‘Weapons’ follows through on its challenging premise
The follow-up by ‘Barbarian’ director Zach Cregger is creepy, shocking, inventive, and surprisingly funny.
Weapons is one of those movies that it’s going to be good to know very little going in, so in this review, I will tread very lightly.
It starts with a great hook: One night at 2:17 a.m., in an unnamed suburban town, 17 kids from the same elementary school class all walk out of their homes, and disappear seemingly into nothingness. Weeks later, the town has torn itself apart, with many parents blaming the kids’ teacher (Julia Garner.)
Based on this premise, all of which is established in the first ten minutes, we’re meant to ask certain questions: What happened to the kids? Is it going to have a supernatural or sci-fi element? Whatever happened, what does it have to do with the title Weapons? And will the film deliver a satisfying explanation, and pull together its many threads in a way that works?
I can confidently say the answer to the last question is yes.
The film, which Zach Cregger wrote and directed, is told in a very nontraditional way, both juggling several different tones and telling the story in a nonlinear way, focusing on several different point-of-view characters. This is a very effective method of storytelling, with numerous moments set up in one segment and paying off in another.
The main characters are Garner as the teacher, whose blond curls are so recognizable that I could tell who the actress was the first time she was shown from behind, despite not remembering that she was in the movie.
Josh Brolin plays the father of one of the missing kids, Alden Ehrenreich is a bumbling cop with a tremendous cop mustache, Austin Abrams (the corrupt cop from Hit Man) is a local tweaker, Benedict Wong is the school principal, and Amy Madigan (Kevin Costner’s wife from Field of Dreams) as a role that I couldn’t possibly say anything about without giving way everything.
Cregger broke through three years ago with Barbarian, a horror thriller that also incorporates social commentary. But Cregger had a background in comedy, as co-creator of the sketch group and TV series The Whitest Kids U' Know, which he followed with a few years as a sitcom actor.
So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that a film about something as tragic as missing children ends up being screamingly funny, on top of plenty of tension, jump scares, and gore. (At one point in my screening, the woman sitting behind me declared, “I’m going to vomit,” but thankfully, since I was sitting in front of her, she did not.)
Weapons is going to start some arguments with its ending, but I liked the direction that it went.
I feared at one point that it was about to pivot in one direction, towards some sort of earnest allegory about school shootings, but luckily that was just a red herring.
I can also quibble with some questions of realism, such as a complete lack of news media; in real life, 17 children disappearing without a trace from a suburban neighborhood would be the biggest story in the country, and likely launch a thousand conspiracy theories about an elite child-trafficking cabal. But telling that story would be telling a very different story than this movie is trying to tell.
With Weapons, Zach Cregger shows again that he’s a very promising director, with a strong command of tone, who knows what he’s doing.