Weapons is writer-director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his breakout success Barbarian (2022), and it confirms his gifts for nifty high-concept horror and sure-handed follow-up scares. The premise for this one is the disappearance of seventeen third-graders at precisely 2:17 a.m. one fateful night in the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania — the kids all simply got out of bed and ran off into the night. Even stranger, all of the children are members of the same class. Their teacher, Miss Gandy (Julia Garner), arrives in the morning to find one lone student, a quiet, bullied boy named Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), sitting at his desk in an otherwise empty classroom.
Nice! But a hooky premise wouldn’t amount to anything like the juggernaut box office hit this movie has become if Cregger didn’t also have a talent for genuinely strange imagery that sticks in the mind. On the night of their flight from their homes, many of the children are captured on doorbell cams and black-and-white home security footage. It’s haunting, the way they come flitting out, leaving front doors open behind them. They run lightly with their arms held out in a wide downward-facing V, like swallows in flight. And though they all dash away as if drawn by some compelling force, there’s an exhilaration in looking at the dark silent neighborhoods suddenly coming alive with fleet-footed children escaping their homes.
It reminded me immediately of W. B. Yeats’s great 1886 poem, “The Stolen Child,” which takes on the narrating voice of the faeries, a powerful race of deities from Irish folklore that you should never, ever mess with. It has a repeated stanza that goes like this:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The poem’s melancholic tone of abduction, combined with a disturbing logic of liberating children from the grievous horrors of the human world, seemed so exactly like what Cregger was going for with these images, I was wondering how on Earth he was going to portray Irish faeries on film. But though Cregger hangs on to a sense of children trapped in hopelessly grim and destructive adult society, he’s headed in an entirely different direction.
The plot unspools with predictable bleakness. Justine Gandy and Alex Lilly both stick to their claims of utter ignorance as to what might’ve prompted this bizarre event. But the devastated parents of the missing children led by the angriest of them, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), quickly target the teacher as the most likely malefactor. Schoolteachers all over America will sigh bitterly over such scenes, knowing how they routinely get blamed by parents for so many problems that are totally out of their hands.
As the town scapegoat, Justine is soon holed up in her house. She gets death threats over the phone, and her car is defaced with the word “WITCH” painted in red. Though she’s warned by the school principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), to lay low, she takes it upon herself to investigate the case by trying to talk to Alex, whose life within a large, forbidding house with newspaper covering all the windows remains a largely unexamined mystery.
The intriguingly fractured narrative takes on the widely differing points of view of various townspeople whose experiences advance the plot and overlap at sometimes chilling, sometimes comical points. Justine is portrayed as a caring teacher who’s also “troubled” and a bit of a hell-raiser in her private life, drinking heavily and, in a bar scene full of dark mischief, reviving her affair with a married local cop, Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). He’s a recovering alcoholic who’s been trying to keep his marriage and his unsteady career together. Paul then works off his pent-up anger and frustration on a burglary suspect he chases down named James (Austin Abrams), who’s an addled, homeless drug addict. Warned to get out of town, James presses his luck by breaking into . . . well, never mind, that gets us into spoiler territory. And it’s really, really hard to talk about Weapons without spoiling its surprises.
Needless to say, there are some things we can talk about — for one, the performances in Weapons are all excellent. Ehrenreich in particular has been great at everything since he first drew major attention in the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar! (2016). But here he’s gotten another sufficiently vivid role to show us what he can do. His hapless cop, with a big aggressive mustache that’s not fooling anybody, seems to physically shrink under the gaze of both his wronged wife and his testy father-in-law who is also his increasingly disapproving boss, the local police captain (Toby Huss). And Austin Abrams — a consistent standout in series like The Walking Dead, This Is Us, and Euphoria — is simultaneously maddening, touching, and funny as Paul’s quaking nemesis, the boy-man whose response to imminent danger is to zip himself inside his pathetic little pup-tent in the woods, as if being unable to see the danger means it isn’t there anymore.
And Amy Madigan does wonders with her showy role as Alex Lilly’s peculiar Aunt Gladys, who may or may not be dying of a terminal illness. Her brassy red wig rides too far back on her bare skull as she twitches and gabbles sunny euphemisms about devoting herself to Alex’s welfare.
This question of the children’s welfare is underscored throughout the film in ways that go beyond plot. Weapons starts with an unseen little girl calmly describing how all the weird events that occurred in Maybrook will never be officially reported. The opening scene with the running children leads the viewer to speculate about some sort of mysterious revolt against adult control, or perhaps they’re being coerced remotely. And in the end, there’s a violent reckoning between the extremes of youth and age that can’t help but remind you of some of the geriatric monsters currently running our government and hoarding immense wealth all while young people struggle for a future on the sidelines.
The oblique title of the film also prods the viewer into speculation. Why Weapons? The most obvious weapon in the film appears in a nightmare of Archer’s. There’s an AR-15 hanging in the sky like an ominously-shaped black cloud, with the red alarm clock numbers 02:17 on it. It’s his subconscious hunting for the source of harm to his missing son, and what it shows him is a supernaturally outsize version of the very real assault rifle most associated with school shootings.
Or perhaps it’s because, in a movie filled with attacks, there’s simply a lot of scrambling for weapons. One darkly comical effort involves Justine Gandy scrabbling along a kitchen counter for something to defend herself with and coming up with nothing but a citrus peeler — which she uses to start scraping the skin from the face of her assailant. Yet if you ponder it, the main weapon deployed in the film is people, who are sent zinging out into the world programmed to do as much harm as their fleshy bodies will allow. But who controls them mentally, and for what purpose?
Some critics are complaining about Weapons ending on a general sense of “flatness.” I felt it myself. After so much that’s compelling and evocative in the film, the literal “answer” to the mystery — SPOILER ALERT — might seem trite after everything that came before it, featuring an old-time monster revived here for new scares. But if you let it linger, ruminating over all the strange and dreadful imagery that came before it, the implications associated with that monster begin to take on new meaning.
Take special note of the monster’s inanity and clownishness, both of which make it especially ghastly. Those two qualities are very suggestive of the horrors we now live with daily.
Great Job Eileen Jones & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
