Review by Tim Robins
WARNING: SPOILERS
Writer-Director Zach Cregger’s new movie Weapons has been feted as much for its 100% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes as its skilful blend of humour, intrigue and horror. I found the film a disturbing affair, steeped in menace and melancholy with one foot in the history of horror and the other placed firmly in the future of the genre.
Weapons is framed by a child’s story of supposedly true events in a Pennsylvanian town. However, be warned, the child proves to be an unreliable narrator.
We are told that one night, at precisely 2:17am, all but one of the children from a third grade class in the local primary school get out of their beds and take flight, running off into the mist. A few doorbell cameras capture some footage of the children running, arms outstretched like the wings of planes, their destination unknown.
As the grief-stricken parents try to understand where their children have gone, their suspicions fall on the class’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). The local police struggle to remain neutral and question Gandy and her remaining student, a boy named Alex (Cary Christopher). The school’s Headmaster, Marcus, is played by Benedict Wong of ‘Doctor Strange’ fame who has his hands full with managing Justine, his impetuous member of staff.
Other characters furnish what is, at times, an eerily underpopulated town. These include parent (Josh Brolin), cop (Alden Ehrenreich), and druggy (Austin Abrams). All play their part in deepening the network of relationships and slowly revealing the whole story.
There are plenty of red herrings in Weapons. For a long time, I wondered if we were being misdirected, especially when Justine had to drive around town with the word “Witch” spray-painted on her car.
The performances really sell the emotions stirred by the story. None of the characters are without fault. Julie Garner’s Justine cares about the fate of the children, but her care leads her to compromise her professional duties towards them. Austin Abrahams’ character is as engaging, but remains a lying, self-centred drug addict. But it is actress Amy Madigan, introduced late in the day, who almost steals the show as Alex’s eccentric Aunt.
The structure of the film takes a leaf from Magnolia (1999). Weapons is a tale told from the different perspectives of its characters. The film folds back on itself as it progresses towards its violent climax. Like many films of late, the child’s narration gives events a fairy tale quality, particularly in its more terrifying moments (think “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumplestiltskin”).
Depending on your own viewing history, you’ll pick up on echoes of Rosemary’s Baby, Suspiria and Salem’s Lot. Shots and scenes reflect key moments in The Exorcist and The Shining. The film nods to these films, but it weaves them seamlessly into its own dark tapestry of fear, and sometimes the cinematography is actually quite dark. You’ll find yourself peering into gloomy interiors and wishing someone would turn on the lights – or at least open a curtain.
The events are accompanied by an unnerving, sometimes cacophonous, percussive score, the film punctuated with gore, but not excessively so. Weaponsis film that, instead, has a lot for you to feel, themed around moments where boundaries are crossed: a cop two-times his partner who is also his boss’s daughter; Justine takes an inappropriate care in her students’ out of school situation; Justine’s cop lover uses inappropriate force on a captive.
Other boundaries include the threshold of houses and rooms. Archer (Josh Brolin) finagles his way into a home where he has previously been denied entry. Similarly, Alex’s Aunt, Gladys, gains access to the home of Marcus by emotionally strong-arming his partner. There’s a scene in which Justine flirts with Paul at a bar that skilfully explores the role alcohol makes in eroding professional and personal boundaries. (The corrosive nature of alcohol is at the deepest, saddest heart of Weapons).
When interviewed, Weapons director Cregger has bluntly stated that he himself is an alcoholic. He has also identified the tragic death of his friend, the comedian and film director Trevor Moore, who fell from a balcony flat while intoxicated, as providing the melancholy animus for writing it. Moore. In the film, alcohol has never seemed more menacing than when we visit a store piled high with bottles of booze to the point that they form a labyrinth through which Justine is stalked on the way to the counter.
Where then, you ask, are the laughs? After all, people find Weapons a funny film. The usher showing me the way to my seat said that the film was the best he’s seen this year and that he’d laughed from beginning to end. I had to ask him if I was at the right screening. Had I wrongly bought a ticket for The Naked Gun, which was playing on the screen next door?
The usher is not alone. Critics describe weapons as an outright comedy: “If Weapons wasn’t the best horror movie of the year – pipping even the mighty Sinners – it would probably be the best comedy” (Phil de Semlyen of Time Out) and “a roller coaster of fear and laughter” (according to Jake of YouTube channel ‘Woman Carrying Man’).
Weapons is not unique in mixing horror and humour. In the 1980s, scholar Phil Brophy coined the term “Horrality”, to describe the way in which horror films were combining horror and hilarity. He cited The Evil Dead (1982) as an example of the audience “simultaneously screaming with terror and laughter”. Although, this being for the highly theorised journal screen, Brophy may not be talking about actual audiences but those implied by a film.
For my part, I recall an actual audience erupting into laughter at the end of a notorious scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). The scene begins with a Doctor conducting an autopsy, only to have his arms bitten off by teeth growing out of the corpse’s stomach. The scene ends with the corpse’s head falling off, growing legs then attempting to scuttle out of the room. “You’ve gotta be f*cking kidding me!” exclaims one of the team.
With Weapons, I intentionally set my sense of humour aside. I think this was to allow me to empathise with the film’s atmosphere of paranoia and grief that linger like a mist formed by the fears of contemporary America. A meeting in the school hall has all the anger and recrimination of a Republican ‘Town Hall’ and, when Archer runs through a dream, he sees a gun hanging in the sky like a sword of Damocles above his home. It is not surprising that those going into the film have wondered if it will be about a school shooting. It isn’t, but it still feels as if it could be.
I’ve noticed that, when interviewed, Cregger doesn’t say exactly how his friend died. I think that’s a mark of respect on the director’s part. And part of that respect means recognising that falling drunk from a balcony is an absurd, bathetic end to a young man’s life.
Weapons may be funny, but a river of tears runs through it.
Tim Robins
Weapons is in cinemas now
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
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The comparisons to ‘Magnolia’ and ‘The Thing’ caught my eye as both are among my all time favourites. Having seen it yesterday, I don’t think ‘Weapons’ will end up in that category but for me all three movies represent film makers showing a laudable ambition to outdo their previous, well-received efforts and show audiences something they’ve never seen before. It’s too early to rank Cregger with PTA and Carpenter but on his current trajectory he could combine the best qualities of both directors. That’s an exciting prospect for me!