Review: WEAPONS

 by Rob DiCristino

In which Zach Cregger cashes his blank check.

“It’s not what a movie is about,” Roger Ebert taught us. “It’s how it is about it.” Well, Zach Cregger’s Weapons is ostensibly about a case of missing children. Seventeen missing children, to be precise, all of whom left home of their own volition at exactly 2:17 AM on an unassuming weeknight and never returned. They all lived in the same neighborhood, all were members of Justine’s (Julia Garner) grade school class, and all seemed to have perfectly normal home lives. Enraged parents like Archer (Josh Brolin) rally against Justine — whose checkered history of pushing student/teacher boundaries makes her an easy scapegoat — forcing Principal Andrew (Benedict Wong) to send her on an involuntary vacation. Meanwhile, Officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), an old flame of Justine’s who’s just blown it with his fiancée (June Diane Raphael), takes his frustration out on local recitivist Anthony (Austin Abrams). Oh, and then there’s Alex (Cary Christopher), the one kid in Justine’s class who didn’t disappear that night.

That’s the “what,” but it’s the “how” that makes Weapons one of the most exciting films of the year so far, the payoff of a promise made by Cregger’s 2022 genre-bending sleeper hit, Barbarian. Anchored by a simple horror premise without ever being hindered by it, Weapons slowly reveals itself as a story about the way we deal with — or, in most cases, don’t deal with — the mistakes we’ve made in our lives and the character flaws that keep us making them over and over again. Cregger does eventually explain all these supernatural goings-on, of course, but over a handful of non-linear, criss-crossing chapters — each devoted to one of the people listed above — his film keeps us so invested in their interpersonal drama that we forget about the mystery that brought them together until, with almost irresponsible glee, Weapons explodes into an orgy of spellbinding violence. It’s an approach that would make the residents of Twin Peaks proud, a testament to Cregger’s knack for blending tones without letting the plates spin out of control.

For Weapons, that balance is everything. Take Justine, for example: We open with a good-natured and dedicated teacher whose worst indiscretions seem to be hugging her crying students too tightly and giving them rides home when the bus leaves them behind. Even as we understand her principal’s objections — Hey, teachers, don’t ever let a student get in your car — we can still appreciate Justine’s Only Sane Man position as the town gets its witch hunt against her rolling in earnest. They just need something to do with their anger, we think, but the more time we spend with Justine as she ignores Alex’s need for personal space, feeds her addictive tendencies, and flat-out fails to practice good horror movie sense, the more founded Archer’s crusade against her starts to feel. He’s mired in self-torture of his own, as his son’s disappearance has effectively ended his marriage and forced him to stew in every loving word he left unsaid. Somehow, though, he and Justine will have to find common ground if they hope to figure this out.

For the audience, figuring it out is both relatively easy — one late-arrival character practically comes with a flashing neon sign that says “I did it!” — and largely beside the point. As in Barbarian, Cregger knows that the juice is in the seduction; he wants to give his characters enough rope to hang themselves with and then take his time setting out the lawn chairs and popping the popcorn so we can all enjoy it when it finally happens. Whereas similar, shoddier exercises like Strange Darling focus so much on subverting expectations that they neuter any potential for engrossing drama, Weapons never forgets its audience’s need to empathize with characters who are conflicted, characters who know their darkest truths but are too afraid to speak them aloud. Like the film around them — the exact blend of horror and comedy you’d expect from one of the founders of The Whitest Kids U’ Know — each character is a mix of virtue and vice, flavors that don’t seem to mesh until the climax smashes them together at the highest possible speeds.

Citing Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia as a major influence on his screenplay, Cregger, too, makes terrific use of a talented ensemble. Blink and you’ll miss how fast Alden Ehrenreich shifts Paul from principled good guy to pathetic goon — perhaps the film’s best example of perception shaping characterization — or how a subtle shift in camera angle turns Julia Garner’s Justine from dignified schoolmarm to bedroom-eyed lush. It’s nuanced stuff for a film that is also this darkly hilarious — Brolin has a “What the fuck?” moment that almost broke my audience — and this balls-to-the-wall violent (How violent? Our press kits came with branded vegetable peelers. You do the math). In a crowded field of would-be horror auteurs reaching for a throne left empty by studio fuckery and audience indifference, Weapons proves Zach Cregger to be the genuine article, a filmmaker who’s craftsman enough to build a memorable world and psychopath enough to point and laugh as he burns every inch of it to the ground.

Weapons hits U.S. theaters today.