‘Weapons’ Review
There’s something amiss in the town of Maybrook. After the disappearance of 17 children from a single classroom, mystery ensnares the town’s residents as unexplainable circumstances affect everyone in different ways. Zach Cregger’s Weapons is the kind of ambitious follow-up effort that can make or break a director. Cregger tackles a sprawling, interconnected narrative that juggles a sinister atmosphere with gallows humour, all while keeping itself grounded through characters simply trying to make sense of a dark unknown. Gradually revealing its hand through a fragmented structure, Weapons is powered by its mystery and frequently reinvigorates itself with chilling sequences and shocking twists. While its ambition brings about notable hiccups, there’s nothing quite like Weapons. It isn’t just an impressive sophomore solo effort; it’s a sign that Cregger is one of the most interesting writer-directors working in horror today.
When Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) walks into her elementary school class one morning, she finds her students have all but disappeared - all but Alex (Cary Christopher), who sits alone at the back of the room. Every other classroom remains in attendance, but at 2:17 AM, seventeen of Ms. Gandy’s students ran off into the night, leaving no clues as to where they went or why. Parents like Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) refuse to believe that Justine had nothing to do with it. As she becomes further ostracized by the community around her and the police seem to be coming up empty-handed in their investigation, Justine begins taking matters into her own hands. However, strange occurrences start happening after the disappearances that drag down citizens throughout Maybrook into a mystery that gets weirder by the day.
The allure of Weapons is in its hook, which immediately grabs the viewer with its mystique—a knowing acknowledgement from the audience that whatever is happening has to be immense, but what it is seems impossible to fathom. An early assembly emphasizes a fear-stricken community that simply wants answers, but it’s the scale and strangeness of what happened that make those answers difficult to even guess. There’s a bit of The Leftovers felt in that processing of the unknowable, but Cregger also taps into a collective terror. Rows of houses, separated, but brought together through tragedy; suburban nightmares fueled by the puncturing of the idyllic.
That display of a collective experience is somewhat mired by how Cregger’s screenplay structures the film. Weapons follows an anthology format where it follows characters up to a point and then cuts to another character, where the viewer revisits specific events from a differing perspective. The payoff is that pieces of the puzzle are slowly revealed. When the film finally connects all of the tangentially related stories, it ties everything together with a neat bow that is impressive for how vast the film initially feels once it begins splintering. The issue is that the momentum resulting from one character’s story is reset once it shifts to a new character, and it becomes slightly infuriating when answers are within reach but are purposefully being held back to create suspense.
The most obvious inspiration for the sprawling feeling of Weapons is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Namechecked by Cregger leading up to the release, Weapons features a bunch of characters, each handling the disappearances in their own way. The film makes a point to make them feel more connected than Magnolia did to keep its mystery tidy, but the more thematic and intangible connective tissue remains. Alden Ehrenreich’s police character, Paul, is even sporting a similar moustache as John C. Reilly does in Anderson’s film. However, Magnolia makes the wise decision to keep passing the baton between characters as it sees fit, and not from an arbitrary structure that demands no character be returned to unless they cross paths with the current character. While the final act of Weapons works because of that structure, the build-up has an undeniable jerkiness to its pacing that needlessly hurts an otherwise stellar plot.
There’s also the argument of whether Cregger’s screenplay being tidy is a detriment to the thematic bones of the script. Eventually, it’s a film that feels like it gives up on saying anything. However, dream sequences and a concerted effort to make every character their own brand of messed up hint at a film trying to derive some meaning out of the situation. There’s a clear break from thematic importance that happens as the film turns its gaze firmly towards the mystery and the horrors of its situation. That is emphasized by how much quicker the pace of the film becomes. The shift supports a larger idea that the search for meaning may be futile—or rather, it doesn’t necessarily matter as much as what you do with it. Arguably a feature and not a bug, it’s the part of the film that might divide audiences looking for some emotional catharsis from it all.
Tone also remains an interesting facet of Cregger’s work. Barbarian is an entertaining film, and it’s because it makes overt shifts in tone that then slowly bleed back into the terror. Some arcs in Weapons feel like miniature versions of Barbarian’s tonal shifts, most notably when characters like Paul and James (Austin Abrams)—a local drug addict—get a little more attention. However, because it’s in a smaller dose, it feels like the rise and fall of a rollercoaster ride rather than a reset. So where the momentum occasionally suffers, the tone always becomes stranger and more exciting. Cregger doesn’t quite have the same command of tone as Anderson did in Magnolia, but he seems to be working towards an end goal as opposed to a persistent feeling. The film’s funniest and most horrific moments all happen later in the movie, and without the tonal shifts that precede it, Weapons would not be as thrilling as it is.
It’s also a film where performances can hinder tone. Thankfully, that’s not the case in Weapons. Every character is simply “soldiering on”, as Archer puts it when talking to another parent. Garner’s performance serves as a reflection of the town’s general demeanour as her character’s care for the children becomes consumed by volatile and self-destructive behaviour. Brolin’s semi-stoic presence hides a festering wound that also provides the film with some of its lighter comedic touches as he tries to make sense of the strange happenings in Maybrook. Benedict Wong brings an endearing quality to the film as the school principal and also delivers some of the film's most memorable sequences.
Then there’s the overtly comedic performance from Abrams, who feels just shy of inhabiting his Wolfs character again (a film also shot by Weapons cinematographer, Larkin Seiple). Still, it works here because it’s a seemingly detached character somehow tethered to it all (a hectic score from Ryan and Hays Holladay and Cregger also parallels his performance). Ehrenreich sits somewhere comfortably numb between Abrams’ high-strung antics and Brolin’s blend of worry and anger. It’s arguably the funniest performance in the movie and seamlessly integrates within the film’s tonal shifts. The same can be said about Amy Madigan, whose performance—frequently reminiscent of Kathryn Hunter—is a vital component to the film. There’s not a single performance that feels out of place, despite many actors being tossed into different moods. It’s a very strong ensemble that gets to play within Cregger’s sandbox and craft some stellar moments out of sheer terror and complete bewilderment.
Violence also, of course, plays a pivotal role in Weapons. The title alone brings with it an expectation of brutality, and Cregger does not skimp on it with some gnarly sequences. What I think works for Cregger here is that the violence is expected. What’s surprising is not that it occurs but how far it’s willing to go. The answer is almost always comically far. Creepiness is also laid on thick throughout the film, but it doesn’t quite have the same impact—it’s something far more chilling. The atmosphere completely changes, and to watch Weapons take two different forms of horror and amplify them both to differing results is best experienced in a communal setting. A packed theatre where one moment everyone is laughing maniacally at disturbing levels of gore, and then feeling the air get sucked out of the room, is a special kind of experience.
Despite having some issues, Weapons should be rewarded for how minor those gripes ultimately become by the end. It’s a film with very clear direction, and while there are reservations with its structure, it’s impossible to fully complain when the resolution is as satisfying as it is. Cregger is someone who knows what he wants the audience to feel in any given moment, and being able to elicit that response from a crowd is commendable in its own right. Few horror films come around feeling this confident in what they’re peddling, but when they do, it’s a disturbingly magnificent sight. A satisfyingly macabre experience that reinforces Cregger’s directorial voice in an ambitious pursuit for meaning from the darkness, Weapons is a colossal achievement and a tour de force for everyone involved.
