Weapons Grade

Fans of horror movies have been championing the new film Weapons, from writer-director Zach Cregger. It's his follow-up to 2022's Barbarian, a movie I felt so ambivalent about that it seems I never even blogged about it. But Weapons is no "sophomore slump"; I went for it as completely as the zeitgeist promised I would.

At 2:17 in the morning in a Pennsylvania town, 17 children wake up and run out the doors of their different homes, vanishing into night. They comprise the entire class (save one boy) from school teacher Justine's class, leaving her deeply shaken and the entire town set against her -- especially one stricken father, Archer. In the weeks that follow, the community tries to move on as Justin and Archer separately try to get to the bottom of the disappearance. What they find is more dangerous and disturbing than they could ever imagine.

If you're a fan of horror movies, I feel like Weapons is going to scratch all the key itches you look for in the genre. The movie delivers a multi-ingredient stew of jump scares and skulking dread... with laughs to release the tension briefly before ratcheting it up again. (Josh Brolin is central to one of the best moments of the latter.)

It also features a number of profoundly creepy visuals. Moments that feature characters in the grip of complete intense hatred -- or the complete absence of emotion of any kind -- are effectively unnerving. The open front door of a surburban house has rarely looked as menacing as it does here, inviting you to imagine any terror that might be lurking just inside its unnaturally black maw. And the image that leads the film's marketing campaign -- children running with arms out, as though pretending to be airplanes -- feels like it might be as iconic a movie poster as The Blair Witch Project's climactic monologue to the camera.

All that was good to me -- but I really enjoyed Weapons for how clever I found the script to be. It employs a non-linear narrative with separate "chapters" centered on different characters, key events sometimes repeated from different perspectives as new chapters unfold. All that in and of itself is not new; Pulp Fiction won a screenplay Oscar for this technique, and Zach Cregger himself cited Magnolia as a major influence. But the way it's used here seems especially smart.

First: the movie clearly wants to evoke the emotions surrounding school shootings. The anguish of grieving parents is a major part of the story, along with images of memorials and heated debate about what might have been done to save children from an evil. The non-linear structure of the script allows the movie to begin in a more realistic place that engages most earnestly with these ideas. As new chapters unfold, the story descends gradually into more supernatural elements in a way that a straightforward narrative wouldn't have allowed.

Second, the non-linear structure highlights a secondary theme of the story, essentially that "hurt people hurt people." An opening narrator tells us that the disappearance of 17 children was almost just background for the story that unfolded next: and that is an extended example of how people struggling to cope with their own grief create a Butterfly Effect within their community that can affect others too. The self-destructive impulses that Justine displays in her story wind up dragging down her friend Paul when we get to his chapter. Archer's urges to lash out over the loss of his son end up magnifying Justine's pain. Paul's backsliding leads him to visit misery on a complete stranger, James... and the cycle continues all the way to the end of the film.

Third, the re-sequenced narrative allows leitmotifs to be sprinkled into the story early on, before you even realize they're important. I have found it deeply rewarding to think back on the movie and realize new connections throughout. It's hard to highlight connections without spoiling things, but there are a couple I think I can tiptoe around. One characters fear of needles (getting "stuck") proves eerily prescient. And very early on, the movie cheekily tells us exactly what's going on, hiding a massive clue in plain sight in a cunning bit of misdirection.

Is the movie absolutely perfect? Not quite. For one thing, it kind of wants to have its "cake and eat it too" when it comes to modern technology. Houses with Ring cams provide footage of the children running off in the dead of night... but there conveniently are none near the place that might have cut right to heart of the mystery. And to say that the police in this town are incompetent would be woefully underselling it. It's not that they should speculate on what we learn is really going on, but that any cursory investigation would surely have turned up some of the weirdness that Justine and Archer find in their own searches: a loose thread to at least begin pulling on.

But it's easy to overlook the shortcomings amid all the other cleverness I cited. And the movie features great performances from Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan. I really loved Weapons. If it's not my favorite movie so far this year, it's certainly up there. I give it an A-.