Barbarian, review: an Airbnb booking has never been so terrifying

The face of urban blight has never been quite so grotesque as it proves in Barbarian, a frighteningly tense, craftily structured horror-thriller which has taken the American box office by storm, and will do the same here. It starts with a heavy downpour at night, in the exact area of Detroit where you would least want your Airbnb situated.

For Tess (terrific Georgina Campbell), the news is worse: a stranger called Keith (Bill Skarsgård) blearily answers the door, and it turns out they’ve been (mistakenly?) double-booked.

Writer-director Zach Cregger, best-known until now as part of frat boy-ish comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, toys with the awkwardness of this scenario, before Tess ventures to the cellar for loo roll and gets trapped. What she finds down there, which has the makings of a horrific sex dungeon, is the stuff of nightmares.

To say much more would interfere with this film’s niftily controlled escalation into full-bore dread. We can speak for a moment, though, of AJ Gilbride (Justin Long), the property’s oblivious owner, who’s a sitcom actor in Los Angeles, caught up in his own imminent cancellation when accused of rape by a co-star.

He flies – or maybe it’s flees – to Detroit to liquidate his bricks and mortar asset, and only realises for the first time what caverns it has below, though not yet what they’ve been used for. Played queasily to the hilt, Long’s toxic dude-bro is no one’s white knight here – far too self-absorbed to concern himself, say, with the camcorder someone has trained on a bed in the basement, or the bucket next to it.

Cregger keeps a tight hold on his storytelling for an hour or more. He knows the jolt, and the release valve, of a sudden switch to another character thousands of miles away – or to the same street 40 years earlier, with Reagan coming in and white homeowners at the point of exodus. The secret history of this house and the tunnels below starts coming out in a steady trickle; Fritzl-level red flags need flying for the unwary.

Barbarian could have been tauter yet if Tess didn’t abandon her raw survival instincts – alert at the start, with Campbell looking sharp – by the third act. Cregger also backs out of the sustained claustrophobia that worked so well in something like Neil Marshall’s 2005 film The Descent, the result being his film’s hokiest surprises get spilled out in the open.

The middle stretch is genuinely scary, though, thanks to the film’s clammy aptitude for trapping us alone in the dark. Somewhere in here, there’s a thesis brewing about how predators ply their trade and cover their tracks while purporting to be the good guys. The product of their actions is ghastly, and it’s lumbering at us fast.

18 cert, 103 min. In cinemas from Friday