitors before anything so rosy might develop, precipitated by an excruciatingly suspenseful sequence where Tess trots down into the basement in search of toilet paper; discovers a secret hallway that leads to a cell-like room with a filthy mattress, camera, and bucket; finds out there are even more stairs; and then …  I won’t go further than that; I’ll cop the common critical refrain that it’s best to go into Barbarian not knowing too much. 

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