Weapons: Bold Horror That Shoots Straight

Our childhood is where our mind is the most impressionable our bodies ever allow it to be. When I was young, the horror genre attracted the lowest common denominator of filmmakers, as evidenced by the multitude of horror movie titles in the Dollar-DVD bin at Walmart. I grew to associate the genre with lazy filmmaking and a gore-hungry, easily pleased fanbase that didn't give the people who made movies like this any incentive to get better. Nevertheless, horror movie tickets sell like hotcakes because people like to be scared, and since I grew interested in film, I've been observing a phenomenon. In the last decade, there have been a lot of young and talented filmmakers out there who have combined their fascination with horror films with an expert handling of the craft of filmmaking. Combining terror and integrity has produced an intriguing result.

In the last ten years, the horror genre has been making a massive comeback from the days of endless soft reboots, and I think young lovers of cinema with a soft spot for horror may be a new demographic for the consideration of Hollywood's richest, finest, and fattest. Enter Weapons. I'm a big fan of Zach Cregger's work on Barbarian, the story of an Airbnb from hell, yet I'll shoot you straight: Weapons is an even better movie. In fact, while the movie's tone was perfectly captured by its superb marketing, the trailers underplayed how horrifying it would really be. Weapons is an unholy conflagration of brilliant filmmaking and the iron stomach to be occasionally disgusting, and it works really, really well. Elementary teacher Mrs. Gandy would say otherwise about Maybrook's sense of vigilante justice. You see, at 2:17 in the morning on one fateful day, every child in her class disappeared, leaving behind only eerie doorbell camera videos of them running away from home with arms outstretched as though preparing for takeoff. Now, Maybrook blames her. What they don't know is that something far more sinister is afoot. Neither I nor they were prepared for what followed next.

I admire Zach Cregger's uncanny ability to make the domestic seem so dangerous. First, it was a double-booked Airbnb, and now, he's set his sights on the type of spectacle you'd see on the nightly news. Those delighted by Barbarian will feel right at home here. Weapons is neither a familiar haunted house movie nor foreign enough to feel safe. The crisis it dreams of is not affecting the military or the government. The chaotic school board meeting hastily thrown together to address the disappearances is no council of experts discussing Infinity Stones. Everyone in this movie is either a concerned bystander, a confused victim, a potential perpetrator, or guilty. Weapons is a seemingly familiar movie set in a seemingly familiar place, and the suburban neighborhoods we think of as safe are now anything but. It may not be a perfect pattern, but Cregger finds something of a throughline by creating a startling contrast between Maybrook during the day and Maybrook at night. During the day, the town is familiar and even safe. But at night, the camera angles change. The music changes, too. Maybrook becomes eerie. This is intentional, though exceptions arise as the film's runtime wears on and the situation develops, almost as if the danger posed by whatever or whoever caused these kids to disappear were a dark cancer infecting the light.

Weapons handles both its cast and the story structure they inhabit unusually. It shows us the same crisis in the same timeframe from more than one perspective, an unorthodox technique used extremely intelligently in this case. This is my favorite aspect of this movie, as we're taught to fear and even to loathe a character one moment, and then unceremoniously shoved into their shoes the next and forced to see the world from their perspective. The acting in this movie is absolutely incredible on every front, with Julia Garner being the standout as a woman blamed for a crisis she doesn't understand well enough to explain her innocence convincingly. However, Josh Brolin's performance as a scared father of one of the missing children isn't far behind; his character is somehow both reprehensible and empathetic. Of course, Cregger acknowledges that evil exists in his movie, and he doesn't bother to give the same treatment to many of the more unsavory elements of Weapons. His protagonists remain human, and his antagonists remain horrible, and that second adjective might even be an understatement. This movie stacks layers upon layers on top of itself with each new perspective of the crisis, yet its one flaw is that this technique wears out its welcome. Weapons can become repetitive and even fleetingly monotonous when it loses sight of its bizarre premise, bowing slightly in the middle where it becomes apparent that Cregger briefly runs out of ideas. Nevertheless, this movie shoots as straight as an arrow, piercing the heart of the perceived safety of our American suburbs in ways both terrifying and true. Its aim is immaculate, and its impact is even painful. Let it scare. Let it suspend. Let it hurt. You'll thank me later.

Without a doubt, Weapons is both one of the most unsettling movies I've seen this year and one of the most creative. Its story is told in a very unusual way, so it ends up being almost as eccentric as the premise. This movie is eerie and mysterious - first strange, then sinister - and I can't say I've ever seen a story like the one Zach Cregger dreamed up here. Weapons is extremely methodical, maybe a little too methodical, but what stands out most to me about it is that it feels so much like an invasion, an invasion of everything we think of as normal and safe in suburban America. Many of the filmmaking techniques in this movie are highly unusual, and as more and more unsettling facts come to light, these techniques make more and more sense. This is a strange vision of a strange event, and luckily for us, the cryptic marketing for Weapons does it a lot of favors, concealing or at least disguising most if not all of the major revelations. This movie will surely shock and surprise. Once the meaning of its cryptic title makes sense, it feels as though one were looking at a finished puzzle, a picture of those responsible for this sinister anomaly. Now that we see them, the only question left is what should happen to them?

Weapons - 9/10

John 16:20-22