‘This is a true story that happened in my town…’
The hype around Weapons has been impossible to ignore. Not only is this writer-director Zach Cregger’s long awaited follow up to the 2022 smash hit Barbarian, the buzz around the film also reached fever pitch because of the unprecedented bidding war that took place for the rights to Cregger’s screenplay. Pretty much every major studio tried to buy the rights including Netflix, Warner Brothers and Universal with the latter eventually sealing the deal for a whopping $38 million. Jordan Peele was so incensed that his production company Monkeypaw Productions lost out that he sacked longtime managers Joel Zadak and Peter Principato. This film is a big deal is what I’m saying. Surely, it couldn’t live up to the hype? You know what? I think it kinda does…
Weapons begins with an unnamed narrator (Scarlett Sher) solemnly relaying that two years earlier, in her hometown of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, a class full of children vanished. The children simultaneously awoke at 2:17am (a possible reference to the haunted hotel room in The Shining), left their beds, and ran off into the night, never to be seen again. Their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) and a sole child (Cary Christopher), are the only ones left behind.
Cregger presents us with this mystery and then gradually solves it through the narrative lens of several key characters that all then intersect at the end. We begin with Justine, but then the narrative switches to a grieving father (Josh Brolin), a troubled police officer (Alden Ehrenreich), the school’s headteacher (Benedict Wong) and the only kid not missing. There is possibly an arugment that Cregger could perhaps have left a little bit of mystery intact, but the execution is so effective that it’s hard to argue with the end result.
As with Barbarian, Cregger provides a heady mix of extreme violence, laugh-out-loud comedy and beautiful cinematography. In lesser hands, the tonal whiplash would dull the impact of the scarier moments, but Weapons finds the perfect balance between horror and obsidian humour, helped along by some stunning performances – particularly from Garner and Brolin. The latter is truly excellent and it’s hard not to think that Pedro Pascal leaving the film due to scheduling issues caused by the writer’s strike was actually a blessing in disguise. I can’t imagine him being as intimidating and vulnerable as Brolin is here.
Weapons is the kind of film that demands multiple viewings. It contains multitudes. It’s layered and nuanced and troubling and it boasts loads of disparate elements all competing to be heard. This film and Barbarian have marked Cregger out as the next great horror auteur on the conveyor belt. I can’t wait to see what he does next.