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. Even after Tess' first attempt to kill her, the Mother still only wants to save her.
The Mother is the main antagonist of the 2022 comedy horror film Barbarian. She is a deranged and deformed human and the result of decades of incest and rape of Frank, a serial rapist and pedophile living in Detroit, Michigan.
The naked woman, referred to as The Mother, turns out to be the progeny of a man named Frank who's also still alive in the deepest recesses of the house's winding basement tunnels. Frank was a murderer and a rapist who abducted women, and one of them gave birth to The Mother.
Up there, AJ chooses to sacrifice Tess to save himself. He tosses her from the water tower and the Mother jumps after, grabbing and cradling the woman to reduce the impact from the fall. Out of anger that AJ tried to kill her “baby,” the Mother gouges out his eyes, killing him instantly.
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.
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.
Tess spends weeks trapped underground before she is given a sudden chance to escape when AJ Gilbride (Justin Long), the narcissistic actor who owns Frank's former house, unwittingly distracts The Mother long enough for her to make her way out of the home's tunnels.
At this point, Barbarian has spent so much time building up the threat of Keith, and the danger of the solitary male, that her sudden appearance is genuinely shocking. The Mother is towering, naked, and filthy; she seems like a ghoul, a mutant, something less than human.
Even when Tess shoots The Mother in the Barbarian movie's climactic moments, she seems to do it more out of pity than anger, which shows how much she understands what she has been through.
However, it is soon revealed that The Mother is the result of decades of multigenerational incest by Barbarian's serial rapist Frank, played by Richard Brake. The true villain of Barbarian is the toxic masculinity exhibited by not only Frank but the male protagonists of Keith and Justin Long's AJ.
AJ saw the tapes and threatened to call the cops. 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.
It can be deduced that she fears men because her only exposure to them is through Frank, the man who imprisoned and raped her. The only time we ever see her cower back into the darkness is when AJ makes it to the door of Frank's room.
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.
Also, trigger warnings for: sexual violence, incest, murder, blood and gore, abduction, stalking, child abuse, gaslighting, suicide, jump scares, flashing lights, one use of a homophobic slur, pedophilia, nudity, toxic masculinity, violence against women, and a car crash.
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. Tess gets the keys to her car from the rental home and seems to kill The Mother by running her over.
In it, Tess was a wronged woman who was hanged at Winchester jail for the murder of Alec D'Urbeville, her violent lover who raped her and prevented her from being with her true love. In a 2008 BBC adaptation, Tess was played by Gemma Arterton while her suitor, Angel Clare, was played by Eddie Redmayne.
Tess dies early in the story: Before she has the chance to deliver Ellie safely, one of the monstrous infected rips off a chunk of her shoulder, dooming her to a slow death as the cordyceps fungus steers control of her brain.
Tess decides to stay behind as a distraction for the infected while Joel and Ellie attempt to escape. While they run off, she gets ambushed by the infected and one of them kisses her, which lets the remnants of their disease make their way into her mouth.
Tess hit Alec with her gauntlet in Chapter 47, thus, by her own admission, foreshadowing the murder. Angel can love Tess now that Alec is dead, as he said he might in Chapter 36. Tess says she killed Alec after he called Angel 'a foul name' (p. 385) – Angel hit Farmer Groby for a similar offence to Tess in Chapter 33.
Tess dies after being bitten by a Clicker in the museum. Knowing she's doomed, she sacrifices herself by blowing up the Capitol building while it's full of infected, allowing Joel and Ellie to escape. When they arrive at the Capitol building, they find nothing but boxes of gear and dead, bloody bodies.
At the end of the novel, Tess is hanged in the “city of Wintoncester, that fine old city.” The reader is spared the details of this execution, only being told that a black flag slowly moves up the staff after the execution is finished.
