Following up a bona fide horror cracker is no enviable task as many directors will tell you. For every stunning debut that manages to rewrite the rulebook, you’ll find a sophomore effort that disappointingly flounders as if the auteur involved blew all their good ideas on their first movie. However, over the last decade or so, there’s been a string of genre mavericks who have managed to buck the trend and deliver on their promise and the latest in this over achieving list is Zach Cregger.
Lest you’ve somehow forgotten, Cregger was responsible for the narrative shuffling masterpiece, Barbarian, that saw a slow, dread infused, unbearably tense build up ultimately give way to utter lunacy as the movie relentlessly pull more rugs than a crazed toupée thief. Well, now we’ve got Weapons; a movie that not only aims to ladle on the suffocating tension as it gradually unveils another inhuman atrocity lurking in the midst of suburbia, but hopes to repeat the trick of jumbling up the story to keep us hopelessly off balance. Sic em, Zach.
At 2:17 A M. seventeen children all from the same class in school in the town of Maybrook got out of their beds, left their houses and ran off into the night and apparently vanish without trace. Obviously, the town gets into an understandable uproar and matters are made even more suspicious when it’s discovered that only a single child, Alex, managed to avoid the bizarre malady that overcame the class taught by Justine Gandy. After a month of searching and interviewing, the police remain confident that Justine had nothing to do with the mass disappearance, but the growing mob mentality of the grieving patents unsurprisingly don’t agree. With disgruntled dad Archer Graff leading the charge, Justin finds that the witch hunt she’s enduring is all getting too much – but things are about to get ever weirder.
As we pick up from that one month marker, we follow the unraveling story from the points of view from some of the people deeply involved and even a couple that seemingly have nothing to do with anything. Justine thinks that if she could just talk to Alex, she might be able to uncover something that everyone else has somehow missed; Archer continues his own investigation by scouring door cameras, desperately trying to figure out some pattern; local recovering alcoholic cop Paul finds he has his own problems as ex-girlfriend Justine looks for a shoulder to lean on; and local drug addict, James, may stumble upon a massive clue while on a constant hunt to fund his next fix. All of the above (and a few more besides) find themselves drawn into the mystery either as wannabe detectives desperately trying to uncover the unbelievable truth, or as unwitting pawns who become tragic cogs in a hideous machine. Will anyone manage to solve this thing, and even if they do, can they actually do anything to stop it?
For the most part, while I’m pleased that horror has gained a large amount of respectability over the past fifteen years, I have found myself yearning for them to cheer up at little. Yes, the brooding atmospheres, barely concealed allegories and downbeat endings have given us plenty to chew on, but sometimes I just want drop the furrowed brow and just let shit go crazy. Well, Zach Cregger not only seems to agree, but with Weapons he also have found the sweet spot that lay between dark brooding films like Hereditary and The Babadook and the hyperactive freak-outs of Malignant and Evil Dead Rise that are not only very self aware of their own ridiculousness, but play on it. That’s not to say that Weapons is a horror comedy, bit there’s something very 80s about its anything goes attitude to what would be, in other hands, an incredibly serious story.
Something else I noticed about Weapons is that when compared to Cregger’s earlier Barbarian, there’s seems to be a progression in the writer/director’s style that seems nicely familiar to the leaps and bounds made by Quentin Tarantino between Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The first was a scrappy, raw, utterly unpredictable film that gleefully fucked with its own timeline that felt almost like an experiment, whereas the second film is smoother, more assured and deals with a similar, overlapping storytelling style that feels way more confident. Where Barbarian bounced forward and backwards in time by years to tell its twisted story, Weapons chooses to strip away at its central mystery layer by layer by telling the story up to a certain point from one person’s point of view, and then switches away to focus on another, answering and creating more questions as it goes.
If it sounds suspiciously like I’m deliberately avoid as many plot details as humanly possible, then you’ve probably already guessed that my advice to you is to go into Weapons as bereft of any prior knowledge as you can as a major part of its charm is literally watching the plot gradually get ever more outlandish until you realise that you’re actually watching a modern, suburban-set, Grimm’s fairy tale that whips you round like an unsafe rollercoaster. In fact, a major part of the fun here actually comes from untangling all the various bits and pieces to sees what, if any, significance they have to the greater story. A bandaged finger, a house with newspaper taped on the windows, a word painted on the side of a car, dreams of a old woman with lipstick smeared over her lips – any one of them could unravel things or just lead to more conundrums as Cregger rips up the playbook to keep us off balance. He’s ably supported too by a cast who genuinely seem to be relishing playing horribly flawed characters caught in a claustrophobic web. Julia Garner continues her impressive year of bring married to a werewolf and heralding a cosmic planet eater by playing the teacher at the centre of a witch hunt who, rather than being a virtuous goodie-goodie, drinks like a fish and messes up other people’s lives in order to discover the truth. Likewise, Josh Brolin’s grief-wracked father also steers into obsessive territory without a thought of others and both amusingly end up causing yet more damage as they pick their way to the middle of this narrative maze.
However, when the time comes for Cregger to turn up the horror, he does so in varied fashion. When he’s not presenting lurid dream sequences with effective jump scare endings, he’s unleashing frenzied scenes of chaos involving characters transformed into violent berzerkers whose eyes bulge alarmingly from their sockets. But also, expect Amy Madigan’s hauntingly garish Aunt Gladys to be the hot ticket for this year’s most unorthodox Halloween costume – and let’s not forget the film’s unfeasibly creepy central image of the children, running through those night time streets with their arms stretched out to the side.
Horror aficionados have been eating impossibly well this year and with Weapons, that hearty feast looks to continue. However, while people will show up locked and loaded looking for deranged twists and popcorn shedding scares, it’s those stealthy laughs that make Cregger’s second movie the total package as he fully weaponizes the weird and runs with it as fast as he can – presumably with his arms outstretched to the side…
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