At Christmastime, in a northern Alaskan town where everyone is crazy from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), an old serial-killer-turned-barber (Malcolm McDowell) is back to his old tricks.
Never quite hitting its stride as a comedy or as a thriller, The Barber is nonetheless an entertaining and well made confusion. The murders are nothing special and far too much is given away too quickly by an apparently tacked-on narration (but it’s a narration by Malcolm McDowell so I’m torn). It would have been nice to learn the barber was the killer when it was pertinent instead of having him state it at the beginning of the film, but without his satirical comments, the film’s humor would have been blunted.
The meat of the movie isn’t the crimes, but the interaction of the mentally challenged and psychologically distressed townspeople, and they are a pretty intriguing bunch. Besides the psychotic barber, there is the already-dead, taxi-driving, part-time prostitute, her oblivious, older husband, a sheriff who got the job by default, the dizzy police receptionist, an ineffectual and effeminate deputy, a pair of drunken, probably homosexual “hunters,” and an FBI agent who takes himself too seriously and can’t deal with the perpetual night. Every character is believable, and a majority of them are amazingly complex given the 94-minute running time. A direct-to-video release, The Barber is a nice little film which gives Malcolm McDowell one of his best roles in recent years.