In Barbarian, his solo screenwriting and directorial debut, Zach Cregger gave us one of the most watchable horror films in recent times, transforming a generic premise into a truly captivating, suspenseful and thematically rich story.
Barbarian, released with a rather flimsy promotional campaign, quickly became a phenomenon, finding favour with even the most staunch horror aficionados. Barbarian’s treatment of horror — which was much more than simply jump scares and bloodcurdling screams — heralded the arrival of Cregger as an exciting new voice in a genre which has not always been as inventive as its potential has demanded.
Three years later, Cregger is back with Weapons, a more lavishly mounted, studio-backed enterprise led by big names (Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Benedict Wong). Post Barbarian, the expectations from Cregger have been high, and in his sophomore directorial, he delivers on most counts.
For starters, Cregger turns almost every narrative device and horror film trope on its head. He starts off by letting a child — who we never see and who remains unnamed — narrating what shattered the harmonious co-existence of the somewhat tightly-knit community in small-town Maybrook. The use of such an unconventional narrator is both interesting and unsettling, setting the tone for the offbeat path that the film will subsequently follow.
When it opens, we find a town in the middle of a collective breakdown, struggling to fit together the pieces of what has torn asunder a number of families. In the middle of the night — 2:17am to be precise — 17 kids, all of them belonging to a single section of Grade 3 in Maybrook Elementary — run out of their homes into the darkness, never to be seen again. The parents are predictably devastated, the town is left groping for answers and the cops are flummoxed. The needle of suspicion — particularly on the part of the grieving parents — points at Justine Grandy (Julia Garner), the teacher of that particular class, and the quiet and introverted Alex (Cary Christopher), the only child from that section who didn’t disappear that fateful night.
One of Weapons’s big wins lies in the fact that instead of opting for a straightforward narrative, it splinters the story into a sort of anthology format, following the same set of events that take place after the disappearance, but telling them from different perspectives. The film opts for the structure of following a character up to a point and then cutting to another player, where the viewer revisits specific events from a differing perspective. Among them are Justine, Archer (an aggrieved and often violent father, played by Josh Brolin, whose child is one among the missing), Marcus (Benedict Wong as the principal of Maybrook Elementary), Paul (a disturbed cop, played by Alden Ehrenreich) and local drug addict James (Austin Abrams), who unknowingly becomes the one who holds the key to the mystery.
The primary allure of Weapons lies in its hook of leading the audience on a journey where the viewer is aware that whatever is unfolding on screen has roots both dark and gory, but is not privy to the information of what has brought it on and what it would lead to. This is the kind of film that worms its way into your brain and makes itself at home.
An early assembly emphasises a fear-stricken community that wants to know what happened, the scale and strangeness of the incident making those answers difficult to even guess. There is a bit of The Leftovers — the TV series, which over three seasons showed New Yorkers trying to make sense of, and also build a new life after a section of its population mysteriously vanishes — felt in that processing of the unknown, but Cregger also taps into a collective terror, manifesting a kind of mass hysteria which remains largely silent but explodes at certain points. When it does, the repercussions are disturbingly grisly.
Cregger writes and subsequently intercuts his scenes in such a way that the tension is gradually built until your posterior is perilously close to leaving the edge of your seat, choosing to release the pent-up hysteria either through a gory resolution or a moment that ends in humour. In the Friday evening show I was in, the shrieks of horror were equally matched by peals of (almost relieved) laughter, making Weapons a wholesome experience enhanced by community viewing.
The use of humour in horror — let’s just call it ‘hum-hor’ and not Bollywood’s cash cow ‘horror comedy’ — is a potent storytelling device, and Cregger makes use of it generously in his final act. While I enjoyed it and felt that it elevated his material and took it in a new direction, there can be members in the audience who may not consider it to be a satisfactory payoff.
What did feel a tad disappointing was the rather predictable — if not banal — reason for the film’s big mystery. But the surprise appearance of a key character — who has been kept away from the film’s promotions — and the subsequent horror unleashed, made up for it to a large extent. Aunt Gladys, modelled on a mix of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight and, more recently, Nicolas Cage in Longlegs, has made Amy Madigan an instant horror icon.
Cregger has openly admitted that his inspiration for several scenes in Weapons has been Stanley Kubrick’s iconic horror fest The Shining. Weapons is no The Shining, but as one of the most potent horror films in recent times, it has its place right up there.
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