Worth Mentioning - Come for a Night. Stay Forever.

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Horror and thrills from 2022.

BARBARIAN (2022)

I’m a news editor at JoBlo.com / ArrowintheHead.com, a job that requires going over multiple news sources every day, reading a lot of headlines, and doing research... which means that I usually see spoilers for movies before I get a chance to watch them. My main focus is horror news, so I especially see spoilers for horror movies. But somehow, I managed to stay completely spoiler free when the horror movie Barbarian was released last year. I didn’t know any details about the film other than the fact that it involved a character played by Georgina Campbell finding something scary in a basement. At first, my avoidance of spoilers was pure chance. But soon I saw people saying that it’s best to go into Barbarian without knowing any spoilers, so I started making sure I avoided them. So when I finally watched the movie on VOD, I had no idea what to expect. That was definitely beneficial, and I agree: it’s best to watch Barbarian without knowing anything about it. Maybe even skip the rest of this write-up, even though I’m not going to get too spoilery.

I will confirm that Georgina Campbell stars as Tess, a woman introduced as she shows up at an Airbnb home she has rented on Barbary Street in Detroit, Michigan. As she tries to enter the place, she finds that it has been double-booked and someone is already staying there: Bill Skarsgard as Keith. Circumstances force Tess and Keith to have to share the house... and as we watch them interact, we see that the movie could have gone off in a rather pleasant direction. This could be a meet-cute situation for Tess and Keith, leading to romance. But we know this a horror movie, so we’re waiting for things to go terribly wrong. Is Keith a creep? Why was the homeless guy outside warning Tess not to go into the house? How is the horror going to enter the picture? We find out when Tess makes the mistake of going into the basement.

As the film gets gross and violence, Justin Long also gets worked into the story as the owner of the property, and genre regular Richard Brake makes an appearance as well.

Writer/director Zach Cregger didn’t have an outline in place when he started writing Barbarian, he just let the story go wherever it wanted to go. That is evident in the finished film, because it has an unusual structure. But I liked not knowing what Cregger was going to show us next, and I really enjoyed how crazy things got as the movie went along. There are definitely going to be several more viewings of Barbarian in my future.

WATCHER (2022)

There are too many movies and TV shows that are called Watcher or The Water, but this Watcher – which marked the feature directorial debut of V/H/S/94 contributor Chloe Okuno – is one that’s worth checking out. It stars Maika Monroe of It Follows and The Guest as Julia, an American woman who has just moved to Bucharest with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman)... and hasn’t quite gotten a grasp of Romanian yet. As someone who spends a good amount of time in Brazil but still hasn’t managed to become fluent in Portuguese, I know how frustrating and sometimes scary it can be to make your way around in a country where you don’t speak the language. And that’s the situation Julia is in throughout the movie. She also has a lot of free time on her hands, since her husband works long hours and she has nothing to do but hang out around their apartment. Maybe it’s because she has so much free time that she happens to notice that someone who lives in the apartment building across the way seems to be watching her... and following her around town...

As if being watched and stalked wasn’t worrying enough, Julia also comes to suspect that the guy who likes to keep his eyes on her may be the serial killer who has been attacking women around Bucharest recently, slashing throats and cutting off heads.

Okuno, who rewrote the initial screenplay by Zack Ford, does a good job keeping the scenario as intriguing and involving as possible. As we side with Julia while she tries to figure out exactly what’s going on around her – and just how much danger she might be in – we come to see Francis as an ineffectual douche, so we know it’s going to be up to her to deal with this alone. Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a thriller if Julia’s quest to resolve the situation didn’t eventually put her in grave danger. Things get so intense for her, there was a moment where I thought the movie was going to lose me – but it didn’t, because it has a very satisfactory ending.

Watcher is a very strong start for Okuno’s feature career, and I look forward to seeing what she’s going to do from here.