On the basis of his two solo outings as a writer-director, the filmmaker Zach Cregger has established a bit of a lane to himself in focusing on the somewhat déclassé notion of film primarily as a plot-delivery machine. As modern horror (“elevated” and otherwise) has increasingly become “theme-forward” and something to be parsed for hidden messages or real world analogues as much as it is enjoyed, Cregger’s films — 2022’s Barbarian, a late-pandemic word of mouth sensation, and his eagerly anticipated follow-up Weapons — feel almost willfully out of step with popular trends in that they function almost as the cinematic equivalent of page-turners. Designed primarily to rip the rug out from under the viewer and propel them toward the next fantastical development, the early knock against Weapons — which, like Barbarian, is not only a wholly original story but one that’s unexpectedly captured the public’s imagination — is that it’s not “about anything” and instead serves as a series of interlocking cliffhangers building toward a resolution that is nothing if not definitive. But why the rush to dismiss something that largely aspires to keep audiences on their back foot, unable to anticipate what direction the story might take or where the next bend in the road might lead them? Are there not pleasures to be had in simply being taken for a ride? Is a genuinely scary story confidently told no longer “enough?”
Which isn’t to say the film is thoughtless or without a larger purpose; it’s simply that the “what’s it all means” here is decidedly of secondary concern to “what’s going to happen next?” Weapons begins as a puzzle box, frontloading its attention-grabbing premise in its prologue, which is presented credulously as a true story relayed to us in voiceover narration by a child character we’re never actually introduced to (Cregger has been nothing if not upfront about the extent to which he was influenced by Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling opus of happenstance Magnolia). We are told how only a month earlier in the small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, 17 students from Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) third grade class ran from their homes at precisely 2:17 in the morning — in an acknowledgement of how much we have invited the surveillance state into our lives, we learn that many of the children were captured fleeing on their motion-activated doorbell cameras — running in a straight line, their arms stretched out to the sides as though they were imitating airplanes, before disappearing without a trace. We discover that only one student in the class, young Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), showed up to school the next day, and that neither he nor Justine could offer any sort of explanation for the missing students’ whereabouts or what might have compelled their synchronized behavior, much to the mounting suspicion of the children’s apoplectic parents. And, that after a month-long manhunt has turned up no evidence of the missing kids, life in Maybrook struggles to return to normal with Justine designated a pariah — she’s relieved of her official duties, menaced at her home, and someone in the community even paints “witch” on the side of her car — and parents like Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) barely able to function without answers to make sense of a personal tragedy.
What unfolds from here is novelistic in structure, with Weapons playing out as a series of discrete chapters (each one focusing on one of the film’s six main characters and running approximately 20 minutes in length) that pick up the narrative baton where the preceding one left off, albeit from a somewhat oblique angle. If you recall the edit in Barbarian where we cut from Bill Skarsgård’s character being dragged deeper into a sub-basement by something offscreen to a self-satisfied Justin Long cruising down the PCH, that gives you some idea of how Cregger likes to abruptly shift tones and punctuate scenes with macabre humor while leaving viewers hanging in a state of temporary uncertainty (after only two films it’s possibly too early to label this tendency a crutch, but all the same, the filmmaker may want to consider switching things up with whatever comes next). The film relentlessly builds to a series of mini-climaxes, typically a moment of unexpected violence or a startling revelation that demands further interrogation, only to reset and focus on another member of the sprawling ensemble, on a seemingly different trajectory that will invariably converge with the other characters. There’s something a little perverse about the way the film repeatedly denies any sort of release, splashing proverbial cold water on the viewer by repeatedly shifting perspective or walking us back from the brink precisely just as it’s building a full head of steam. Yet it’s hard to say the approach isn’t ultimately effective, both in moving its many chess pieces around the board and in priming the audience’s curiosity in anticipation of the film’s hellzapoppin’ final act, which draws inspiration from sources as far-ranging as The Shining and Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer.
What stands out about Cregger’s work in Weapons is how preternaturally self-assured the filmmaking is. While not exactly bereft of jump scares or gore — the filmmaker continues to be a big fan of showing skulls being crushed apart by blunt force trauma — the film devotes considerable attention to the sleepy rhythms of small-town life, and the enveloping numbness of living in the aftermath an unimaginable violation. That’s particularly true of Justine and Archer’s stories, which find the characters’ search for some shred of the truth only feeding their existing demons and further ostracizing them from their community and loved ones. Cregger carries himself with the unearned confidence of a far more experienced filmmaker, granting the film the space for what initially appear as extended digressions, only to adroitly pull together all the disparate threads into something that coalesces into a mostly satisfying whole. There’s a logic to the film which is never precisely vocalized, yet the trail of breadcrumbs left for the viewer has a certain sense to it. The film trusts us to intuit what’s happening and why — particularly the “hows and whys” of its supernatural antagonist — and to patiently wait for Cregger to unveil his grand design.
And that patience is mostly rewarded because the film first and foremost is a yarn. Weapons mostly recalls the work of Stephen King, with its casual evocations of the occult, spooky children, and darkened houses at the end of the street that not only coexist with the quotidian, but derive their power from it. The film also plays like an urban legend, passed from generation to generation where the details have been dulled over time but the general thrust of it remains indelible. Answers for what’s been going on are provided, although many of them will be too doggedly literal for some viewers who assumed some grand summation on “how we live now” awaited them. At the same time, Weapons isn’t exactly discouraging an extra-textual reading what with its all too commonplace memorials adorning the outside of a school, terrified parents gathered in an auditorium screaming for accountability, and even a fleeting image of an AR-15 appearing in the clouds during a nightmare sequence — which would run the risk of being lampshading if the moment itself weren’t so knowingly goofy (and then, of course, there is the film’s title). Is the film arguing that a fairytale conception of evil is somehow easier to reconcile than routinely allowing preventable tragedies to happen because we lack the political will to stop them, or is that merely undigested grist; a private joke on the filmmakers’ part meant to make the viewer grasp for meaning where none exists. As the film itself unspools, it scarcely matters which is actually the case.
DIRECTOR: Zach Cregger; CAST: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN THEATERS: August 8; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 8 min.
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