Horror’s in a tricky spot right now. It’s one of many final surviving genres the place unique materials can nonetheless thrive, but solely when there’s a way that what we’re being offered isn’t only a movie, however a sensation – an invite into a very unmissable cultural second. It wasn’t sufficient that Longlegs had Nicolas Cage falsetto singing in wild cosmetic surgery make-up. That 2024 movie, we were repeatedly warned, was evil all the way down to its atomic construction, as if it had been a little bit of satanic coding penned by the Zodiac Killer himself.
Weapons, which centres on the eerie disappearance of a category of schoolchildren, has equally tried to latch onto the texture and aesthetics of true crime, centered on the conflicting testimonies of a grieving mother or father (Josh Brolin’s Archer) and the category’s instructor Justine (Julia Garner). It’s a wildly efficient advert marketing campaign. But I can’t assist however suppose audiences are being barely misled right here. Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022’s Barbarian is definitely as bizarre, depraved, and enjoyable – what it’s not, nonetheless, is the chilly, nightmare headf**ok we’ve been advised it’s.
Cregger has a background in sketch comedy, having as soon as been within the acclaimed troupe The Whitest Youngsters U’Know, and maintains an intuitive sense of how a scare needs to be structured (the identical as a joke: set it up, string it out, land the punchline). He additionally is aware of precisely when to puncture the stress. When Justine is being chased round a gasoline station retailer by one thing manic and threatening, you hear a cashier’s voice within the background yelp, “Get out of my retailer!” With out a beat, she barks again: “F***ing HELP me.”
Weapons is break up into chapters, illuminating every character’s perspective on the occasion and its aftermath. Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia as an affect, but it feels extra in observe like one thing Stephen King would possibly cook dinner up, as small-town troubles and the extra phantasmagorical fortunately rub shoulders. Archer suspects Justine is aware of one thing she’s not telling the authorities. In spite of everything, it occurred so all of a sudden and but appeared so rigorously orchestrated. Each considered one of Justine’s class, save for one little boy named Alex (Cary Christopher), bought off the bed at 2:17am, walked out of their entrance door, and bumped into the darkish with their arms outstretched like a moth pinned to a board.
Everybody’s a detective beneath such unfathomable circumstances: Alex, Archer, Justine, cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), the college principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), and James (Austin Abrams), a neighborhood drug addict. And none of them are notably likeable, save the child. Justine has a historical past {of professional} overreach. Paul is outright pathetic, in a approach Ehrenreich captures with laser accuracy. Marcus is a Disney grownup.
Cregger isn’t too occupied with bearing the heavy hand of trauma metaphor down on his viewers. However Weapons doesn’t want it, since its scares are rooted largely within the incongruous nature of what we’re being proven – all finally neatly defined by its remaining reel. Whether or not it’s the reply you need is tough to say, however I used to be more than pleased with it, largely as a result of it hints at how deeply rooted Cregger’s work is within the classics of Seventies horror cinema.
On the similar time, he’s been upfront about how the odd approach these youngsters run is subconsciously influenced by the Vietnam battle {photograph} generally known as “Napalm Lady”, and that barbaric lack of innocence feeds into the movie’s very darkest corners. There are echoes of the Satanic Panic, the mass hysteria during which lecturers similar to Justine had been falsely accused of the ritualistic abuse of their college students, and the group fallout after a mass capturing. But, its climactic picture is a pointed, and unexpectedly humorous, act of intergenerational warfare that reveals Weapons’s true message: nobody’s ever actually desirous about the kids.
Dir: Zach Cregger. Starring: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan. Cert 18, 128 minutes.
‘Weapons’ is in cinemas from 8 August
