Weapons

 

This review may contain spoilers!

Weapons is a horror film in which 17 children run out of their houses at 2:17am one night and disappear, leaving behind only one student and their teacher from that class. The town is divided over who the culprit is, while many circulate closer and closer to the darkness at the centre of this mystery.

I really admired just how creative and original Zach Cregger is with the script for Weapons. It has lots of elements and points of inspiration from other works, but it remains remarkably its own thing. This film tells a multi-layered POV story, delivering us tidbits of everything from the eyes of different characters. I loved being across this small American town, wondering where the clues that would provide some answers were going to emerge. I also liked that as the film drew us deeper down the line of perspectives, we got a greater sense of how depraved this little town can be. The teacher who lost her students has been demonised; she's an alcoholic, and she wants her students to be found. The Dad missing his son is preying on the most likely suspect, the police officer tries to cover up an assault, and the homeless man discovers some of the more surprising elements. This is a film that just invites you further in and will have fun keeping you guessing. I loved how the opening two acts are a boiling pot of tension, fright, and mystery that makes you guess at the answer to the disappearance of the children. When you understand the backstory to the missing children, there are some serious dark elements there. Unravelling the evil behind the disappearance and what steps were taken for the children to disappear is unnerving and unlike your typical horror antagonist plot. I love this film so much because it has dynamic characters, a town that feels lived in, and it managed to be a horror that wasn't afraid to be comedic or thrilling.

I really enjoyed Zach Cregger's pallid style; there's this washed-out grey that sets our landscape as a tragic, morose place. I think it must be difficult to capture horror in a manner that feels fresh, but there are entire sequences that just surprised me so much in their ingenuity. The editing set a very consistent pace, hitting key story beats and moving the tension of a scene along quite well. The score wasn't certainly eerie, and the soundtrack was a neat blend of tracks, with the opening use of 'Beware of Darkness' by George Harrison a surprising and effective moment.

Scarlett Sher, who voiced the Narrator, is an eerie start and end to this feature; she has this chilling quality that comes both from her age and her delivery. Cary Christopher, who played Alex, is incredibly versatile for his young age; Christopher is as much of a leading presence in this film as his adult co-stars. Josh Brolin, who played Archer, really has a protagonist with a serious, mean edge; Brolin is marred by grief and a drive to fix the wrongs that have been visited upon his family. Benedict Wong, who played Marcus, is such a genuinely kind role; I really think the work Wong put into making Marcus such a reasonable, good character makes his fate all the more tragic. Austin Abrams, who played James, is such a wildly comedic and entertaining standout role; Abrams is an almost manic, irrational character who gets into some absurdly scary and funny scenarios. Alden Ehrenreich, who played Paul, is a character with paper-thin resilience; Ehrenreich's police officer is entirely insecure and prone to destructive behaviour. Amy Madigan, who played Gladys, breathes some real menace into a rather erratic character; it is clear Madigan is one of the performers having the most fun with the script. Toby Huss, who played Captain Ed, was a quietly entertaining character performance; Huss navigated scenes with deference and good humour alike.

However, the best performance came from Julia Garner, who played Justine. This character is openly quite compassionate and displays a real sense of care for the children she teaches. I enjoyed seeing how combative she was, and how the town turning against her hadn't completely decimated her resolve. She is fiery and unwilling to be beaten around by more domineering figures. Garner also made sure that Justine was inquisitive, a curious individual who often let her curiosity be her own undoing. I enjoyed that this character was morally grey as well, prone to alcohol and bad choices of bedfellows. This is one of my very favourite roles from Garner so far; she really leads this feature brilliantly.

This is such a standout film due to its complete creative outlook; it really shoots for the moon and has fun with that. However, Weapons also doesn't make sense in a few places. It leaves a lot of questions open-ended, and not in a particularly well-reasoned way. This could range from something small like the cloudy assault rifle in Archer's dream sequence, right through to how the police weren't able to identify what seemed a very obvious antagonist in the first place. Weapons has a lot of plot holes; it doesn't suffer egregiously from them, but it does leave you feeling like sections of this were incomplete or needed more development. I also found the antagonist, Gladys, to be well-performed but not very well-written when she's in a scene that doesn't involve Alex. Her character really oversells herself to a point that it feels quite cartoonish. Gladys has some menace to her, but those moments where she dons the wig and becomes this wildly eccentric woman about town really fail to make me enjoy her as a horror antagonist.

Whitmer Thomas and Callie Schuterra, who played Alex's Dad and Alex's Mom respectively, never get developed enough to be interesting parental figures; these two are here to be props to the horror more than anything.

Weapons is that kind of original, bonkers horror film that is making going to the cinema a real point of excitement right now. I would give Weapons a 7.5/10.