The highest mark I can give a movie is: I wish I had written that. And given my dalliances as a horror fiction writer, you can imagine that I’m saying that both with jealousy and awe. In the case of Weapons, this conflicting emotion was one of my primary thoughts among many as the credits rolled.
Zach Cregger emerged just a few years ago as a horror wunderkind with Barbarian, a film with a deceptively simple premise, “Airbnb but with an evil basement” that sprawled out in thrilling ways. That film immediately enshrined itself as a spooky season favorite and led with the immediate question that tends to float to the top of respective genre filmmaker speculation: can the sophomore effort live up to the freshman splash? This hasn’t panned out for many of his fellow emergent directors—certainly not Jennifer Kent, Ari Aster or David Robert Mitchell, even Jordan Peele has yet to equal his initial high mark. Thus it’s a relief that Cregger not only bucks this trend, but produces a film that betters his earlier work.
Oddly, Weapons also focuses a bit on a creepy sublevel in a midcentury house and centers itself around another simple idea: “What if a handful of kids ran out of their homes in the middle of the night and were never seen again?” Cregger takes this concept and molds a novelistic modern fairy tale in how that one event disrupts a community, its social order and the impact it has on specific citizens of the town of Maybrook; be it the children’s teacher (Julia Garner), an angry homebuilder father (Josh Brolin), an alcoholic cop (Alden Ehrenreich), or a drifter with substance abuse disorder (Austin Abrams). Each POV unfurls chapter-like, akin to a Stephen King bestseller, though given the specific sense of suburban decay, Peter Straub might be the better comparator. And as the viewer advances through the narrative, each perspective shift unlocks greater context to the preceding scene until a much larger tapestry is presents itself.
While many horror efforts share similar small town settings and parlay their monstrous underpinnings as a metaphor for the rot that lies underneath their environmental facade, Weapons is one of the few films of this stripe where you can feel the filmmaker taking his time to better establish an actual sense of place. Rarely do I want to peek around the corner of the screen and see what the local postman is up to or members of the city council, but there’s a vibrancy here that feels like there’s a full world that exists just beyond the viewer’s grasp. But that’s not to say what is presented primarly is any less worthwhile for it; on the contrary, it’s Cregger’s ability to withhold that allows Weapons to become an even richer text. It’s a film that tempts you to want to live in its world and noodle around in its marginalia and even, dare I say it, lore.
Structurally, Cregger has spoken as some length on the influence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia in his writing process. It doesn’t take much work to see how that turn of the century ensemble effort played as a significant model for Weapons to follow, from the sprawling cast, to how its narrative is divvied out, to the similarities between Ehrenreich’s hapless police officer and the one played by John C. Reilly there – bad mustache included. Beyond the surface similarties, there are key thematic ones too, including how Cregger similarly lends his focus to a cast of broken people whose paths continually cross like a braided knot. And of course, Weapons shares Magnolia’s sense of the biblical as well, and while there are no frogs falling from the sky there is an undeniable reference to the good book throughout that may further unlock the film’s hidden secrets for the most obsessive viewer (of which I’m very tempted to become one, I have to admit).
All that to say, it’s also a rather frightening film at points. The initial imagery of the children running from their homes to a backing track of George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” creates its own chilling effect at the outset, but as the film’s antagonist begins to slowly surface, this gives Cregger great latitude to play both with the eerie and a few jumpscares (though they are surprisingly sparse for a major studio horror release). More than any recent horror film, Weapons feels like it picks up the specific filmmaking cues of George Romero – particularly in its third act – while producing a subtler undercurrent of the political that only becomes truly apparent thanks to a specific visual signifier. He does all of this while also melding it to, to my everlasting delight, the visual language of Raymond Carver. There are gorgeous shots of street lights bouncing off of these single and double-story neighborhood homes that look like they were ripped right off the current editions of his collections, and if one were to chase the etymology of the Magnolia influence back to Short Cuts…well, the dots are easy to connect. But maybe that’s my emergent obsession talking.
Still, Weapons. What a picture. The year’s best horror film and that’s really saying something given the competition. To say the least, Cregger is the real deal and for my money is likely the guy who can finally inherit John Carpenter’s horror master crown.
*Also, shoutout to Whitmer Thomas for being in both this AND the year’s best comedy in Friendship. I guess he should just be in everything.