Review: Weapons Is Terrifying, Gruesome, Gasp-Inducing Fun
Zach Cregger delivers a chilling vision of modern horror in his gripping missing-kids thriller “Weapons.”
In search of seventeen missing third-graders — all of whom rose from their beds at 2:17 a.m. the same night, ran from their homes out into the dark, and then vanished — the desperate adults in Zach Cregger’s chilling Weapons go knocking on strange doors, and creeping down hallways they might be wiser to avoid.
Weapons relies heavily, and fruitfully, on the suspense of “Don’t go in there! Oh no, she’s going in there.” The filmmaker’s thrilling Barbarian similarly showed a penchant for sending characters down dark, winding paths against their better judgment.
That film, a steady descent into the terrors awaiting an Airbnb guest who arrives to find a strange Skarsgård already staying in the house, consistently tops itself with nasty surprises behind every closed door. Yet, the deeper that intrepid guest Tess descends into the hellscape, the more urgently she has to keep plowing forward into the madness, no turning back.
In Weapons, bizarre turns await, and there’s no turning back because kids’ lives are at stake. The strong sense of urgency derived from a classroom full of missing children propels the plot and their frazzled teacher, Justine Gandy (a superb Julia Garner), who is determined to find answers and clear her name as the lead suspect in the mass disappearance.
Of all the children in town, only those from Justine’s class vanished into the night. Why? What happened in her classroom, a shouting mob of concerned parents, led by building contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), demands to know.
Weapons doesn’t plow blatantly into politics, but places Justine squarely in the sights of a vicious witch hunt. A seemingly conscientious educator under fire from a community whose children were there one moment, and gone the next, Justine buckles under the pressure of becoming the town pariah.
She hits the bottle, starts racking up reckless decisions, peeking through windows, and stalking the one little boy in her class, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher, also excellent), who did not go missing.
Enveloped in hauntingly quiet atmosphere, the story unfolds Rashomon-style, in overlapping chapters, each told from a different character’s perspective. The successive chapters add further detail to the puzzle until, finally, the full harrowing picture comes into view, the mystery solved.
Cregger and crew mount the mystery, the big picture, and the details meticulously — especially in the crack timing of jump scares and foreboding silences.
From nightmare glimpses of a face in the ceiling, to the creeping anticipation provoked by a front door that opens ever so slowly to reveal only shadow, Larkin Seiple’s masterful cinematography and the taut editing by Joe Murphy (Barbarian) continually amplify the air of dread.
But the movie isn’t just dread and silence. As a child narrator (Scarlett Sher) pronounces at the top, “a lot of people die in a lot of weird ways” in this story, and Cregger doesn’t turn the camera away from the excruciating bodily harm inflicted by blade, bludgeoning, or firearm.
The film gets creative with the kills, and with its references to other films — from Halloween and The Shining to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And, much like Barbarian, the movie constantly tops itself with gasp-worthy reveals.
Robustly funny in its own macabre and gruesome fashion, Weapons marches inexorably, no-turning-back to the edge, saving its most gasp-worthy reveal for a climax that gleefully embraces the chaos.
Weapons (★★★★☆) is rated R and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
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