Barbarian director Zach Cregger’s latest movie playfully obfuscates what is, at heart, a dark fairy tale.
As a child’s voice spookily informs us in the opening moments of Weapons, one quiet night at 2.17am, 17 children from the third grade class taught by teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) rise from their beds, creep from their houses, and run off into the night. Only one student, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), remains.
Suspicion doesn’t naturally fall on Justine, but it’s generally agreed that it’s all a bit odd, and she soon starts getting threatening phone calls and nasty graffiti on her car, driving her back to the bottle and the arms of her married ex, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Meanwhile, local dad and construction boss Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), his own kid one of the missing, starts his own investigation.
With its obscure title and deliberately vague marketing campaign, you could be forgiven for thinking Weapons was the sort of arthouse horror normally pilloried by the sort of people who don’t like arthouse horror: big on mood, light on plot, full of unanswered mysteries and monsters that are manifestations of trauma. It’s not, but it feels like it should be.
Writer and director Zach Cregger, here following up the very well-received Barbarian, tells his story obliquely, deliberately doling out information for maximum effect. He offers us a narrative that isn’t so much non-linear as overlapping, with a selection of viewpoint characters. In addition to Garner’s wonderfully messy teacher and Brolin’s gruff, pragmatic working man, there’s homeless junkie and petty criminal James (Austin Abrams channeling Jason Mewes), who comes sniffing after the reward money for the missing kids; plus Benedict Wong’s hapless school principal, essentially collateral damage, who suffers horribly for no good reason except proximity.
Which is true of everyone here, really. What’s most chilling about Weapons is that all its horrors are largely arbitrary – something awful has come to this little town for its own reasons, and while there is a method to the madness that’s unfolding, there’s also a callous indifference to the pain being inflicted. Amy Madigan’s superbly unsettling Gladys, whose garish visage immediately went viral when the film first dropped, is clearly the villain of the piece from when we first see here lurking ominously at the edges of the story, but how and why takes a little telling.
While there’s a mystery at the heart of Weapons, it’s not one we’re invited to solve as audience members – we simply don’t have the information we need until late in the game. When all the pieces are finally on the table, what’s revealed is deceptively simple and surprisingly old-fashioned. That’s actually somewhat refreshing; Weapons plays by a strict set of rules, and in terms of plot the drive is to figure out what those rules are and how they work. what it really reminds me of is a tabletop RPG scenario, especially when Brolin’s Archer is getting down to brass tacks in his leg of the investigation with surveying tools and zoning maps. I might argue that it’s an example of the gamification of film narrative – not in terms of adaptation, but rather in the way storytelling techniques from the two mediums can cross-pollinate.
Weapons is a great horror film. There are moments of shock and gore that’ll really blow your hair back, and Cregger maintains a sense of creeping dread throughout, but what really impresses is just how clever it is. It’s an ingenious little clockwork marvel of a film.
Weapons is in cinemas and available on VOD now.
