To this end, the surprise ending of the film where the Mother willingly sacrifices herself to save Tess and, later, allows Tess to kill her signifies her innate trust in and solidarity with other women.
She's not the monster, but the product of one. Tess's killing of the Mother is an act of empathy rather than one of revenge, and the audience can't help but feel sorry for the deformed woman who only wanted a child to love.
Barbarian has been characterized as having themes related to sexual abuse and trauma, and, owing to the book by which Cregger was inspired, themes of different forms of misogyny.
While AJ berated him and called him sick, Frank likely didn't kill himself from guilt but fear that his secret would finally be revealed. He shot himself to avoid the consequences of not only his sexual crimes but the creation and actions of The Mother.
Injured after AJ shoots Tess, the actor sacrifices her to the Mother, throwing her over the water tower's edge to save himself. Luckily for Tess, the Mother cushioned her fall, but the antagonist isn't done yet, gouging AJ's eyes out and killing him. Tess ultimately shoots the Mother and survives the terrifying ordeal.
Viewers were shocked by Tess' last moments in HBO's The Last of Us, when she allowed a "clicker" zombie to kiss her on the lips and directly infect her with the cordyceps fungus rather than fighting back.
Keith went down into the labyrinth, only for Tess to try to help him after he got attacked in the shadows. Mother then crept out of the dark, smashing his head into the wall. Interestingly, when she took AJ, he panicked even more, which Tess warned about as she knew Mother would also kill him.
Keith's toothbrush on the floor can be chalked up to where the outlet is placed. It is likely that Keith didn't have any other place to charge it, but it is much harder to explain The Mother's actions and this is where the true message of Barbarian comes from.
In the 1980s, he pretended to be a maintenance man in order to leave the bathroom windows open so he could kidnap his victims later. He also arranged to have an extensive, labyrinth-like tunnel system in the basement of his house, where he would film himself raping the women in one of hundreds of rooms.
This exchange, and AJ's drunken voicemail apology to the victim, confirm that the rape did, in fact, occur without ever showing it. A perfectly cast Justin Long gives Barbarian an unassuming villain.
Tess is absolutely terrified but proves herself to be a smart horror movie final girl when she figures out how to survive. At the end of Barbarian, Tess realizes that she can only rely on herself when police officers don't think that she's telling the truth about the events of the last little while.
However, Cregger has provided a hint by revealing that Barbarian is based on a thought he had after reading a book called The Gift of Fear, a self-help book written by a security consultant named Gavin de Becker.
Viewed through this lens, Barbarian becomes a film about how male entitlement and indifference has helped build a world that allows evil to fester and rot. It is present in the desire for a carefully cultivated suburb, which Frank's neighbor abandons the second he sees it changing.
It is revealed that he has kidnapped, raped and impregnated several women in the secret chambers beneath his house without repercussions for decades, and that Mother is the daughter of another of his victims, born into miserable captivity.
After abducting them, he rapes them, and then rapes their children, leading to severely deformed offspring such as The Mother. He also proceeds to record these deviant acts, and put them on VHS tapes to view, and presumably pleasure himself to, later.
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.
Forty-two years later, Barbarian borrowed heavily from The Shining when a homeless man named Andre, played by Jaymes Butler, steps in to save the protagonist and take her to his totally safe hideout — only for the monster to immediately break in, rip off Butler's arm, and beat him to death with it.
Barbarian is the story of a survivor. It is also the story of a mother, an abuser, a victim, and a haunted house; a commentary on capitalism, sharing economy, gentrification, greed, gender politics, Trickle-down economics, motherhood, and abuse. The one thing it is not: a conventional horror film.
The Mother is the titular main antagonist of the 2022 comedy horror film Barbarian. She is a deranged and deformed human who is the result of decades of incest and rape from Frank, a serial rapist and pedophile living in Detroit, Michigan.
They are a symbol of evil and death. Colloquially, however, snakes are not animals, but people. They are backstabbers — the barbarians — who have a tendency to manipulate situations to craft a narrative that presents themselves as innocent.
While Tess is gone, AJ discovers the underground “bedroom” where an elderly Frank has taken up residence. He unwittingly informs Frank that cops will soon be crawling through the house's tunnels, prompting Frank to shoot himself in order to avoid facing any form of justice.
Why The Mother Never Tried To Kill Tess In Barbarian. On the surface, The Mother seems overprotective of Tess because she has likely developed a skewed sense of motherhood after living in Frank's basement and obsessively watching the videotape that teaches how mothers should nurture their children.
The real villain of this movie is clearly Frank, for what he had caused and the decades of torture he put so many women and children through - The Mother was just the sad, unfortunate outcome of all of that.
