When all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.
In a year clogged with different varieties of horror—from elevated darlings and classical surprises soaring high or franchise cash-grabs skulking into theaters under cover of darkness—"Weapons" seemed poised to stand out from the pack like a blood-soaked thumb, its marketing campaign promising the kind of visceral, boundary-pushing experience that horror devotees whisper about in reverent tones.
And while it does so, you should expect A LOT of caveats.
If Barbarian’s narrative weaponized mistrust, paranoia, hubris, misperception, the intricate layers behind survival and the difficulty and self-destruction of men willing to prove women wrong by any means necessary, this more or less takes the framework of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale and applies it to a modern horror context, taking the structural chicanery of Magnolia and putting it in service of a magnetic drip-feed mystery plot that faints a tricksy labyrinthine structure before revealing something more straightforward. Despite being deceptively simple yet layered, it earns props for its avoidance on cookie-cutter material, resulting in a Rashomon-style narrative structure that leaves no effort to smooth out jagged edges and only just balances out playing with our expectations and delivering on sheer unpredictability. It becomes its own kind of deranged children’s story, one where fracturing the audience’s sense of narrative authority until enough beats are laid bare make for an odd but bold choice and the frequent sleights of hand and rug-pulls never feel arbitrary, because even as it denies us closure, it’s never boring enough to keep us away from the screen.
To be frank with it, though, none of the movie’s themes explored here aren’t very subtle. Outside the usual dichotomy between physical weapons being conjured to do one’s bidding or emotional weapons willing to be exploited at the cost of someone’s absentminded grief, there are other tantalizing, overlapping, irreducible details of symbolic potentiality between internet sleuthing culture, the bystander effect, boundary crossing, bureaucracy’s incompetence snd the reasonable futility of witch hunts. What all these have in common….points to the very hook of the movie, the missing kids, being a red herring; they’re all layers on top of layers poking at our inability to unionize in the face of tragedy rather than constantly pointing fingers and looking for someone to blame (which is a nigh-constant reality). The reliance on staggeringly incompetent police and willfully ignorant citizens to help sell the appeal on “being sick with consumption” in a bid to cope isn’t anything new in these types of stories, yet the handling of these tropes ooze enough palpable weariness to be timely but only just feel cohesive.
Final results show a patchwork quilt of promising ideas and stylish set pieces stitched together with gore-soaked threads.
As it probably has been explained countlessly at this point, perhaps the most obvious point of contention here is our villain; sure, the central conflict is well-executed but the landing doesn’t completely stick due to the antagonist’s lack of a clear purpose or compelling motivation, making their role feel less impactful than it should. What’s maddening about this is one little tweak could’ve escalated both her and the structure exponentially and given the not-so-subtle allegory for gun violence, it’s not even a hard fix. Imagine if she were building a hive-mind army to avenge a centuries-old injustice; as is, the victims not being weaponized to carry out a specific purpose beyond inadvertently antagonizing the occupants of the town for their own shits and giggles and pure apathy for the well-being of others does help strengthen the allegory on its own….
….but at the cost of the dramatic weight previously built upon and rushing the final act to a denouement both satisfying and one that debatably renders the entire mystery and witch hunt, not pointless, but empty.
Zach Cregger’s directing is bloody hypnotic, fully in command of the unsettling atmosphere in a manner both operatic and oppressive. Like a hallucinatory metronome, he measures each cut and composition for maximum psychological disruption and like a gambler reaching his high and gradually coming down, he marinates in the cacophony of both extremes.
The small town suburbia production design harbors perhaps the most claustrophobia and intimacy out of this feature outside of the story; in this suffocating, airless cocoon of neighborly dread, every individual location, no matter how sparingly or frequently used, seemed designed to serve as a proscenium of creeping malaise. Very tight, heavily reliant on its swelling surrealist landscape and inflated by an atmosphere that wraps around you like a suspenseful cloak, it does plenty of the heavy lifting in supplying the calorie-free tension it boasts. Only possible downside to this would be the worldbuilding; once you pick apart the what, how and why of it all, the more you notice places where the logical or fantastical joints don’t quite align. I appreciate the film not making everything easy for us to dissect but it’s possible that, to me, this was so committed to abstraction that the gravitational force holding the story together nearly turned itself off at multiple instances; this can come across a little too lofty and open-ended for its own good without needing to anchor itself.
Getting the cinematographer behind Everything Everywhere All At Once was genius. Beyond just that of a technical flex, Larkin Seipie centers nearly every shot, finding and exploiting the eeriest camera angle in damn near every scene while jolting around like a kid on Moon Shoes. With the film’s visual language and aesthetic being baroque and clinical, the precision of mixing shallow focus with long tracking shots with each sequence feels like a ghost staring into the symmetrical face of madness itself and Joe Murphy’s editing helps further aid the distortion to the film’s benefit.
Pacing is a weapon all its own here, there’s a delicate balance between genuine dread and playful pitch-black humor that masters this tonal tightrope without stumbling off the high wire and losing its footing, costume design has a finite sense of muted exaggeration to color symbolism within and out the lines with the characters’ clothing, sound design is downright cruel and meticulous actively mastering its abject silences and sharp noises without resorting to cheap jump scares…..most of the time and Hays and Ryan Holladay, with Zach Cregger’s help also, branches a score so minimalist and maximalist at the same time that the eclectic mix seeps into your marrow and elevates the unease tenfold.
Not that this needs mentioning also but it passes the R-rating test with flying colors, gradually upping the violence to a wince-inducing level and mostly succeeding at giving the chaos a meaning.
Similar to Magnolia, the ensemble of characters here standout moreso through battle of attrition than actively being three-dimensional. Still, they’re just interesting enough to warrant understandable plights and overcome rather questionable dialogue choices; plus, being linked by luck, coincidence and by the way their lives seem parallel or bleed into each other heightens the focus on character callbacks. Supported by subtle, nuanced, layered performances from the cast, everyone does a solid job with what they’re given and I can’t pick one person in particular who overshadows the rest.
Still, even in its slipperiest moments, "Weapons" is never less than thrilling to look at, to listen to, to exist inside of. A tantalizing set-up that doubles down on the strength of its ensemble cast, camerawork and score, only a somewhat spotty narrative if you look through the cracks prevent this from truly spreading its wings (or arms in this case) and soaring.
