Weapons Review
Weapons has been pushed into the marketing world with the simplicity of its premise, I quote the main poster: “Last night. At 2:17am. Every child. From Mrs. Gandy’s class. Woke up. Got out of bed. Went downstairs. Opened the front door. Walked into the dark… And they never came back”.
It’s a smart idea because this mystery can build intrigue to a possible audience but also it’s the large looming idea of Weapons, not even the mystery itself but how 1 event can leave a small community fraught and on their own paths of conspiracy and paranoia that manifests in different ways as it interacts with the personal fabrics of their lives, leading to one of the most unique feeling mainstream horror films in years.
Weapons explores this small town of Eastbrook through fracturing the narrative across the various characters like films such as Magnolia (directly listed by Zach Cregger as an influence), Nashville, Yi Yi and Rashomon and it’s a credit to Cregger’s direction that he is easily able to familarise us with each character not only through an excellent screenplay that zips in important information quickly but also camera blocking and editing that knows how to create a unique rhythm in each section to make sure we’re emotionally resonating with the information about these characters, immediately transporting us to their inner world and their place in the mystery plot.
We speedily learn about Justine Gandy’s (Juila Garner) often clumsy good intentions that leaves her as the face of this crisis as the teacher of the class who disappeared, Archer Graff’s (Josh Brolin) grief riddled depression over the disappearance of his child which leads into an angry obsessive, conspiracy mind and Paul (Alden Eherenrich), a police officer with a distressed relationship with his wife and alcohol.
These characters and many others (which I don’t feel like I have the right to talk about due to how much of this film’s marketing is secretive), bump and interact with emotional differences and entanglements that ever so slightly ramp up the tension, shift the tone and plot of this film, making it easy to get invested into this story even if the plot does cliffhanger, stop and start as it transitions from character to character, the intrigue continues even if it’s taken back to square one sometimes as there’s a new lens to look on old events through.
Due to the structuring of its narrative, Weapons does not operate like traditional horror, often having a focus on procedure and mystery akin to something like David Fincher’s Zodiac. Part of me thinks horror fans might be a bit disappointed because there’s a lot of talking and plot moving without necessarily scaring but it all builds to these thrilling moments where these characters are met with their paranoia and Weapons uses horror to externalise these fears but also comedy as the mundane American suburbia is weaved with the absurd, heightened ideas of genre.
When Weapons shows its final hand, it kettles up and boils with tension as well as tragedy while showing the things that were hidden to us all along, making it more than just exposition and finally explodes with a hilarious and also heartwarming finale as each character’s arc is beautifully concluded. The one thing left hanging is what Weapons necessarily wants to leave us with. The characters of the film are given resolution in many different forms but as an audience member, I am left thinking if it’s supposed to be a deftly painted portrait of a small town’s community. Or a metaphor for the underbelly of evil lurking in suburban America like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet?
Weapons ends a bit too abruptly for me to get a real handle on whatever it is thematically (not that I need films wrapped in a tight bow but I do like my endings to leave me with a thesis) but it is a scary, darkly comic and enthralling ride from start to finish with enough investment in abstraction before it’s slightly flawed ending to allow the film to be worth talking about as soon as you leave the cinema and the days after. I’m excited for the Reddit threads.
★★★★ 1/2
Out in cinemas August 8th / Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, Austin Abrams / Dir: Zach Cregger / New Line Cinema, Warner Bros / 18
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