Given his credentials as a comedian and is a founding member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, writer-director Zach Cregger made a splash in the horror genre with 2022’s Barbarian, which would be best described as the worst-case scenario when renting an Airbnb. Being an acclaimed and commercial success, Barbarian was a difficult piece to write about without going into spoilers as it was a film driven by a non-linear structure that was all about subverting your expectations. Now with a bigger budget, it seems that Cregger is doing a similar approach with his latest feature, Weapons.
The opening minutes of Weapons establishes the central mystery right away as seventeen children from the same class simultaneously leave their homes and vanish during the middle of the night. As the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania set their sights on the class’s teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) as they believe she is involved in the children’s disappearance, she, as well as Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children, are trying to solve this mystery.
Whereas Barbarian used its non-linear structure to tell a cleverly disjointed three-act narrative, Weapons somewhat takes the Rashomon approach with the film being broken up into chapters, each focusing on the perspective of a single character. While you got the obvious players like Justine and Archer, who are experiencing this tragedy in their own way, from the former left in a depressive, drinking state to the latter who prioritizes his search for his mission son above everything else, you also have supporting players Alden Ehrenreich’s Officer Paul Morgan, who is wrestling with his own demons.
From characters who have a significant connection to the mystery to incidental players who have zero interest, most of the film plays out like a drama with the occasional tease of horror, or at least a jump scare. With its shifting of perspectives, the film does move at a slow pace with the two-hour-plus running time and for a while, you are left wondering what the film’s endgame is, until the final chapter unveils and all the lingering questions that each previous chapter presents are answered.
Considering the amount of Stephen King film adaptations that we are getting this from The Monkey to upcoming releases like The Long Walk, you do wonder if Zach Cregger is influenced by King’s storytelling. Weapons touches upon themes of grief and the loss of innocence and how a small town can react to such an incident, to the point it reveals a darker side. However, like King, Cregger also knows how to maintain a sense of humor, even during the film’s most disturbing and intense moments that is enhanced by an atmospheric score that Cregger co-composed with Ryan and Hays Holladay that gets under your skin.
