Intriguing and impactful, Weapons will certainly stick with me.
Listen at the podcast providers of your choice.
Industry buzz is a double-edged sword. It's never bad to get eyes and press about your movie, whether it's good or bad. Because folks won't go to see a movie if they don't know about it, and if there's one thing movie studios have struggled with recently, it's piecing together strong campaigns for original films meant for adults. And oddly enough...Warner Bros., a studio that seemed more content to shelve movies than distribute them, seems to have figured it out with two massive original premise R-rated movies crushing at the box office this year. First we had Sinners and now Zack Cregger's follow-up to Barbarian, Weapons.
And now the other edge of the hype comes in which is...the potential for disappointment. Because most movies don't come with an unintentional tagline like "Jordan Peele was so pissed about not getting the production rights for this movie due to his agent's double dipping that he changed representation." Which is, for me, one of the best endorsements any movie can get. So does Weapons live up to the hype? Kinda yeah!
The Setup
The movie takes place in the town of Maybrook Pennsylvania, where almost a month ago, 17 children from a single third grade class ran away from their homes at 2:17 a.m. and disappeared, save for one child named Alex. With tensions in the town reaching a fever pitch, a number of the residents including the children's teacher, a desperate father of one of the missing boys and a number of other local characters begin a desperate search for answers.
It's hard to pick a starting point with Weapons, because much like Sinners, I didn't throw out that comparison at random, Weapons doesn't operate or feel like a straight horror movie. I still think that's the proper classification, but the film also features a lot more character drama, humor and even grounded action beats before it explodes into full blown horror.
So let's highlight what makes this movie work before diving into what I think it's about.
Great Use of Narrative Structure
Part of this is how the film is constructed which is an interweaving series of perspectives ranging from the aforementioned teacher played by Julia Garner to a struggling drug addict who stumbles across some key information before they all slam into each other in a single story.
And I think this is a really strong choice for two big reasons: it allows for deep dives into our main players and helps build the movie's world and mystery.
I'll use Garner's teacher, Justine, as an example. First of all, I love this character. Instead of making Justine something akin to a martyr, which would be understandable considering she teaches third graders, she is messy as hell.
She's dealing with a lot of bullshit that isn't her fault, but we also see all of her most glaring faults laid bare. And since we only have her perspective we have a number of little mysteries that are hard to piece together. Cut to the next segment and we start to get more details about another character and how this tragedy is affecting them, and also get some answers from Justine's segment.
She's dealing with a lot of bullshit that isn't her fault, but we also see all of her most glaring faults laid bare. And since we only have her perspective we have a number of little mysteries that are hard to piece together. Cut to the next segment and we start to get more details about another character and how this tragedy is affecting them, and also get some answers from Justine's segment.
All of which weave in and out of character drama, horror and darkly funny jokes. It really captures the feeling of wanting clear cut answers, but only getting more confusing bits and pieces, while also highlighting everyone's complicated humanity.
Shot Selection
There's so much this movie gets right in terms of pure creepiness. We have small details like how the children run in the available footage with their arms at their sides like wings. It's both so deliberate and unnatural that it feels inhuman, especially when sustained over a long period of time. And then there's the shot selection, which might be perfect.
Why? Writer/director Zach Cregger keeps giving the audience jump-scare scenarios without providing the jump...sometimes.
I'll explain what I mean using a generic horror plot: a haunted house movie. In most modern haunted house movies, the director will typically do two things. Establish a sound and visual pattern, and then they'll break it.
So if I'm the director, I'll pan around the room a few times with little to no sound. And then we'll thrown in the a glimpse of something that shouldn't be there on the second of third pan after we hear a creak in a floorboard. Now we as the audience are all freaked out and then bam fourth pan the entity comes right at the camera.
What Cregger does is sit in that discomfort before the expected jump scare. He sits in that tension. And makes you wait just long enough to think that it's over...and then it isn't. He also misdirects the audience by giving them just enough to make them ask questions, but not filling in the blanks.
I cannot explain to you how creepy a single scene of watching a door was and that all comes down to direction and shot-selection.
Acting
If your narrative is going to shift perspectives multiple times, you need the acting talent to back it up. And everyone brought their A game. Which they needed to, because the script does it's very best to let the character details file in via showing not telling whenever possible. This is especially evident when two seasoned pros like Julia Garner and Benedict Wong are having a conversation and it's so clear what either of them is about to say before they're cut off or all of the words they're not saying when they start to talk and then abruptly shut up.
The actors and script also work really well together in how they present sympathetic, but very flawed individuals. A throughline for most of our leads is that they're in tension and looking for a release or an answer. So we can sympathize with their perspective even as they do bad things. For instance, Josh Brolin's father seems like pure rage until you see what this obsession with finding answers is costing him personally and professionally.
Everyone is so naturalistic and grounded that when some honest to goodness horror acting drops in (in a good way) it is suitably jarring.
What's It All About?
Writer/director Zack Cregger has been pretty forthright about what drove him to write Weapons. He was dealing with grief after losing his friend, comedian Trevor Moore, and Weapons is the script that came out.
So as much as the title and premise feel like an on the nose reflecting on gun violence in American schools, for me, the thematic focal point is about the power of grief, and how loss, fear and desperation can bring out the worst in all of us.
As I mentioned in the last section, almost every named character is dealing with an unresolved tension that may or may not be related to the central mystery. Garner's Justine and Brolin's Archer both want answers to the point that their lives are falling apart with Justine turning to alcohol and Archer wallowing in his loss by sleeping in his missing son's room.
Which is very on the nose when it comes to dealing with grief.
As much as grief can manifest in the obvious ways, including debilitating sadness, there's also a burning desire for answers and mountains of guilt that come with it as well. You want to know why this happened and if there's any mystery surrounding this traumatic event, what happened. And you'll probably mask your hurt with a lot of anti-social or self-destructive behavior because there's a void you're trying to fill.
This is why I think the inclusion of an addict as one of our POV characters is a great idea. Because his singular mindset and irrational and often illegal behavior isn't too far off from how Justine and Archer are behaving. They just have the rationale of being "the teacher's whose entire class went missing," and the "father of a missing child." It's also why the efforts to figure out what's going on only work through shared humanity and parties you'd expect to clash with one another working together, because grief or the mystery of what happened to these missing kids, is not something you can solve on your own.
That's not to say this is a definitive read on the movie, because hell I've got a few things to say about the main villain and what they represent, but for me, the emotional hook of this movie is capturing that flailing need for certainty and answers in a world that feels nonsensical and chaotic.
The Verdict: A Wild Ride
Intriguing and impactful, Weapons will certainly stick with me. 9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment