Movie Review: Weapons
Weapons has an incredible hook: one night, at 2:17 am, 17 kids from the same class woke up, ran out of their houses, and seemingly disappeared into the night. Nobody knows where they went, nobody knows why they ran out of the house, and nobody can find them.
It’s hard not to be hooked by such a simple yet chilling premise for a film. But with that comes the pressure of executing a story and delivering a film that is just as intriguing as its premise. I’m not sure what I was expecting from Weapons or where it was going to go, but writer/director Zach Cregger’s latest film is an original, twisted, horrifying film.
Weapons opens with a voiceover from a child explaining the situation. 17 kids from the town of Maybrook went missing one night, all of them from Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) class. The town searched far and wide for the missing children but found nothing. After a month of searching and mourning, everyone tries to get back to normalcy. Weapons picks up here and opens on a town hall meeting where the locals of Maybrook berate Justine, blaming her for their children’s disappearance, most emphatically by Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), a father to one of the missing children.
Weapons is structured with connecting chapters, each one titled after the name of a character. There’s a chapter for Justine, one for Archer, one for Alex (Cary Christopher), the only child from Justine’s class that didn’t go missing, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a bumbling and aggressive local cop, Anthony (Austin Abrams), a local meth head, and Andrew (Benedict Wong), the principal at Justine’s school. Each chapter is expertly constructed and dives into the mystery of the children, the characters, and their motivations, and the happenings of Maybrook. This structure allows us to understand the characters more and even makes Maybrook a character. The world Cregger builds in just two hours is impressively layered, chilling, and fascinating.
Within each chapter of Weapons, Cregger gives us an additional nugget of information about what may have happened to the children, but never shows his cards until the film’s insane final act, which is a relentless sequence of horror and violence and features one of the best jump-scares I have seen in a movie this decade. Each chapter was more surprising than the previous one. I was constantly wondering what would happen next or where the next big clue was. I realized that trying to guess what was going to happen would be a waste of time, and just sitting back and basking in the brilliance of the originality and shock of the film would be a far better experience. It was indeed.
What impressed me most about Weapons was Cregger’s ability to handle the film’s tonal shifts. This is a terrifying and stressful film, but also has a lot of quieter, character-driven moments, such as Justine and Paul talking at a bar or Andrew’s home life, while also featuring a surprising amount of devilish humor. It’s a movie that looks at alcoholism and anger as means of coping, and about the vagueness of why bad things happen. Cregger layers these themes in with some truly terrifying sequences that I never saw coming. I was on the edge of my seat from minute one and didn’t move until I left my seat.
Weapons solidifies Cregger as one of the next great horror filmmakers. Following his 2022 smash Barbarian, Weapons shows that Cregger is as original as they come and knows how to scare the hell out of us while also making thought-provoking cinema. Weapons is one of the best movies of the year.
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