If you were going to play the old parlor game and invite four people, living, dead or fictional, into your home for dinner, chances are none of them would be a character from “Barbarians.” The title may suggest yet another sci-fi-fantastical, faux-historical bloodletting involving halberds, broadswords and prophesies. Instead, “Barbarians”—a film newly available on AMC+—is a dread-inducing dining-room drama about something pan-historically cutthroat: real estate. And the question of whether our obsession with it is as primal as thirst.
Striving for the Pinteresque, director and co-writer Charles Dorfman sets out to assemble four quasi-adults in the nouveau-palatial residence of Adam and Eva (Iwan Rheon, Catalina Sandino Moreno), who haven’t quite taken ownership of the house, though the deal has been cut. Or chiseled: Eva, a renowned sculptor, is bartering for her dream home with a plinth-like carving inspired by the nearby Gaeta Stone (think Stonehenge). The work is intended to be the centerpiece of Gateway, a luxury housing development in the exurbs of London that’s being put together with the scruples of a Visigoth by their friend Lucas (Tom Cullen). He and pregnant girlfriend Chloe (Inés Spiridonov) are coming over for dinner. But not before Lucas tries to plug his project on Instagram from the actual Gaeta site. “Hey guys! What’s up?” he says into his phone, before being chased off by irate neo-Druids.
