Film Review: Weapons
At 2:17am one morning, seventeen children – all from the same third-grade class – get out of bed, open their front doors, and run out into the night with their arms outstretched. A month later, no one’s sure what happened, or where the children went, or why one child in the class, Alex, didn’t disappear too. As the folks left behind seek answers, it becomes clear that there’s something dark and nefarious happening in the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania.
Weapons is a horror film that deals with some extremely dark and heavy subjects: a loss of innocence, an entire town’s grief, that awful feeling of having lost control of your life. But in director Zach Cregger’s hands, Weapons feels far less bleak than you might think. In fact, it’s riotously entertaining, provoking as many laughs as it did gasps from my audience. Cregger’s previous film, Barbarian, did something similar, building on real social trends and complicated gender politics with some gnarlier horror elements to craft a film that was simultaneously complex in its ideas and straightforward in its execution. Weapons, while not quite as wild as that film, ultimately gives its viewers more to chew on.
The film is split into segments, each focused on a different character. Justine (Julia Garner), the teacher of the disappeared class, is drinking heavily and restarting an affair with cop Paul (Aiden Ehrenreich), whose own life is spiraling in a few different directions. Archer (Josh Brolin), whose son is one of the disappeared children, grows conspiratorial, certain that Justine is involved in the disappearance. Meanwhile Alex (Cary Christopher), the one child from that class who did not disappear that night, faces his own demons, as does James (Austin Abrams), a drug addict who quickly finds himself in over his head when he stumbles upon a significant detail the police have overlooked.
The throughline of the whole movie is that haunting image of children running into the dark, arms outstretched, driven by an unknown force, and the chaos that inevitably erupts in the wake of something so strange and inexplicable. The film actually provides far more answers than you might expect, untangling its mystery in a satisfying manner, but it’s clear from the get-go that there can be no truly clean resolutions. Weapons is haunting without being oppressive.
In the days since its release, I’ve seen a question asked again and again about Weapons: what, exactly, is it about? Is there a central allegory that explains and unlocks the film? Perhaps Cregger’s greatest strength, as both the film’s writer and director, is that Weapons really does explain itself quite thoroughly before the credits roll – but the deeper sense of what we should take from it is left entirely up to the individual viewer. There are ways of “reading” Weapons, and they’re satisfying, but Cregger understands that our connections to horror films are personal. The film shows the many ways grief can be weaponised for an agenda, but the grief it evokes will hit differently for each person watching, depending on their own lives and circumstances.
It’s worth reiterating that for all of this dourness, Weapons is really fun. It tempers its horror with great sight gags, well-written, funny characters, and shocks that carry just enough camp value to cut through the inherent sadness of a movie about children disappearing. Cregger balances tones extremely well here so the laughs never feel inappropriate – it might be touching upon some serious issues, but this is still a horror movie, and tension needs release.
For all of its stylistic flourishes, Weapons largely avoids the trappings of the so-called “elevated horror” subgenre in favour of a good old fashioned grisly fun. This is the power of good horror – it can make us look at our deepest fears, as individuals and members of a society, and face them with a degree of courage and levity. Between this and Barbarian, Zach Cregger has emerged as one of the most interesting horror directors currently working.
Weapons is in cinemas now.
James O’Connor has been writing about pop culture and games since 2008. He is the author of Untitled Goose Game for Boss Fight Books.
