Weapons

4/5

Sometimes, you know immediately with a film that you are in for one hell of a ride. Watching as a group of children, rendered faceless by shadow, run from their homes with their arms outstretched as George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” plays, qualifies as one of these moments.

This occurs within the first five minutes of Zach Cregger’s Weapons, his sophomore film that released this month. Generally speaking, this film is about how a classroom of children – save for one – up and leave their homes in dead of night for no apparent reason. This class was taught by Justine Gandry (Julia Garner), who swiftly becomes the centre of suspicion in their disappearance. Surrounding her drama are an angry father desperate for answers as to what happened to his son (Josh Brolin), a cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a homeless man (Austin Abrams) and, of course, the one child who didn’t run that night (Cary Christopher).

I have never seen Barbarian, so I am not going to compare this film to Cregger’s debut in any sense. However based on this film alone I can safely say that Cregger is an adept and frequently interesting director. Weapons is, overall, beautifully shot. The composition is fantastic throughout (Cregger has earned a spot in “directors allowed to use a Dutch tilt), and many of the scares are accomplished through clever blocking and a simple camera pan.

Some of said scares might leave something to be desired (the pacing of the modern jumpscare is so predictable that there was at least one moment where I timed the jump almost dead on) but for every rote jumpscare there are three pieces of genuinely chilling imagery. The children running into dead of night with their arms out like that may have been pretty heavily advertised, but that didn’t subtract from the “nope” factor of seeing it in context. The sound design prioritises silence in key sequences, leaving the viewer alone to hold their breath waiting for what might come next (you could hear a pin drop in the IMAX screening I attended). The spectacularly gruesome violence is deeply effective on the rare occasions it’s used, particularly in the finale.

However, some of the most uncomfortable moments are the most truly human ones. Justine spends much of the film in a self destructive spiral brought on by her grief, as she desperately tries to reason with what happened to her classroom. While in most films one might be shouting at the screen “get out!” as the monster sneaks up behind our intrepid final girl, in this case I wanted to shout at Justine to get out as she takes her emotions out on the people close to her or crosses professional boundaries seeking absolution from Alex, the last boy in her class. It’s a beautifully human take on horror, the horror of coping poorly with tragedy.

This might sound like it makes for a grim and bleak film. In places, it is. It is also sometimes wickedly funny. Cregger’s previous claim to fame before directing was in the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U Know, who produced a show filled with bizarre characters and pitch dark humour. This sense of humour is well on display throughout the film – Alex’s aunt Gladys is meant to be in equal servings unnerving and funny, and a violent confrontation in the finale almost serves as a punchline to the film. But Cregger also finds humour in small human moments. After waking from a nightmare, Archer swears in confusion and horror. While being pursued by an assailant Justine shouts “help me!” at a cashier – not in panic, but in irritation that he’s just watching it happen. These are deeply funny moments, but they never break the immersion of the film because they feel totally real.

On its own this might make for a compelling film, but Weapons pushes further. I’ve seen some accuse this film of being “style over substance”, and not really saying anything. I don’t find this to be the case; I simply believe that the film is approaching its themes from a slightly different direction than expected.

The film proceeds non-linearly, presenting each character’s troubles through chapters marked by their names. Justine’s story plays out across the first chapter, following her as she spirals from the grief of losing her class and tries to make it better for herself. But after that the film wanders through the lives of others, presenting dramas from their lives as they reel from this tragedy. This nonlinear structure has been compared to Magnolia by many (including Cregger), and at first seems a neat way of controlling what the audience knows about the central mystery and when. It definitely does fulfil this purpose – the boy Alex’s chapter is reserved for last, which leads straight into the climax.

More importantly however, it gives us time to breathe with each character, and explore the point of the movie. At first the film follows the topic of grief through Justine’s and the father Archer’s chapters. The former is desperate to clear her name as a witch and absolve herself of crushing survivor’s guilt – “we’re the only ones left,” she says to the principal while begging to speak to the last child in her class. The latter transforms his grief into anger, blaming Justine for his son’s disappearance because he needs someone to blame. These chapters are particularly raw – Cregger said that the film was inspired by the grief of losing his friend and collaborator Trevor Moore, and it fuels these initial chapters. It is worth noting that this grief is largely unresolved by the end of the film. There is no great catharsis, no feel good moment tying it all up. The characters still have to struggle to deal with what happened and process it, reflecting Cregger's continuing struggle to process the death of his friend.

As the film moves onto other chapters however, the scope widens. The focus of the cop Paul’s chapter is police brutality. The homeless man James’s, homelessness and addiction. These might seem somewhat unrelated to the central topic of the disappearance, but together with the main premise (a reminder, that being a class full of children suddenly being gone and the horror that entails), a through line forms. The film appears to be a portrait of America, a country that is crumbling under the weight of violent police officers, the persistent failure of the less advantaged and, of course, the unavoidable connection between an empty class of children and school shootings (this last connection is almost spelled out to us, as in a dream sequence Archer sees a massive assault rifle loom over his house seconds after his son ran into it). Without revealing specifics, the final thrust of the movie portrays the force that took these children as old and sick, requiring the lives of these children to sustain itself.

And that, to vanquish this force, its own weapons must be turned against it. Brutally.