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"Mature Content Warning!" |
The Mother is the main antagonist of the 2022 horror thriller film Barbarian.
She is a monstrous and feral woman who is the product of decades of incestuous rape by the sadistic kidnapper and rapist Frank. She intends to kidnap people living in her house to keep as her "children".
Her Evil Ranking[]
Her Villainous Deeds[]
- She attempted to kidnap Keith when he explores Frank's underground tunnels.
- When Keith tries to escape, she angrily and very brutally bashes his head against the stone wall until it kills him.
- She kidnaps both Tess and A.J. and locks them in a cell in the ground of the tunnels. She then forces them to be her "children" afterwards.
- She forces Tess and A.J. to drink milk from a disgusting baby bottle and when the latter refuses, she becomes very angry and drags him up to her room.
- The Mother would later be seen forcibly breastfeeding A.J. making him visibly uncomfortable.
- Tess uses this as an opportunity to escape as The Mother breastfeeds A.J. but when she finds out about this, she chases Tess to keep her in the tunnels.
- When Tess returns to save A.J., The Mother bursts out the door in attempt to either kidnap her again or just outright kill her, but Tess manages to temporarily knock out the mother out by running her over with a car.
- When Tess and A.J. escape to a water tower guarded by a recluse named Andre, the Mother bursts open a wall and very brutally rips Andre's arm off. She then uses the dismembered arm to viciously beat Andre to death despite him doing nothing wrong to her at all.
- She chases both A.J. and Tess up the water tower in attempt to either kidnap them again or just murder them for running away from her.
- She very graphically gouges A.J.'s eyes out and rips his head in half. While A.J. absolutely deserved it for throwing Tess off the tower to save his own hide, the death itself is still very brutal.
Why Doesn't She Stand Out?[]
- While her brutal murders made her pass the baseline, she greatly fails the heinous standards to her father Frank, who has raped multiple women for decades with less resources, while the Mother only kills two people onscreen despite being a lot stronger and faster than Frank.
- Her murders don't help too stand out, as while they are on-screen, Frank is heavily implied to have murdered and tortured dozens of women and children as well.
- She is far too tragic to be NPE. Despite all her crimes, she is constantly presented as a victim of Frank's abuse. Even when he's a decrepit old man, The Mother is still generally terrified of Frank, this is shown when she slowly begins walking away once A.J is close to his room.
- Her final moments are also played for extreme sympathy. She tries to bring Tess back to the house to continue caring for her, but Tess simply wants nothing to do with her due to the traumatizing horrors that lie in the tunnel and is left severely injured. When Tess points a gun at the Mother's head, she doesn't stop Tess and gladly accepts being shot to end her miserable life. What makes this moment even more sympathetic is that the Mother's final gesture to Tess was an affectionate tap on her forehead after kissing it, showing that she truly did care for Tess to the bitter end and genuinely viewed her as one of her children.
- She isn't even really inherently "evil" at all, as she simply believes that she's protecting a child as a motherly figure, not realizing the gravity of her actions at all.
- She has major moral agency issues. In her own twisted, delusional, and child-like mind, she simply wants to be a normal mother even if her methods of achieving that come off as very disturbing. Her abrasive and feral nature is a result of decades of inbreeding and Frank's horrific abuse towards her which twisted her mind into thinking violence was a normal part of childhood.
- When A.J. both cowardly and selfishly throws Tess off the water tower as bait to save himself, her motherly instincts kick in and she jumps down to save Tess's life, even laying directly beneath to latter to cushion the fall. This shows that she truly does care for Tess and would sacrifice her very life to protect her "children".
External Links[]
- The Mother on the Villains Wiki