Weapons Review: The Most Twisted Studio Movie of the Year

Zach Cregger’s Weapons does not always feel like a horror movie, and for large stretches it isn’t one. The enigmatic genre piece begins and ends with a mystery: Why would 17 elementary schoolers, all from the same class, wake up  in their disparate childhood bedrooms at 2:17 in the morning and then vanish into the night? The prologue of the film centers on this seemingly senseless riddle with the plaintive awe of a J.M. Barrie story. We see all the kids running from their beds, their parents, and their lives, each galloping into the dark with arms outstretched as if they’re Peter Pan and his Lost Boys flying off to Neverland.

Yet Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian should never be mistaken for a fairy story. It’s sweet, funny, and occasionally a little elegiac, but this thing is also ruthlessly diabolical and as twisted a premise as I’ve seen from any major studio release this year. The movie might rap at the door of the mythological, but far more often it plays like a thriller that could’ve been made in the 2000s or ‘90s about a town touched by something metaphysical and unknown. One can even squint and see that gentler movie about a community grieving the loss of a shared innocence, like the kid who discovers there is rot beneath the veneer of their idyllic home.

The fiendish pleasure of Weapons, then, is in digging beneath the film’s outward, suburban tranquility and learning just how peculiar, how fetid, and how truly dire the rot in Cregger’s imagination is. It is a two-hour magic trick where the curtains around happy, and also quite unhappy, homes get pulled back. We get to peer in, and have the uneasy sensation of knowing something is peering right back.

And perhaps one of the cleverest tricks about Cregger’s screenplay is that he alternates between many domestic facades, beginning chiefly with that of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) and the loneliness she feels. See, Justine is the teacher of the classroom full of kids that abandoned their homes, and with the exception of one particularly quiet boy named Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), she is the first person to realize that all of the town’s missing children came from her class. Neither Alex nor Justine can explain to authorities why this happened, but after a time jump of about a month into the future, Justine is isolated and despised by her community. She’s been stripped of her job—”temporarily,” insists her well-meaning but feckless principal played by Benedict Wong—and her privacy is nonexistant as neighbors and strangers alike watch with scorn. Someone even spray paints “WITCH”  on the side of her car.

While Josh Brolin’s Archer Graff would never stoop to something so cruelly jejune, he is the first to smear Justine at a school PTA meeting with suspicion. Along with 16 other sets of parents, Archer is at his wits’ end at figuring out what happened to his missing child. For a month he’s watched countless times what amounts to a cryptic farewell note: doorbell-camera footage of his son sprinting like Superman into the yard. We get to spend time observing several days in the life from both Archer and Justine’s points-of-view, as well as Wong’s aforementioned Principal Andrew, young Alex and his eccentric Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), and a few others like Justine’s ex, a cop named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich giving a soiled self-loathing to his typical affability). The more we see of each siloed, and sometimes opaque narrative thread, the more clearly the film’s puzzle box structure comes into view. As do its hideously sharp edges.

Like Barbarian, Cregger’s second genre feature is a tonal mashup that tinkers with style and structure. Both movies are told via nonlinear narratives, and while I’m not sure which is ultimately more satisfying, Weapons is by far the more confident and complex. Deliberately pulling influence from filmmakers like Tarantino and Villeneuve, Weapons develops a patient, slow-boiling cadence with a novelistic approach to its characters, as well as how their narratives vividly, and sometimes violently, intersect.

Cregger’s screenplay and direction is so sure that it has enough payoff to its mystery that it becomes more than happy to bide its time, occasionally dipping into the humor that defined Cregger’s previous career in comedy. Unlike Barbarian though, Weapons reserves most of its laughs for the dark gallows variety, intriguingly closer toward the end too as the full malevolence of the film comes into clarity.

It is that malevolence of the piece that ultimately makes Weapons such a sharp piece of work. There are again considerations to be made about the film’s portrait of American suburbia, and a community in crisis, but Weapons feels less like a “message” movie (or “elevated” in the modern parlance) than it is an exceptionally good thriller that tips into eerie and perverse.

It is also mostly through inference and obscured menace that Weapons becomes so unsettling. Cregger’s eventual use of “jump scares” throughout is both thankfully minimal and strangely flat. Similarly the film’s studio origins are most visible in the back half when the story develops the sudden need to minutely and painstakingly explain nearly every aspect of its final revelations. It was already far more insidious moments earlier, however, as the mind was previously left to slowly fill in the blanks.

Yet along these same lines is also the ultimately grim satisfaction to be found in Weapons. Here is a puzzle box where the mind is able to piece together the larger picture just as the main characters do—or perhaps a little beforehand. Uniformly excellent performances and measured character work, including by a welcome and memorable return by Madigan, also gives those puzzle pieces incredibly sharp teeth.

There is some heavy-handed, late-in-the-day exposition, but it does not really weaken the film’s fascinatingly odd pairing of warmth malice; it might even enhance these bedfellows since Weapons crescendos into a final movement of nigh mythic grandeur. This is better than a “twist movie.” Like a well-told storybook fable, learning the various characters’ fates and destinies takes on a life of its own—one filled with wonder and horror.

Weapons opens on Friday, Aug. 8.