Pig (2021)

Editor's Note: The following review contains spoilers for 'Barbarian'

Barbarian has a lot of set-up. By the hour 20-minute mark I had to tell myself that perhaps not everything in this story will be explained. With only 15-20 minutes left in the film, it would be impossible for every question to be answered or every mystery to be revealed. Recent movies have somewhat trained me to prepare myself for such withholding of information. Pig never really gets to why Nicholas Cage’s character became a hermit. Nope never really explains why Gordy the chimpanzee went on a killing spree. While I appreciated both of those movies, the lack of explanations for these story points left me dissatisfied.

But I was ready for Barbarian. I was ready to appreciate whatever ending it was going to throw at me. We may not learn why this one house on Barbary lane is the only liveable space on the block, why ‘The Mother’ has super strength, how Frank ends up capturing all his victims, or what exactly is on those VHS tapes. And that’s okay. In some cases, what’s left to the imagination ends up being the scariest thing of all.

Barbarian begins with a young African American woman named Tess, played by Georgina Campbell, arriving at an Air BnB late one rainy night. Due to some scheduling mishap, Tess finds herself sharing the rental with another man named Keith, played by Bill Skarsgard of It fame. Unable to contact the property manager, they end up agreeing to share the place. The next afternoon Tess discovers a hidden corridor after accidentally locking herself in the basement. Down the corridor, there is a room with a camcorder and a dirty mattress. Panicked and still trapped in the basement, she, fortunately, escapes through a window with Keith’s help. After hearing what Tess has seen, Keith goes down to the basement to investigate. When he does not return, Tess goes down and into the underground tunnel to find Keith, only to make a startling discovery.

From there, we’re introduced to a character named AJ, played by Justin Long, driving down some sunny west coast highway. AJ is an actor whose career is on the brink of collapse due to accusations of sexual assault from a TV series co-star. As the owner of the property that Keith and Tess are staying in, he visits the site in anticipation of selling his assets to cover lawyer expenses. Soon AJ discovers the corridor in the basement and ventures in, where something horrible awaits.

My original debut piece entailed dusting off a dying trope, so no one was more surprised than me when the popular YouTube channel “The Take” beat me to the punch. As a lifelong roleplayer who’s experienced plenty of cross-over with fanfic writers and lovers, I figured that the “Mary Sue” was an archaic archetype: a silly milestone.

You see, somewhere down the line, “Mary Sue,” often a cringe-worthy chapter in the creative history of young writers, made an epic trek from the campy corners of fanfic to an interview with a chart-topping celebrity in 2016. This was certainly a shocking and sensational trajectory, but why, in 2021, is a major presence still examining a matter that's over five years old? A quick browse of YouTube’s filtered results as of this writing would suggest that the “Mary Sue” is not a hot new trend in the cinema circuit, nor has it been applied recently to any character other than Rey.

On September 23rd, when I set out to layer a critique of the Mary Sue on top of the surge in female superheroes in the MCU, I pitched an idea to my team through the lens of a roleplayer. I asked: “What informs anti-Mary Sue sentiment, and will female superheroes face a similar critiquing process? If so, will lovable flaws somehow protect them?” Perhaps there was something to that, because, lo and behold, The Take claimed, a week later, that one can create the “non-Mary Sue” by plugging in flaws. But is it really that easy? And should we be bashing Mary Sues in the first place? I invite you to follow me down the rabbit hole of YouTube comment threads, Discord channels, fanfic nostalgia, and a man that really just wants his pig back.