Writer/director Charles Dorfman’s debut feature BARBARIANS is the story of two couples, three friends, four people, and the fragile relationships that exist between them. When those ties are pulled the most taut, the foursome has no option but to put their comparatively trivial problems aside to overcome a bigger threat. Playing at this year’s Fantastic Fest, it’s dinner with YOU’RE NEXT for dessert: a meal that leaves you satisfied, followed by a palate-cleansing THE STRANGER sorbet.
Iwan Rheon plays Adam, a semi-famous director with a more successful girlfriend. Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is an accomplished and well-known artist and sculptor, who has been hired by Adam’s best friend Lucas (Tom Cullen) to create a massive piece for Lucas’s new real estate development. On Adam’s birthday, the couple plan to host Lucas—who is famous on social media as well as in real estate—and his girlfriend Claire (Inés Spiridonov) for dinner. Mixing pleasure with business, the hosting couple is also set to finalize a contract to live in the house they’ve inhabited on the property while Eva worked on the sculpture.
Cracks in the foundation are clear from the beginning, but the direct source of the collapse can’t be blamed on any one thing. The basis of the friendship between Adam and Lucas is more than good-natured dick-measuring; Adam is hostile toward Lucas for his constant slights, though Lucas is too wrapped up in himself to acknowledge them. Like INGRID GOES WEST, BARBARIANS expertly reveals the manufactured authenticity of influencers, their “real” lives only shared through any number of Snapchat filters. Lucas is one man for the camera, another for his friends, and possibly another in his mind. He’s happy to take credit both when it’s due and otherwise, which leaves the way he acquired the land for the development potentially dubious. Adam has clearly spent a lot of their friendship nodding and smiling off the jabs from his friend, while also navigating his male ego around a more successful romantic partner who is ready to settle down with him. A neighbor’s overt flirtations towards Eva also have Adam on edge—in the right mindset, everything that surrounds him is bigger, and better.
Cullen and Rheon are both fantastic, no pun intended. Rheon’s Adam is restrained, tight, with serious David in STRAW DOGS energy. His emotions fluctuate between playful puppy dog and steel-eye rage, and the speed with which he changes from one to the other speaks to more going on than meets the eye. Cullen plays Lucas with a bombastic machismo that’s intimidating, tempered only by a thousand-watt smile and Hugo Boss model good looks. He’s charismatic, but he knowingly rates a little too high on the Asshole Scale. How these men met and became friends isn’t important, but where their friendship is headed is.
Watching BARBARIANS heat up slowly gives you that lobster-in-a-pot feeling. Comfortable, but something isn’t quite right and then…you’re done. It easily stands alongside THE LAST SUPPER, THE INVITATION, and AN IDEAL HOST as movies that have mastered the art of jaw-clenching politeness that wears down over wine and hors d’oeuvres. Whether from biting your tongue or grinding your teeth, BARBARIANS will leave you with a mouth full of blood.
Tags: Barbarians, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Charles Dorfman, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest 2021, Ines Spiridonov, Iwan Rheon, Tom Cullen
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