For as long as we’ve known about Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his 2022 blackly comic splatter sensation Barbarian, we have heard endlessly that it’s the supernatural horror genre’s epic equivalent to Magnolia––not exactly the most marketable elevator pitch, but one designed to make the average cinephile sit up and take notice. Cregger himself has done little to dissuade such comparison, citing PTA’s operatic Los Angeles drama as his biggest inspiration, and thanks to a mysterious marketing campaign, it’s arriving on screens shrouded in secrecy, coupled with only the vague promise of a bold vision from an emerging auteur. If knives do fittingly come out for Weapons, then it’s because Cregger has only nailed the sprawling, ambitious, genre-hopping nature of that ensemble drama without ever getting to grips with the emotions driving his flawed characters while, wherever possible, shying away from exploring their moral murkiness. It’s an entertaining film, but not a particularly resonant one considering the charged subject matter; it’s structured like a parlor trick, keeping one at a deliberate remove until working out how its constituent pieces fit together rather than caring about the people within them.
Cregger has insisted Weapons is a personal story that shouldn’t be read as a political allegory. This is a fairly bold statement when we’re almost immediately thrown into a town hall designed to echo those we’ve seen after school shootings, where we’re first introduced to a schoolteacher mired by conspiracy theories that she was the “witch” who was responsible for all but one child in her class disappearing overnight. This is Justine Grandy, who Julia Garner manages to define better than the script can; on the page she’s characterized as an enigma during the opening chapters, a symptom of Cregger’s choice to make everybody a mystery until you get the bigger picture.
Through Garner’s performance (one of her strongest since The Assistant) you get the lived-in feeling of a recovering addict who found structure and meaning in her life from a job from which the school principal (Benedict Wong) insists she takes time away. But the script very intentionally frames her as an unreliable narrator, her understandable nightmares after discovering the children she cares for have disappeared framed as hallucinations which underline her unstable nature. It’s a misdirect that’s easy to see through, and this inaugural chapter––Weapons‘ longest––suggests, distractingly, Cregger trying to mimic the unnerving intrigue of Barbarian’s opening scrawl.
If there is an unshakable issue with Weapons, it’s that we never feel the weight of the tragedy or impact it’s had on the town outside of that first meeting and the occasional glance of a missing poster. The only parent we spend any significant time with is Josh Brolin’s Archer Graff, a character presumably named after all the charts and graphs he, after examining as much Doorbell-cam footage as he can, uses to map exactly where the children disappeared. There’s a powerful film to be made about how grief can turn us into existential sleuths, trying to find some explanation for a tragedy beyond comparison––that film is called The Shrouds, and David Cronenberg lets you live in his protagonist’s headspace and contend with why conspiracy theories are so often adopted by people who live in emotional crises. Cregger only once allows you to see Archer as a grieving parent during his section, and that’s in an extensive dream sequence, where, if you’re like me, you’ll be distracted by his 8-year-old son having a Mad Max: Fury Road poster on his bedroom wall. The messiness of Archer’s emotions––those of any other character, for that matter––is flattened by Cregger’s need to focus on his mystery at all costs, even if it means adding greater depth or real-world resonance to the people caught up in it.
In later sections, this distancing from anything too controversial gets more pronounced when focusing on Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), Justine’s ex-boyfriend who falls into the mystery himself when trying to cover up footage of him beating a handcuffed suspect (Austin Abrams). That this is the rare instance of onscreen police brutality between a white officer and white victim suggests some self-awareness from Cregger––that to depict otherwise would mean having to engage in a dialogue about systemic racism which he’s too timid to confront. Considering how joyously Barbarian juggled its unsparing social satire with genre thrills, it’s a disappointment that he’s playing with kid gloves here, but this theme is invoked just as school shootings and far-right culture-war conspiracy theories are––through imagery alone, asking you to draw parallels when the story isn’t bold enough to call out and incorporate them directly.
Weapons is at its strongest when leaning directly into dark fairytale trappings. The opening and closing monologues from a child recounting the tragedy don’t recall Magnolia’s introductory voiceover so much as they do a ghost story told around the campfire, the final line being the most evocative closing statement of any recent horror film for how it reframes the story as the kind passed down between generations. The arrival of Amy Madigan as Gladys, the aunt of the only boy in Justine’s class who didn’t disappear, directly plays into fairytale tropes of the untrustworthy guardian trying to deceive children for sinister purposes. Madigan provides a desperately needed levity. Her midpoint introduction sees Weapons change to something closer in spirit to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, another appropriately campy update of this brand of fairytale storytelling, and revealed to me the film could have been more effective––albeit not as innovative––if framed solely from this perspective. Others may disagree––the sharp-left turn shatters the atmosphere which has been steadily built up––but this was the section where characterization felt most coherent, and most unburdened by lack of depth, to become the Barbarian-esque thrill ride for which fans of that movie had likely been waiting.
The final half-hour is entertainingly silly as hell and builds up to a riotously bloody climax you might call this Cregger’s “raining frogs” sequence, which I can imagine would be frustrating if you’re more invested in the world-building beforehand. With Weapons, there’s the sense Cregger falls victim to consciously trying to better his breakout hit, following a formula that was ill-suited to his characters and overcomplicating the simple thrills of a dark fairytale.
Weapons opens in theaters on Friday, August 8.
The post Weapons Review: A Sprawling Horror Tale Lacking Emotional Resonance first appeared on The Film Stage.
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