‘Weapons’ reinvents fairytale horror
I’m not sure, really, why the horror genre is still such a hot ticket for moviegoers. My best bet is that it’s a cathartic coping mechanism for how strange and horrifying real life seems right now—whether it’s conspiracy theories, AI, paranoia, the aftereffects of years in lockdown, or the Epstein files—driving people to crave even more “WTF?” entertainment as a way of managing their sanity.
But director Zach Cregger is a different breed, offering horror fans the completely-bananas home-icidal Barbarian a few years back, and now something that taps into the perennial fright factor of fairytales, zombies, witches and the supernatural, yet without descending into cheesiness or animated dolls or such like.
From New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Pictures, which brought you blockbusters like The Nun and The Conjuring franchises, Weapons marks its territory like a rabid dog and doesn’t release its grip until the shock-cathartic ending.
When a small community suddenly loses 17 of its third-grade students—shown fanning out at 2:17 a.m. from their homes into the night, arms outstretched creepily, racing towards who knows what—we are as puzzled as the increasingly frayed townspeople.
The town’s rage turns towards Justine (Julia Garner), the schoolteacher who finds that only one child, Alex (Cary Christopher), turns up in her classroom the next morning. Justine doesn’t help her case by drinking heavily, lashing out at the principal (Benedict Wong), sleeping with local police officer Paul (Aldren Ehrenreich) and enraging one dad, Archer (Josh Brolin), who also lost his son at 2:17 a.m. and spends most days staring at surveillance camera footage of his kid disappearing into the night.
Weapons owes some of its mood of lingering dread to Twin Peaks, Denis Villanueve’s Prisoners and even a famous and haunting news photo known as “Napalm Girl” that was published during the Vietnam War. Tapping into our very human fear of losing our loved ones, it mines familiar tropes—scary clowns, zombie stares—but gets deep into the bones of that dread, leaving us disturbed beyond the requisite jump scares.
Unfolding in parallel narrative arcs, we see Justine, Paul, Archer and Alex intersect over the days leading up to 2:17 a.m., and weeks after. The tension tightens as weirder and weirder things happen. Bursts of humor help lighten the load at times—things like the Easter egg cameo of Justin Long (the Barbarian character who meets a grim fate) and the frequent outbursts of (unexpurgated) “WTF?” that match how the audience is feeling about the events unfolding onscreen. The gore factor is higher than Barbarian, though the twisted weirdness of Cregger’s debut film is here leavened somewhat by the interplay between humor and creepifying horror.
Does catharsis still work on people in this day and age? By the finale, audience members were cheering for the most horrible thing to happen onscreen, as though to cleanse us of the nasty emotions the film stirs up. The audience looked drained as they filed out of at the Megamall IMAX. The Greeks had a name for it; Aristotle would be proud.
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'Weapons' is distributed through Warner Bros. Pictures.
