The saying often goes, “eat the rich.” Charles Dorfman’s Barbarians takes this sentiment and asks what if the rich ate each other? It isn’t unfeasible considering all the ingredients for obscene wealth and status the film gets right. Chief among these ingredients is the toxic male culture vacuuming any and everything around them to get a step ahead of the competition. The film bubbles with potential when exploring this core but ultimately fizzles before it can spark.
Barbarians tells the story of TV writer Adam (Iwan Rheon) and his wife Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno) as they host a dinner party for his friend Lucas (Tom Cullen) and his girlfriend Chloe (Inès Spiridonov). Adam and Lucas are on opposite ends of the masculinity spectrum. Lucas is the typical alpha male. Vulgar, narcissistic and just in general someone most people probably couldn’t spend more than ten minutes with. Adam is cowardly and resents the status he and his wife are trying to achieve. Because Lucas owns the land (with many strings attached) Adam and Eva are currently living on, the dinner party is a charade to convince Lucas to officially sell them the land.
Adam & Lucas
Both men are dangerous in their own right. Adam’s hatred toward himself foams to those around him. His weakness is symbolized by a maimed fox he can’t bring himself to put out of its misery. It takes another man, one more rugged and closer to Lucas’s masculine stature, to remove the animal.
Lucas, on the other hand, is an aggressive brute. He’s quick to live stream any moment if it gives him an inch of clout, and he slips in and out of social media influencer mode a little too easily. Adam makes for an easy punching bag for Lucas, who is going through his own financial troubles after a drama-filled legal battle over the land Adam and Eva occupy. Their emotional and physical violence hold the women hostage to the turmoil, making for an uneasy dinner party.
Iwan Rheon in ‘Barbarians ‘ Photo courtesy of Fantastic Fest.Prioritizing the Wrong Violence
The violence invoked by the film ultimately becomes its undoing. Not violence in itself but the type of violence it chooses to prioritize. Every principal character is inflicting some type of violence against one another, even before the jarring shift into the third act. Lucas is a bully, Adam is dishonest with himself and his wife, Eva craves status, and ? is carrying a secret. Yet only the men carry most of the conflict while the women are mainly peacekeepers.
The dinner table serves as the battleground for the various egos in play but the lack of complete involvement causes it to be mildly disappointing. There’s an opportunity for a Succession-esque war of words and vigor that is overlooked. Rather than putting the focus here, Dorfman more or less plows through it. Then the story turns on its head.
Lucas’s legal drama comes back to bite everyone in a way that turns the evening upside down. The sudden shift from the violence of status and peer pressure to a physically violent threat diminishes whatever it was trying to say when putting these insecure, materialistic people together. It became less interesting, even sometimes predictable. This will probably be the make-or-break moment for audiences. Barbarians almost fits its definition but ultimately defers to being something safer.
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