If you’ve been to the cinema in the past few months, specifically to watch a horror film, you might have seen an intriguing teaser for Zach Cregger’s sophomore film, Weapons, in which a child’s voice recalls the night that 17 children – all from the same third grade class – disappeared in the small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania. At 2.17am, they silently got out of bed, left their homes, ran off into the night, “and they never came back” leaving only ominous security footage and devastated parents in their wake. Warner Bros capitalised on this creepy premise (and Cregger’s breakout success with Barbarian) through a mysterious marketing campaign – de rigueur for any self-respecting modern horror – setting Weapons up to be the scare of the summer.
With a class of kids missing, suspicion falls to their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), an unassuming blonde with big glasses who is just as disturbed by the disappearance as the rest of the town. Leading the witch hunt against her is Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children, who is dead certain Matthew’s teacher knows more than she’s letting on despite any evidence to support this (we have no reason to distrust Gandy beyond her functioning alcoholism). There is one lead, in the form of the only pupil from the class who didn’t disappear, but Alex (Cary Christopher) isn’t talking, and the small-town cops are in way over their heads. Well-meaning Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) appeases the parents by letting Justine go, and with nothing left to lose, the teacher starts looking into the disappearance herself.
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The same spiky sense of humour Cregger displayed in Barbarian returns in Weapons, even kicked up a notch – there are striking moments of absurdity and physical comedy that undercut some of the more visceral unpleasantness (Cregger has an eye for the unsettling). Garner’s pleasingly undone performance as a woman on the brink of losing everything is nicely matched by Brolin’s gruff concerned father despite the thinness of both roles, though it’s Amy Madigan who steals the show when she pops up in the third act, even if her character is woefully undercooked. This lack of finesse speaks to a problem that Cregger also exhibited in Barbarian: he’s got style, a sense of humour and good casting instincts, but often the ideas in his films are more interesting than how he manages to realise them.
For example: there was speculation prior to Weapons’ release that the film might be an allegory for America’s ongoing failure to reckon with the epidemic of school shootings that have plagued the country for decades. While there is some evidence to support this in the film (an exchange between Justine and Archer, a striking but unexplained image Archer sees in his dreams) the imagery is a flimsy gesture rather than a meaningful statement, muddled in with a small-town witch hunt and a side plot involving a local cop’s run-in with a homeless drug addict. The peaks and troughs of the narrative are perhaps a side effect of its chapter structure, which shows the story from the perspective of various characters. Some are excellent, such as the one about left-behind pupil Alex, but others feel a little like filler material.
The approach has method – in pre-release interviews, Cregger revealed Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia was a big influence on Weapons, in that a cast of characters are bound by one common event, and we see the story unfold from each of their perspectives. Such a bold statement inevitably sets a filmmaker up for failure, and Cregger seems to have forgotten the thing that made Magnolia so great was the originality of PTA’s vision. Rather egregiously, the big reveal of Weapons is incredibly similar to that of Barbarian, and once you notice that striking rehash, it’s impossible to ignore other echos within the film which feel less like stylistic hallmarks and more like lazy fallbacks. His tendency to leave more questions than answers doesn’t help in that area – while there’s often nothing more disconcerting than the unknown, it becomes an easy way out when your ideas are already spookily similar to ones you peddled last time around.
It’s a shame that the film falls back on old ideas, because Weapons’ first half is genuinely intriguing and some of the film’s scares are effective in both shock value and bewilderment. It’s clear that Cregger has a cinematic spark, and his sick sense of humour is most welcome in these trying times, but two films in, it’s time to find a new bogeyman.