“Caught in an impossible trap” – Review: Weapons
Director Zach Cregger surprised the world when he emerged from a career in a comedy troupe to direct an indie horror called Barbarian. That film took the horror scene by storm with its unexpected blend of horror and comedy and willingness to lean fully into the humor of horror scenes and vice versa. It was not the only recent horror-comedy by any means, but the particular stylings of Cregger revealed a definitive cinematic voice.
His sophomore effort has catapulted from the groundswell of enthusiasm around Barbarian and reached mainstream success. With a bigger cast, bigger budget, and strong marketing campaign, Weapons has become a sensation in its own right, garnering near universal acclaim. It’s the type of movie that creates expectations that seem set up for backlash.
On a technical level, Weapons surpasses Barbarian and shows Cregger to be a consummate filmmaker when it comes to editing and cinematography and mastering the tone of his scenes.
Demonstrating the influence of Paul Thomas Anderson, there are a number of excellent shots and camera movements that create the desired mood of a scene. Wide-angled lenses in confined dark hallways help create quite an uneasy feeling. Slow, steady pans generate tension that is released in unnerving moments — not fully jump scares, but ones that shock us with disorienting imagery such as a reoccurring motif of clown makeup. In other words, jump scares as they were meant to be.
This movie has some of the funnier moments of Cregger’s nascent filmography. At a certain point, a crackhead character takes over the narrative and has a scene where he is robbing a home. Playing on the trope of the haunted house and yet throwing in a drug addict desperate to steal anything is a smart subversion of the scene, played brilliantly by Austin Abrams.
The cast in general does a great job. Julia Garner is quite convincing as an elementary school teacher scapegoated by her community for the class of missing children. Demonstrating the grit she showed on Ozark, yet never overplaying the alcoholism angle, she becomes an affable protagonist. Josh Brolin likewise shines as the near co-protagonist, a concerned father of one of the missing children. Brolin always has a gruff charisma that makes him likable, and he gets one scene in particular to really shine. And without revealing too much, Amy Madigan is simply a show-stealer in her role.
But one can sense the “but” coming. Weapons in some ways fails to match Barbarian on a storytelling level due to a frustrating lack of thematic coherence and ultimately resorting to some banal tropes. The central mystery of the film is described in the opening scene: a particular classroom of elementary children (save one) all simultaneously awoke and fled from their homes at exactly 2:17 AM, never to be found. This is an unnerving sequence and immediately sets the film into at atmosphere of tension that is maintained even when the film is openly funny.
The movie seems to want to explore communal trauma and grief, and the idea of how people learn to cope after such a tragic event. The obvious metaphor is the aftermath of a school shooting, which the film seems to deliberately highlight at one point in a dream sequence where a CGI floating assault rifle appears over a house, demonstrating a complete lack of subtlety.
Despite all of these ideas, the film fails to do anything with these ideas in any satisfying manner. Weapons never manages to be about weapons or much of anything due to the scattershot manner in which its themes make it into the framework of scenes. Even with reoccurring imagery of parasites and clowns, it never feels like this is headed for anything more than surface-level exploration. The clown angle in particular seems suddenly dropped when the film starts revealing more truth behind the mystery.
Weapons is caught in an impossible trap where the explanation to the mystery is never satisfying. Particularly in the horror genre, mysteries end up only having so many explanations. Usually its demons, ghosts, witchcraft, or something of that sort. The answer is rarely as satisfying as the mystery itself, leading to some filmmakers wisely avoiding any direct answers. Horror is a space that often thrives on the terror of the unknown.
Yet the way Weapons unfolds its tale almost demands a reveal at some point. And a reveal does indeed come, though it is a rather lackluster one. Weapons picks a horror subgenre and over-explains everything to the point that the suspension of disbelief starts to fail when it comes to how the children disappeared, how they were not found by authorities, and what the point of it all was. The fact that these explanations do not really seem to align with the themes or some of the mysterious dream scenes earlier in the film hurts the overall quality of the film.
It seems a shame to criticize the ending, because the final sequence is one of the most lovely and unhinged pieces of horror outside an Ari Aster or Robert Eggers film. It is cathartic to the plot’s events in a certain way as well. But it comes, at least for this reviewer, after the film’s air had been deflated.
Lest one mistake this as a scathing review, let us be clear: Weapons is a really well-made and fun movie in many ways. It scares, it amuses, and it never feels pretentious in doing so. But one wishes Weapons tried to say something more deliberately and had avoided the pull downwards that answers often bring. In movies, we get to pretend that gravity doesn’t exist. And in a horror film like this, Cregger should have let the mystery fly forever.
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