WEAPONS
by Eric Lindbom –
I hate spoilers and often skip the paunchy mid-section of most movie reviews to avoid lazy, give away-plot summaries. Hence, I relate to those taking a hear no evil stance regarding Zach Creggar’s hit horror movie-of-the-moment WEAPONS (in theaters). Refreshingly, the volunteer info black out is organic, not a marketing ploy, and spurred by the twists in writer/director Creggar’s previous BARBARIAN, the most original fright feature of 2022. Even in this fertile era of cleverly-scripted shockers, Creggar is a screenwriter armed with mad craft skills on full display here.
In deference to those who feel WEAPONS’ storyline should be guarded like a state secret, I’ll handle it in one run-on sentence. In a fictional Pennsylvania town, all the third-graders but one in teacher Justine Grandy’s class flee their homes at the same late-night hour and vanish –to the tune of George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” — and their mass disappearance is still unexplained to anxious parents and cops a month later.
Know that there’s a spooky supernatural element in WEAPONS and no Scooby Doo cheat ending. Since Creggar initially divides the story into chapters, each built around one of five characters, I feel safe mentioning a cast that comes to play.
Julia Garner, a busy actor since her break out role in OZARK, is as tightly wound as her usual head of blonde curls, as teacher Justine an irresponsible drinker and a caring instructor accused of previously skirting boundaries with her students. Archer (Josh Brolin) is the angriest of the many distraught parents who figure she had a direct or in-direct hand in the vanished kids and spies on her. Her sensible but nerve-frayed boss Marcus (Benedict Wong) wants the scapegoated Justine to go on a long hiatus, while her cop ex-boyfriend (Alden Ehrenreich with a bushy stache and short fuse) falls off the sobriety wagon with Justine’s help and takes his angst out on a sorry meth head (Austin Adams) who’s stumbled onto a major clue.
(Full disclosure: While I don’t consider myself a journalist – despite my long ago Bachelor’s Degree – I’ll note that my wife’s talent agency reps one of the cast members – Callie Schutterra – who plays the mother of the solitary kid Alex (Cary Christopher) in Justine’s empty classroom.)
Throughout, Creggar cleverly keeps us off balance not with eerie atmospherics or jolts but narrative sleights of hand. Especially in its first three quarters, WEAPONS entices with intricately structured time jumps that echo Tarantino’s PULP FICTION. In Kurosawa’s RASHOMON we saw the same incident refracted through multiple characters’ differing POVs. In WEAPONS, it’s the viewers whose understanding gets jumbled each time one of the characters takes the foreground and enters a scene we’ve seen previously and now in a new light.
Creggar also has a hot button knack for accessing timely fear frequencies. BARBARIAN turned an Airbnb into a haunted house. WEAPONS mainlines the ongoing mistrust and rancor parents and militant school boards increasingly level against teachers as corrupters of youth. A mob rule vibe typifies early scenes where Garner’s Justine is maligned at grief sessions held at the school gym. Even the film’s title has weight since ‘weaponizing’ is an action verb that’s gone vernacular.
While wildly entertaining, the one point of contention is a gonzo finale often played for laughs. Creggar is a former sketch comic and he liberally uses humor in his work but this go-for-broke sequence struck me as over ripe. In fairness, this bacchanal did set an in-theater crowd howling with glee so that’s a matter of preference. With his next project, a reboot of RESIDENT EVIL, Creggar has already promised/warned of a frantic “rock ‘em/sock ‘em” approach,he likens to Sam Raimi’s peerlessly slapsticky EVIL DEAD II.
Once the dust clears — and shards of broken glass and gobs of gore leave our view — the final seconds of WEAPONS make a disquieting point about trauma. As fellow Scaretube scribe Tom Lavagnino puts it, the last shot “is a metaphoric visual communicating how kids today have to be inured to school shootings.”
Eric Lindbom is a hardcore horror buff with a strong stomach, weaned on the Universal classics from the ’30s and ’40s. He’s written film and/or music reviews for City Pages, Twin Cities Reader, LA WEEKLY, Request magazine and Netflix. He co-edits triggerwarningshortfiction.com, a site specializing in horror, fantasy and crime short stories with illustrations by co-editor John Skewes. He lives in Los Angeles.
