IMAGINE watching a film, that progressively worsens from slightly macabre to profoundly unsettling, that you walk out of the cinema in a fugue state with the will to live stripped away to the point of being catatonic and needing someone to feed you chicken soup. That may not be the outcome for many who walk out of a Weapons screening but it certainly comes close to eliciting that sensation.
In the town of Maybrook, on a nondescript school night, at precisely 2.17am, 17 children from the same school classroom woke up from their slumber, left the cover of their blankets, ran out the doors of their homes, into the cover of night and never returned home.
Following an intense investigation without any result, Weapons’s story begins one month after that particular night, with the community’s frustration and anger shifting towards the children’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner).
This includes Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children, who becomes obsessed with Justine. The situation escalates when police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich) is pulled in due to his relationship with the increasingly suspicious teacher.
At the centre of it all, is Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the only child in the class who did not disappear at that fateful hour.
Those familiar with Zach Cregger’s Barbarian from three years ago will know what to expect with his latest film. Just like it, nothing is ever as it seems with Weapons.
The story gets pulled in different directions throughout its two-hour runtime, making it impossible, but also fun, for audiences to try and piece together the mystery of the missing children.
Films that attempt this manner of storytelling and getting the viewer engaged are rarely able to pull it off successfully, but Cregger does so masterfully, effectively cementing himself in the very “a comedian before, a prodigious horror filmmaker now” elite field that is only occupied by one other writer-director: Jordan Peele.
Disturbing and unnerving, Weapons is relentless. From its opening narration that sets the stage of the children running off into the dark, to how Cregger fragments the story into sections that cover each major character, right until its darkly comic, yet insane ending that will surely see split opinions by viewers.
There has not been a more perfectly paced horror film in modern times than Weapons. There is no lull in Cregger’s story nor direction. Each “chapter” that breaks up the stories of Justine, Archer, Alex, Paul and school principal Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong) are pieces that fit into the grander puzzle that involves forks, scissors, twigs and tufts of hair.
Weapons is probably also one of the darkest films to come out recently. Not necessarily in terms of its themes or horror, but more so the lighting itself. Whenever the film takes place at night or involves pitch black rooms, Cregger uses the darkness to great effect, controlling and obscuring just how much viewers can see beneath an ungodly pitch black cloak.
Even as Halloween is creeping right around the corner, with more horror films on the way, Weapons stands and will continue to do so, uncontested, as the best horror film this year and possibly the best film to convey the parasitic nature of the elderly on the younger generation. The way the film is engineered, from the ground right up to the excellent sound design, deserves a full theatre experience.
Weapons is playing in cinemas.
