Zach Cregger, writer/director of “Barbarian,” continues his non-linear approach to slowly crescendoing horror with his children gone missing spook-fest “Weapons”. Novelistic in its structure, Cregger’s latest has the confidence of vision that only comes from making one of the most discussed horror films of its particular year and being encouraged by that success to double down on one’s own eccentricities. And double down Cregger does, spinning a story that unravels like a beachside paperback, the kind with one of those lurid hand-painted covers that suggest a sub-reality of untold nightmares and creepy crawlies that come for your toes in the night. Yet, “Weapons” lays out a mystery that feels labyrinthine and sure of itself until it doesn’t, offering more answers than perhaps preferred and making one wish it had left some of its secrets subsumed in the darkness of the audience’s collective dreaming.
“Weapons” is built on a simple, yet unnaturally sticky premise. One night, at 2:17 a.m., each of the children in a specific third-grade class ran out of their homes and into the darkness, never to be seen again. The small town of Maybrook is at a loss for who to blame for this seemingly random, yet implausibly specific, phenomenon. Number one on the culprit list is Justine (Julia Garner), the teacher of this third-grade class. Relatively new to this town and battling back her internal demons with vodka as her flaming sword, Jamie seems as aghast at the loss of her children as anyone; little comfort to parents looking for a scapegoat to spitroast in the public square. One of those parents, Archer (Josh Brolin), is particularly convinced that Justine is hiding something and takes it upon himself to do what the cops won’t: force her to spill what he’s sure she knows.
Story-wise, that’s about as much as can be surmised from trailers; this central conflict interspersed with phantasmagoric imagery of creepy grinning children in classrooms and grown adults stabbing themselves in the face indiscriminately with forks. The film, told through a Jacob’s Ladder of individual cascading perspectives, unfurls novelistically, careening backwards and forwards in time at will, with Cregger playing the sadistic conductor on this trolley train cackling into the depths of Hell. Each character, from the cop who has a history with Jamie to the well-meaning principal of the school, has their own place in the grand design, though each may as well be a blind man describing an elephant for all they can see of the story’s scope. There are monsters in Maybrook, though they’re perhaps not the ones you’d imagine. The audience knows this when the characters do not, which sadly diffuses as much tension as it creates.
At its best, “Weapons” is pulp revelry, giddily spiraling its “elevator pitch” into a creeping pinwheel of blood and supernatural dread that engulfs an entire town into its clutches, consuming and ultimately drowning them in the very same darkness those children ran off into. Cregger is building a modern fairytale by stacking horrific occurrences upon horrific occurrences, building the story from the ground up with the hopes that the conclusion will tie all loose ends together with a pretty bow. Why did the kids run out? No clue. Why are grown adults sprinting across town to kill Justine? No idea. Why is everyone being tormented by the vision of a woman whose face is as white as death and has a clown-red smile that seems larger than it should be? When Cregger finds out, you’ll be the first to know. And while his conclusions are somewhat satisfying, they pale in comparison to the haunting questions posed in the film’s first half. And that is a bit disappointing.
I often think about “The Hateful Eight,” Quentin Tarantino’s nearly abandoned locked room Western/whodunit, when considering my hiccups with this style of moviemaking. Tarantino himself has admitted to not knowing the identity of the killer until midway through the writing, a method which offers a fantastically exciting proposition for the writer, yet often leaves audiences wanting when the story’s conclusion feels roughly shoved together like those cute, yet disturbing, chicken/pig abominations from last year’s “Poor Things.” That’s a long way to go, and a sideways one at that, to explain that the ending of “Weapons” might leave you scratching your previously detached head and retracing your steps only to find the bread crumbs you left behind scattered and useless. That’s not to say the trip to this gingerbread house isn’t worth venturing; there is a witch to find and candy to gorge yourselves on after all. It’s just that even the finest of sweets offers only empty calories, and sometimes eating dessert without dinner leaves one wanting.
Unlike Cregger’s “Barbarian,” which steeps itself overtly in the hell of being a woman in a world of men who could kill you at any moment, “Weapons” only hints at deeper themes and instead satisfies itself with surface-level conflict. There is much narrative gold to mine out of a town scapegoating a teacher for what happened to their children at home. If public school teachers have the voodoo power to turn kids trans by reading them a storybook about kindness, logic holds that they can make them run from their homes in the night like a synchronized sprinting team. Right? Brolin’s panicked father feels warped by a mania that would consume any of us in a similar situation; the same can be said for poor, troubled Justine and the dark past that won’t stop poking at her psyche. A more nuanced film might construct the source of this town-wide madness to be something decidedly more human or perhaps offer no clear answers at all. We like answers; they usually make us feel more comforted in the dark watches of the night. If we can see the shape of the world, there are no shadows for real-world monsters to hide in. Yet, Cregger’s shadows are too often shown to be little more than poor track lighting. The monsters in “Weapons” live in the sunshine and can barely be bothered to hide themselves within the skin suits they wear to co-exist with us.
Though if we’re being honest, that doesn’t sound too far from our reality at all, now does it?
“Weapons” is a movie worth engaging with, so long as you hold true to the expectation that we are operating in fairy tale land. So allow yourself to heed the siren song of the night, slip from your collective beds, and venture out together to be consumed by the darkness.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Weapons” is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
