Weapons
The beauty of Zach Cregger’s Weapons is that by the time it’s all over, you no longer have any idea what it’s about. That may not sound like a virtue, but in a world where horror comes either overloaded with metaphor or reduced to bloody nonsense, Cregger valiantly navigates an unnerving middle way. He feints at all sorts of greater meanings — and maybe even indulges them a little bit — before sending things in a charmingly ridiculous direction. Is Weapons scary? It certainly has its moments, and the oblique structure enhances the gathering dread. But more than anything, it’s a twisty-turny blast..
The premise comes preloaded with allegoric potential. One quiet Wednesday morning, every student in a single class at Maybrook Elementary fails to show up at school. Surveillance footage and house alarms from the night before show that at 2:17 a.m., all the kids in question got out of bed and sprinted out their doors straight into the night, their arms spread open like they were pretend attack planes, never to be heard from again. One child, however, did not disappear: young Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), who is questioned immediately. So too is the classroom’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), on whom suspicion soon settles even though nothing actually suggests she’s guilty. Still, some of her past actions, such as giving hugs to crying children and offering a ride to a student who had missed the bus, suddenly look more questionable. It’s not long before people are painting “Witch” on Justine’s car in big red letters.
Cregger structures the story with chapters devoted to individual characters, each section jumping back in time to present earlier incidents from a different point of view. First, we follow Justine; then, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a grieving father whose son is among the missing and who takes it upon himself to investigate the matter more thoroughly; after that we get a section devoted to local cop Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), Justine’s recovering-alcoholic ex, who finds himself pulled back into her orbit; then James (Austin Abrams), a junkie who somehow winds up fitting into all this; and so on and so forth. As a storytelling device, the fractured timeline may not be particularly original, but it is clever: If you laid out the narrative of Weapons end to end, in linear fashion, it might seem too straightforward and lacking in tension. (That’s not necessarily a criticism; you could say the same for Pulp Fiction.) But as presented here, the fragmented perspective and the constant looping back keep us on our toes as each section cuts to the next at moments of heightened, surreal suspense. Where the hell is this thing headed? was a thought that kept leaping to my mind, which is not something one can often say about modern studio horror.
The nonlinear structure also serves a more important purpose. Because of the creepily unreal nature of the film’s setup, each section suggests new interpretations of what’s really going on. American horror almost always exists in the shadow of American society; cinema can’t help but distill all our bad juju into finely concentrated, gruesome genre goo. Weapons acknowledges that truth by giving us multiple paths down which we could go. The furor around Justine’s past and her immediate suspicion by the local populace will surely remind us of a classic witch hunt. Archer’s dogged determination to make Justine’s life hell hints at a metaphor for vigilante justice. At one point, wandering in the darkness, Archer sees above a suspicious house the image of an enormous semiautomatic rifle hovering in the night sky. It’s a nightmarish, surreal, and unnervingly resonant image, reminding us that classrooms full of kids disappear all the time in America, but since they’re gunned down, the country doesn’t even discuss them anymore; they might as well have disappeared mysteriously, without a trace, in the middle of the night.
These ideas are not red herrings. Cregger doesn’t so much abandon them as he lets them linger tantalizingly, though he also doesn’t really confirm any specific readings. That’s where the structure helps immensely. The story is in pieces because these people are in pieces. By showing us an entire community that’s been fractured by this grisly mystery, Cregger turns the discrete sections of his tale into dark doors through which we could disappear further. Each chapter of Weapons doesn’t just circle around a specific individual, it also circles around a specific confrontation, almost as if the movie’s inciting incident has weaponized all these people against one another.
There’s a reason the picture has that title, in other words, and that idea finds a more direct correlation in the finale, which gives us one of the more grotesquely funny climaxes in recent horror. I won’t reveal what happens, but it makes for a great release: These later scenes also mark a stylistic shift, as a freewheeling, handheld camera and a more playful rhythm take over from the tense and somber mood of the earlier sections. Even so, Cregger stays true to the glancing, elliptical nature of his narrative. After the howling mayhem of his final act, we might notice that plot resolution hasn’t really led to emotional closure. And if we leave Weapons with more questions than answers, that’s surely intentional.
