Filmmakers using horror as a medium to explore grief isn’t new, but Zach Cregger’s Weapons doesn’t try to hit us over the head with overt symbolism or over explain the movie’s main themes. He just simply tells the story, and allows us to put the pieces together on our own.
Weapons begins in the aftermath of a tragedy: 17 kids from Ms. Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) class have gone missing. They all left their houses at 2.17am, running freely into the streets with arms outstretched in a zombified manner. Why did they leave their homes? Where did they go? And does Justine have anything to do with it? The only student who didn’t go missing is Alex (Cary Christopher), but the police didn’t see that anything was amiss after questioning him, so he was transferred to another class and left alone.
What happened to the 17 children is the mystery that drives Weapons, and to Cregger’s credit, the supernatural themes of the movie are apparent from the get-go so we don’t find ourselves getting cinematic whiplash after the revelations. The movie is told from 5 different perspectives: Justine, Archer (Josh Brolin), Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), James (Austin Abrams) and Alex. It’s like a snapshot into each character’s life post-tragedy; Justine’s a teacher struggling with PTSD but her grief is not considered important, and Archer’s a parent whose struggling to cope in his personal and professional life. The grief that inundates the community is palpable – how do people even begin to move on from a tragedy like this?
Cregger loves playing with dark spaces and doorways, so quite a bit of this film is set at night. Both Justine and Archer are tormented by nightmares while they sleep, their homes no longer a refuge but a space for them to be haunted by their dark thoughts and sadness. There’s something so disconcerting about the dark, and Cregger loves to let us sit in these dark spaces and wait before tormenting us with some fiendish surprise. The most frightening set piece is definitely the one where Justine sleeps in her car, mainly because Cregger chooses to stage so much of what’s happening off-screen, so we’re on tenterhooks as to what on earth’s going on. The horror imagery in Weapons is new and fresh – it’s signature to Cregger and the film he made. I like that he’s bringing something new to the space of horror and not just rehashing the styles of those that came before.
Both Garner and Brolin are fantastic in their portrayals of their flawed characters – no one delivers “what the fuck” quite like Brolin does. However, the standout performance is without a doubt Amy Madigan as Gladys; it’s right up there with the unhinged performance Nicholas Cage gave in Longlegs – maybe even better. Every single moment she’s on screen is hair-raising stuff, even in her vulnerable moments she still manages to be eerily manipulative. While there’s pathos for Longlegs, since so much of what he did was a result of loneliness and estrangement, Gladys is stone cold and indifferent. Her parasitic nature does not allow her to care about the effect she has on her loved ones or the community – all she knows is to take. But hey, a girl’s gotta eat.
While certainly not the main theme of the movie, Gladys’ character did make me think about the burden caretakers have to bear when caring for the elderly or the terminally ill. The effect is pretty much what we see in the movie; parents are so drained from caretaking they become the walking dead, and children who live in such households are forced to grow up and fend for themselves.
For all the frightening stuff that happens in Weapons, it’s remarkably camp in moments. My cinema hall erupted with laughter a few times, before immediately getting immersed in the tension once more – that’s skill, to be able to have these moments and yet not have them detract from the overall atmosphere of the film. Cregger did the same thing with Barbarian as well.
It all builds up to a gonzo ending on par with what we got with The Substance – gruesome yet insanely satisfying. It’s not quite my favourite horror movie this year – Sinners is still the frontrunner – but I love the film’s atmosphere and the iconic imagery. We’ll never look at children running freely in the street the same way again.
REVIEW SCORE: 3.5/5
