Weapons Review: A Haunting Descent into Community Chaos
Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic
One of the surprise horror gems of the last few years is Barbarian, a bait-and-switch horror film that layers its storytelling through the nonlinear POV of a couple of characters. Director Zach Cregger’s follow-up is also a nonlinear story told from the perspective of several characters, with each character's perspective peeling back the curtain a little bit more to reveal what is going on.
In a small Pennsylvania town, the community is rocked by the sudden disappearance of nearly an entire class of third-grade students. All but one student, Alex (Cary Christopher), got out of bed at 2:17 AM and ran out their front door with their arms out like they were pretending to be airplanes. Everyone is questioned, and no answers are forthcoming, leading to a boiling pot of fear, anger, and uncertainty that threatens to tear the community apart, with the main characters representing various aspects of the community.
At school, the class teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), is devastated because she doesn’t have answers for the parents who are looking for a reason this has happened. The town's scrutiny exacerbates her vices, drinking and hooking up with her ex. She also butts heads with the principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), who is trying to plug the holes in the dam while protecting his students and his teacher.
The parents are represented through Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a father who coached his son's Little League baseball team and sleeps every night in his son’s bed, unable to move on and looking for someone to direct his impotent rage toward. His construction company suffers from his lack of focus and attention to detail.
Embodying the police response is troubled officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), trying hard to walk a sober path as a recovering alcoholic and impress his boss, while feeling the pressure of dead end after dead end with the case shining poorly on the local authorities.
The pressure on the police and investigators leads to a marginalized homeless drug addict named James (Austin Abrams), being on the receiving end of some brutality and suspicion, and his scrounging around for money to get his next score leads him unwittingly into some dangerous places.
The film does a masterful job of weaving its threads together; each POV section has moments hinting at more being revealed later. When Justine goes to a liquor store, she clocks a truck she thinks might be following her. In the same scene, another character asks her for money to buy a bus ticket home. Later, she meets another character in a bar who brushes off questions about a heavily bandaged finger. When one person suddenly attacks someone, which is entirely out of character for them, we learn later what caused this peculiar and threatening uncharacteristic behavior. It’s a satisfying story that should reward multiple viewings.
The police's lack of answers led a few characters to do some sleuthing of their own and eventually work together in search of answers. Justine, who is facing intense scrutiny from the parents in the community, desperately wants to talk one-on-one with Alex, the lone kid in her class who didn’t disappear, but she is rebuffed by Principal Miller, who is trying to shield her from herself.
The film does a fantastic job of creating tension, suspense, and fear. In one scene, a character scopes out a house and falls asleep in their vehicle. Previously, we have seen this house from a distance, with the front door opened and closed by someone unseen in the house. This time, the door opens and stays open for an uncomfortable amount of time, and then someone walks out of it, almost as if in a trance, with something in their hands that could be dangerous to the sleeping character. Simple but effective, preying on the vulnerability that any person has while sleeping.
Even how the children run off in the middle of the night is unnerving. They run out their front doors, arms out from their sides, like they are being summoned. This is captured by various door cams in the community.
The fear of the unknown and the parental fear of having a missing child leads to some interesting commentary about how, when faced with the unknown, people will often resort to finding a scapegoat, finding someone to blame, because they need the resolution. Early on, Justine is accused of knowing more than she is saying, or of even orchestrating the whole thing, and her car is even vandalized.
It could be that this is another film that has some social commentary on, say, Covid and our lack as a society in being able to band together when faced with the worst possible circumstances. Still, I think it's been insightful on a larger scale about the human condition for a long time. When circumstances beyond our control rear their ugly head and the worst happens in an unexplained way, we lash out and circle the wagons, so to speak. And circling the wagons almost invariably means that some people will be outside that circle.
As a horror movie, what is happening in this Pennsylvania town is nothing the townsfolk could have prepared for or figured out as a reasonable or rational explanation. The opening of the film features a child’s voiceover explaining that these events happened. A lot of people died in weird ways, but the police and the town covered everything up out of embarrassment. The movie delivers on the expectations laid out in the opening voiceover.
Some moments of levity help cut the tension of the movie and provide some relief for the audience. Surprisingly, the movie's ending elicited quite a few laughs from the audience I saw it with; I even found myself chuckling at the ending. These are not the kind of laughs that undercut a movie, but ones that felt intentional and earned.
The movie provides some hints as to what is going on. In particular, there is a clue in a misguided accusation against one character, one in a school lesson that Justine is teaching about in a flashback, and one in the subject of a documentary playing on TV right before two characters have their Saturday lunch interrupted by a doorbell.
Based on the previews, Weapons looked like an intriguing premise. Given the quality of Barbarian, I was looking forward to Zach Cregger’s follow-up.
This did not disappoint.
Weapons is unnerving and atmospherically creepy. To paraphrase Leonardo DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie, Zach Cregger, you had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
