The delightfully nasty Weapons spirals in the wake of unimaginable loss
A town loses its children, then its cool in Zach Cregger's bold, funny, and endlessly scary follow-up to Barbarian.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Wouldn’t it be nice, comforting even, for all the terrible things that happen in the world to have one simple explanation? Something you can understand, something you can touch? This is the fantasy explored by Weapons, writer-director (and former Whitest Kids U’ Know member) Zach Cregger’s thrilling follow-up to Barbarian. An unthinkable tragedy befalls a suburban town, and the ensuing coping—ranging from uncontrollable emotions, relapsed addictions, stress dreams, obsessive behavior, and conspiratorial thinking—drives the film through its perversely delightful horrors. Tweaking the way that Roald Dahl fables are just a bit too scary for their young audiences, and the way that Stephen King tales reveal flourishing rot festering beneath the floorboards of the community center, Weapons confronts the primal fear of loss with a nasty sense of humor, shocking imagery, and an elegantly assembled ensemble.
This cast splits the film into perspective-driven chapters, as Weapons slowly reveals the fallout from all the children of Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) elementary class simultaneously arising at 2:17 AM and sprinting off into the night. Well, all but one child. The quiet, baffled Alex (Cary Christopher) is the sole survivor of the bizarre incident, a reminder to parents like Archer (Josh Brolin) of what they’ve lost and another complication to a question with no answer. As Cregger’s script unfolds, doubles back, and reveals new details around events the film has already shown, it’s more clever than terrifying, relying on its mystery and its likably frayed characters to propel a story that incorporates the wackiest tinfoil-hat thinking and most grounded emotional suffering spiraling out from the only things that arbitrarily rob Americans of classrooms full of kids: school shootings.
