Score: 5 / 5
I wasn't ready for Weapons. And neither are you.
Suggesting more than it shows, letting its audience connect its dots, and enjoying its own peripatetic dynamism perhaps too much, Weapons respects itself and its audience and encourages associative cognition. Zach Cregger, perhaps the latest auteur (though we might be using that word a bit liberally these days) in our new wave of horror, has established himself as a writer/director who capitalizes on a thrilling premise and then runs hog-wild with it. With this much larger, in scope, title, Cregger establishes himself as a committed storyteller, one whose final product is considerably more than the sum of its parts.
If you're at all interested in seeing this film and haven't yet, please do yourself a favor and watch it without reading anything about it. To discuss Weapons is to reveal its manifold secrets. You've been warned.
Its central conceit, widely publicized in the film's marketing campaign to the point of being obnoxiously written out on its posters, is that, in a small Pennsylvania town one night, seventeen children from the same third-grade class vanished. The upsetting premise feels all the more poignant as school shootings continue to occur with increased frequency and deadliness; the parallels are pretty clear here, though it's only directly referenced once in a dream that hits it quite bizarrely on the nose. But there's more to this than simple allegory. The film's lackadaisical, almost whimsical tone is struck early, as we watch the children running out their front doors at 2:17am, arms spread as if they're pretending to be airplanes, seemingly blissfully in step with a '70s soft rock song (George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness," the internet tells me). Wistful, even sentimental, this opening sequence feels comfortably chilling, perhaps the very definition of uncanny.
This sweet, slow, subtly sickly aspect of the film -- which lasts for most of its runtime -- draws from a deep well of rural and suburban legends. Evoking the likes of The Virgin Suicides, Magnolia, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and even perhaps We Need to Talk About Kevin, we shift from perspective to perspective of various townsfolk in the wake of their shared tragedy as they attempt to ask (or avoid) questions, point fingers, and make sense of the unthinkable. Films made these days in such rigid episodic structures and nonlinear patterns do raise the question, for me, of whether they were written to be a miniseries, but in this case, I'm glad it was reduced to its two-hour runtime for the sake of cohesion and coherency. The chapters unfold in emotional chunks, sometimes overlapping narratively with an even we've already seen from a different angle; these particular overlaps are often of extremely frightening and violent moments, which serve as jarring ends-of-chapter jolts that, in my screening, had more people saying "wait, what?" than gasping, screaming, or laughing. And that seemed intentional.
To that point, I would like to add that each chapter is presented from the perspective of a particular character, and so Weapons works as an ensemble piece. Arguably the most important character to each part is Justine Gandy, the teacher of the missing students, who becomes a primary suspect of the inciting incident. Julia Garner plays her with profound depth, attempting to navigate her own grief through a gauntlet of weaponized hatred from her neighbors. But Gandy is a distinctly opaque character, one about as far from a Mary Sue as you can get while still being, if not wholly likable, at least sympathetic. She doesn't explain herself, and often holds others to an unspoken standard of judgment they invariably receive. She has a drinking problem, one she's clearly grown with before the inciting incident, and she has a weird vibe with her ex, local cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, doing his usual excellent work here with a character who could easily have been really gross). So it makes sense that she becomes the subject of a literal witch-hunt in her town: she's a single young professional who sins, makes no apologies, and doesn't bend over backwards to play nice with anyone but her students.
It's not long into the film that its tone shifts from the vibe of the films I've already mentioned; Cregger clearly knows and loves his cinema with all the references and nods he proudly waves while guiding us through his nightmares. Visually, the film looks like early Denis Villeneuve (Enemy, Prisoners) in its cold, clammy color palette and its vaguely gritty and damp set dressing; this is the decay of small town Americana, the film seems to be saying, and it's only going to get worse. The competing narratives and air of paranoia that pervade the film might be best described as a cold pressure-cooker, getting ready to freeze your marrow as people's frigid cruelties steadily mount. Secrets hidden behind white picket fence facades will out, and so will the lurking evil, older and more sinister than you would have imagined.
I had no idea where this film was going, though in retrospect, what I thought were red herrings were actually pretty solid hints as to the ultimate reveal. There is indeed a witch in town, but it's not Miss Gandy. Alex, the lone boy remaining in her class, has been helping a witch masquerading as his elderly Aunt Gladys. Gladys (played by an astonishingly delicious Amy Madigan) has tricked her way into Alex's house, bewitching and torturing his parents to convince the boy to help her abduct the town children. So the film, for all its thematic suggestiveness, is really just a sophisticated monster movie, featuring what may be the most maligned and inconsistently deployed monster in the genre, the witch. Presumably, she consumes their life force to sustain herself, much like the Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus, and please don't think me sacrilegious for the reference, but it is pretty squarely part of both the conversation and the convention at this point. And, while and I don't love the ageism and misogyny in his elaboration and grotesque exaggeration of this choice (especially after Barbarian featured a singularly monstrous "Mother" character, one has to wonder why Cregger is so hell-bent on vicious, violent older women as his vehicles of horror), there is something wickedly satisfying about the rhetoric of witch-hunts and public paranoia leading to increased socioreligious conservatism and inaction and violence being so literalized here. Weaponized, even.
Much as the townspeople fear, things will indeed pop out and scare them, probably even hurt them, in their vulnerable state. And so we, the audience, are similarly targeted by the film's firm grip on our anxieties. What could jump out of that shadowy door in the dark haunted house? Well, if your deepest fear said "your bloodied, wild-eyed neighbor/principal/officer/parent," you'd be right. I've always said that, in horror, what bothers me the most isn't what I can't see or touch, nor is it those supernatural things I won't encounter in this lifetime, but rather the person, known or not, lying in wait with the crazed sole intention of harming me and without regard for consequences. That's fucking terrifying. And that's what this movie delivers. By the end of its climactic sequence, I was shaking and weeping with sensations I haven't felt in a cinema in years, not the least of which was a bleak sense of relief that it was done.
That won't be everyone's level of engagement or appreciation, and it doesn't have to be. But Weapons is one I'll be eager to revisit soon. Come for the great ensemble cast -- I haven't even mentioned! Josh Brolin, Austin Abrams, and Benedict Wong all get POV chapters -- or come for the batshit crazy scary moments peppered in (there are shots that felt like Romero's The Crazies and others like Carpenter's Halloween) or come for the richly complex mystery linking it all, and stay for the sheer pleasure of original storytelling by a capable and inspired artist.
