by Nick Taylor
Have y’all seen Zach Creggar’s new film Weapons, the breakout hit of this past weekend and the most recent evidence this year that Horror Is Back? You and I know both know horror has been back, and arguably never left to begin with. But in a very real, almost metaphysical sense, just because something has always been here doesn’t mean it can’t also be Back. Weapons proves this, not always a fresh or streamlined experience but an endlessly compelling one, especially in a crowded movie theater.
Weapons begins with the narration of an unnamed, unseen young girl (Scarlett Sher), telling the audience we’re about to be told a story so weird and disturbing it was kept out of the news by the police. You can probably imagine the tone in which the girl says this, like she’s telling you a really crazy secret you gotta promise you’re cool enough to hear about before she gets started. Spoilers follow after the jump, so if you’re a cool cat, come with me into this basement . . . .
Sher’s narration is a great way to open, funny and foreboding, more in the tenor of a campfire tale than a hideous crime. You can imagine her exact words changing if she tells this story to someone else, but the spirit will hold true to this ooky-spooky sentiment. She’d be right to do so, as she leads into a pretty crazy scenario: One night in an unnamed slice of American suburbia, two years ago, at 2:17am on the dot, seventeen third-graders in the same class ran out their front doors, seemingly of their own free will, and have not been seen since.
One only boy, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), showed up to class the next day. Neither he nor his teacher, Ms. Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), can provide any information to the police about where or why the children ran away, despite thorough questioning over a period of days. But though Alex is believed and left to grieve with his family, the parents of the school’s children (missing or not) have decided Ms. Gandy knows more than she’s telling, or perhaps that her easily-rattled demeanor makes her the easiest target they can gang up on. They clearly just need to antagonize her in some way the police haven’t so they can get their babies back. Oh, and according to the girl’s narration, a lot of people died a lot of nasty, weird deaths, so keep that in the back of your head.
Justine is our entrypoint into Weapons, but we soon hop across multiple POVs and timelines before we fully understand what happened to these kids. Josh Brolin’s obsessive parent, Benedict Wong’s concerned school principal, Austin Abrams’ resilient drug addict, and Alden Ehrenreich’s dissatisfied cop all trade protagonist duties before Weapons fully reveals its hand. They shuffle through each other’s lives, brushing against the truth of where this class has vanished to before it violently approaches them. I’m not sure Weapons fully exploits this device, but it’s an ambitious choice, and I’m glad it doesn’t feel like a completely empty gimmick. The bigger issue to me is his ear for human dialogue and characterization, which can be too transparently mechanical or lacking in subtlety - I have to imagine part of what carries Creggar’s chaptered structure is his baseline skill with actors and visual storytelling.
Creggar controls the generic and narrative tensions in Weapons much better than in his previous film Barbarian. They both slow way the hell down to show us what the big bad is, but Weapons picks up steam again in a real way. The moment-to-moment jumble of tones, themes, and incidents feels genuinely unpredictable. Duller patches are ably carried by the anticipation some other oddity will jolt the film back to life. I still protest the chronic under-lighting of nighttime scenes, but the actual framing and image-making of Larke Sieple’s cinematography is impressively scary. The best stuff is arguably the least subtle, like shooting June Diane Raphael as the shark from Jaws. Repeated motifs of a door yawning opening into an obsidian void and the much-scrutinized image of the kids running in the night only gain more potency as the film progresses. I'm also impressed by the production design, envisioning suburban housing as a series of repetitive labyrinths, and giving its bughouse a truly memorable look.
It’s been refreshing to hear Creggar admit in interviews how much of his directorial process is vibes based. I don’t think all of Weapons congeals in a satisfying way, but the fissures allow the film to inhabit an inchoate, messy way of being that tracks as stumbling through life after suffering an unimaginable loss. While not announcing itself as being “about” trauma, Weapons ultimately interests me most as a case study of how people’s individual hang-ups and concerns inform their reactions to a traumatic event. No one’s day-to-day responsibilities stopped just because these kids went missing. As with an actual mass shooting, everyone gets more entrenched in their own ways, convinced they alone have the right way to move forward. This is all the more impressive given how goddamn funny Weapons is. It never feels heavy with its own import, instead offering some entertaining nonsense spiked and seasoned for the present moment. Sometimes you scream for help while being chased through a store and the shop owner just demands you leave. Sometimes a grunt makes the same running leap a dozen times, and the deviation is as scary and silly as the repetition. It’s fucked, but in times like these, sometimes all you can do is laugh.
I still can’t decide whether the swerve into modern folklore fulfills or upends the vast, paranoid canvas of the proceeding hour. Maybe we don’t want to notice how the biggest threats to children come from within the home, and how easy it can be for a community to eat itself if they want to be angry and uncooperative with each other. Especially if they trust the villain who says everything will be fine after this one move, this last action, and then you’ll be free, just don’t ask any real questions or tell anyone why you're acting so different lately. Maybe it’s just pure American wish fulfillment, where an interloper can be blamed for everyone’s problems and disposed of once the town is willing and able to finally notice her. The very ending, where our narrator finally returns with some gut-punching dialogue about what’s happened to the survivors, obliviates any comfort in where these character’s lives will lead to. Folks emerge triumphant, covered in their neighbor’s gore, and there’s no room for the town to restore the way things were before Aunt Gladys came to town.
Speaking of: Aunt Gladys is a fantastic character, and I would never have guessed Amy Madigan would be asked to play her. But good god is she game for the fright makeup and ridiculous, craggly physicality. Madigan’s characteristic flintiness and lack of vanity make her inspired casting for such a performative woman, and she gives real weight to her mask-dropping and omnipotent threats without every losing a sense of predatory wrongness in her gaze. I love that between this and Love Lies Bleeding, she and her hubby Ed Harris got to cement new embodiments of their respective genders at their most monstrous and vampiric. We’re in a hag resurgence, people, and though we should always investigate how biases and prejudices inform what artists use as their shorthands of female trouble in manner, action, appearance, and motivation, I admit I’m just straightforwardly delighted to see Madigan and any other actress go to such exhilarating extremes in a meaty role. But don’t take my word for it - see it yourself!
Weapons is currently playing in theaters in wide distribution.