Barbarian has now been unleashed on Disney+ in the UK if you're after something a bit different this Christmas.
The much-talked about horror movie follows Tess (Georgina Campbell) who arrives at her rental home in Detroit, only to find it's already occupied by Keith (Bill Skarsgård). Does she stay the night anyway, or is Keith more sinister than he appears to be?
Writer/director Zach Cregger keeps you guessing about that during Barbarian's first act, before playing the first of several audacious reveals as Tess's Detroit trip turns into a bloody nightmare... quite literally at times.
What to Read Next
Whether you watched it at the cinema and want to read more about it, or you've just experienced Barbarian for the first time on Disney+, we sat down with Georgina Campbell to talk about its surprisingly emotional finale.
Needless to say, major spoilers are ahead.
Barbarian ending explained
Tess decides to stay the night and despite some spooky goings-on with her door during the night, everything seems pretty normal and Keith is actually a nice guy. But when she has to go down into the basement for some toilet roll the next day, she makes a sinister discovery.
There's a hidden door in the basement that leads down to a corridor which has what looks like a dungeon. She rightly gets the hell out of there, but when Keith comes back from a day out, he decides to check it out himself and promptly goes missing. Turns out there's another secret tunnel behind the corridor that leads further into the dark.
When Tess goes to find Keith and hears him calling for help, they run into The Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis), a deformed naked woman who brutally smashes Keith's head into the wall.
In the first of Barbarian's jolting narrative switches, we then cut to AJ (Justin Long), an actor who has been accused of sexual assault by a co-star. With his career in tatters, AJ heads to Detroit to the rental home he owns, which turns out to be where Tess and Keith were staying.
Planning to sell it to raise much-needed funds, AJ willingly goes down into the secret corridor as he views it as added value. Of course, he runs into The Mother too and as he tries to flee, he falls into a pit where he meets Tess who has been there for two weeks.
Barbarian then introduces another key character in Frank (Richard Brake) who we see stalking a woman in the 1980s. It's revealed that he's a serial rapist who abducted several young women, and The Mother is the result of him sleeping with the offspring of the women he raped.
Being raised in the dungeon below the house, The Mother has only known two things: the brutal violence of her father (and possibly grandfather too) and the breastfeeding video that we see Frank buy in the '80s flashback.
Tess warns AJ that if he doesn't allow The Mother to 'mother' him, she'll attack him instead. When AJ refuses to feed from the milk bottle she presents, The Mother forcefully drags him away which gives Tess the opportunity to escape.
She attempts to get help to rescue AJ, but the police don't believe her and local homeless man Andre (Jaymes Butler) warns her to get the hell out of Detroit. Tess goes back to the home alone where The Mother is waiting for her. Tess runs her over and pins The Mother to the house, before she goes to rescue AJ.
Tess doesn't know though that AJ escaped The Mother and found a decrepit Frank in another room under the house. Frank had a gun, but he used it to kill himself and now AJ has it. He hears somebody coming and shoots them, only for it to be Tess.
Luckily, he's not a good shot and it's not fatal, so they stumble out of the house. The Mother, unsurprisingly, is no longer trapped and she kills Andre when he tries to help Tess and AJ. They escape to the top of the nearby water tower, but The Mother follows them up there.
Because he's a massive douchebag, AJ throws Tess off the roof as he rightly assumes The Mother would try to save her 'child'. The Mother catches Tess and breaks her fall, but she's not dead. When AJ tries to apologise to Tess, The Mother wakes up and gouges out AJ's eyes and splits his head open, in the most satisfying death of 2022.
It's here where Barbarian delivers what's arguably its most unexpected twist. Because of what we learn about The Mother and how she's not really the "barbarian" of the title (that's Frank, really, or AJ as well), it's a surprisingly tender scene as The Mother cradles Tess to protect her.
Tess knows though that The Mother won't ever stop, so as she's being cradled, she takes the gun that AJ was carrying and kills The Mother. It's an emotional scene and for Georgina Campbell, it was a hard scene to film.
"I was really nervous about it because it's the end of the film and you really want to get it right, you really want to get the emotion right. I wasn't happy, I didn't think I'd done it. But I think what that scene is about is about Matthew," she told Digital Spy.
"He does a really beautiful performance and it really doesn't matter what I'm doing at that point, it's all about him and you understanding this character, so it's such a beautiful scene. I really, really love it, I think it's gorgeous, but I don't think it has anything to do with me, it's all Matthew."
Barbarian is available to watch now on Disney+.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
