Just over a month after it premiered in cinemas, Weapons is now available to rent from the comfort of your home (or hotel room, car, airplane, etc.). Zach Cregger’s hit horror film, a follow-up to his equally buzzy Barbarian (2022), captivated critics and audiences alike, earning a stellar Rotten Tomatoes score and staying atop the box office for weeks thanks to its canny combination of frights, chuckles, and over-the-top revelations. Cregger’s horror epic is every bit as good as the hype suggests, and if you missed it at the theater, now’s the perfect time to see what everyone’s been talking about.
A Different Approach to the Horror Genre
Undeniably the work of a filmmaker who’s had a big hit and now has carte blanche to do whatever he pleases, Weapons is bookended by a smartly employed voiceover filling us in on what we need to know before the proper story gets going. The narration, delivered by a young girl with lots of “like” and “totally” thrown in for good measure, is at once amusing and unsettling. Over a black screen, we’re told that, one night, all but one student from Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) third grade class got up from their beds at 2:17 a.m. and left their house, never to be seen again. Surveillance footage captures the kids fleeing in one direction, their arms outstretched, but that’s where the clues stop.
The opening minutes of Weapons brilliantly upend audience expectations. Many directors would have spent an entire movie on the above setup alone, but Cregger gets the investigation and aftermath out of the way in the first two minutes. The plot properly begins several months after the disappearances, when public rhetoric against Justine has reached a fever pitch and parents seem to be craving blood more than answers. From there, Cregger divides the film into character-titled chapters. We follow Justine for a while, then we follow her sort-of ex-boyfriend, a police officer named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) as he contends with his fiancée (a terrifying June Diane Raphael, stealing the movie with only three scenes) and a drug addict (Austin Abrams) who threatens to completely undo Paul’s already fraying reality. We meet Archer (Josh Brolin), who at first vilifies Justine for his child’s disappearance but eventually becomes her unlikely ally. And then, of course, there’s Aunt Gladys, played by an unrecognizable and awards-worthy Amy Madigan.
Cregger modeled Weapons’ structure after Paul Thomas Anderson’s Altman-inspired Magnolia (1999), a trick which largely pays off despite one passage which is too directly indebted to Anderson’s film to work on its own. If there was any thought, after Barbarian, that Cregger might’ve been a flash in the pan, that’s put to rest here. Weapons is an extraordinarily accomplished horror film, one in which every frame oozes an unshakeable dread.
Weapons Is Almost Perfect
It helps that Cregger has an ear for dialogue and a way with actors. He captures perfectly the lonely, hopeless feeling of a small-town bar, which feels as stifling as the sunny suburban homes inhabited by a few of the characters. Garner, playing a surprisingly barbed and unlikable character, is as good as she’s ever been. Brolin, too, evokes a haunting image of a father desperately trying to bury his grief. His reading of the simple line, “I’m good,” when asked by a fellow grieving parent how he’s holding up is one of the most layered pieces of performance this year.
Weapons is nearly perfect, although there are a few indulgences which keep it from unequivocally achieving that status. An oddly placed image of a firearm seems parodic rather than thought-provoking, and considering how the film develops after that scene, it doesn’t make much thematic sense. And despite a terrific closing shot and line, one can’t be blamed for desiring a teensy bit more character resolution after the crazy-go-nuts climax, which is entertaining in a go-for-broke fashion even as it betrays some of the movie’s more interesting ideas. There is also a bit too many heavily made-up, gurning faces of the Insidious variety, but Cregger gets some points for tying this into the ultimate revelation (albeit thinly).
But it seems churlish to complain when Cregger has delivered a movie so original and so exciting as Weapons. He’s clearly a filmmaker with much to say, but he’s one of the rare ones who possesses the eloquence to express himself. It will be a delight to see where his career takes him from here, especially if it guarantees us sleepless nights.
