A very effective horror thriller. With some concessions.
When an entire classroom of children disappear one night, all blame is focussed onto their teacher, Justine.
Director Zach Cregger wow’ed critics with Barbarian in 2022, and has returned with the mysteriously titled Weapons. Starring Julia Garner (recently performed in The Wolf Man) and Josh Brolin (Dune), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Benedict Wong (multiple Marvel movies). This new film is a compelling horror movie with good performances, revelations, and only some contrivances to keep it afloat.
There’s going to be a lot of expensive therapy for these characters.
The film is structured into chapters, each one following the perspective of a particular character. Obviously, after a haunting opening narration, we follow Justine (Garner). A young teacher who is mystified that her entire class bar one child is missing. To make matters worse, home security cameras display each missing child having run away from home at exactly 2.17am the previous night. Parents like Archer (Brolin) are angry and confused and demand answers. The police remain bewildered as investigations lead nowhere, especially not towards implicating Justine. But if not her, then what happened?
Having not seen Barbarian (at time of writing) I felt it necessary to see Weapons. As engimatic as the title is, I had to see what the fuss was over Zach Cregger. Certainly, it is apparent now why critics are interested in him. Weapons is a tight thriller with heavy horror elements. Set within a small American society, the story starts extremely strong with our protagonist’s total ostracization and demonizing by those around her. Garner was good in Wolf Man, but here she delivers a similar role but with the material and direction to back her up. An effective isolation of the lead character.
The subsequent chapters add perspective to the story as it unfolds. Events before, during, and after Justine’s chapter are shown with increasing volatility and spooks. The visual language implemented is very effective in keeping the audience steady on time and place. No need for title cards telling us locations! Justine might vaguely see two people walking down the street and avoid them. In a later chapter, we might see another character observing those two people from another vantage point.
The scares are effective. Perhaps not as bloody as say, Bring her Back, but the theming and pacing here is very provocative. I’ve never seen a door simply opening be this threatening before. Parents will certainly react strongly to the themes here. There is something oddly relatable even to the imagery of a child, not picked up at school, making their own long way home.
For all of its intensity, it does know when to be a bit silly. More, it is self-aware to let the audience chuckle from time to time. Which is welcome; it prevents the film from becoming completely harrowing.
For any drawbacks, they might simply be concessions the story makes to keep things interesting. Without spoiling anything, which would be extremely easy to do for this movie. The local police department seem pretty… dumb? They don’t seem to think of the first thing to do in this situation? But then you could chalk this up to them being a smaller police force unaccustomed to this sort of thing? Also the aforementioned use of home security, which is heavily used in the film as it shows the family’s last sights of their child, is a doubled-edged sword narratively. Surely if one camera saw it happen, other cameras would see more?
But I was thoroughly invested in Weapons, and it has a very smooth gradient of escalation. It benefits from its chapter structure to keep things compelling, while not being overly complex as to lose audiences.
