Weapons

dir: Zach Cregger

2025

It was, at least for me, always going to be hard for this director to follow up his last, very excellent horror flick Barbarian. It was so good and so unexpected that, yes, okay, I demand, in full Karen mode not to speak to his manager but for him to make another solid, unexpected, unpredictable flick.

I guess he did that. It was successful, more successful than Barbarian financially, and it had ads on tv and on bus shelters in my strange neck of the woods.

So why didn’t I like it that much?

There are parts of the so-called “American Experiment” that, to the people outside of America, make it look utterly insane. I’m not going to lower myself to talk about the political stuff. The gun thing, the collective shoulder shrug after each new gun massacre, the thoughts and prayers and business as usual after classrooms get shot up, and countless children die, that makes them all look collectively fucking insane.

Weapons, perversely, pops us into this national psychosis, but has nothing to do with gun violence. It’s animated by something that almost seems like one of the tragedies alluded to, but instead takes it into an unpredictable yet unfortunately unproductive direction. Because of how insanely comical the ‘solution’ is, how outside of actual human experience, for me the flick itself becomes something of a shoulder shrug, where you wonder what the point was.

The set up is fine, the explanation is meaningless.

One particular night in an unremarkable Pennsylvanian town, a bunch of kids, all from the same 3rd grade primary school classroom go missing, all bar one, being Alex (Cary Christopher). All seventeen of the kids snuck out of their homes at exactly 2.17am, and started running in the same direction, with their arms out behind them.

Everyone thinks the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), must know something or be responsible. Everyone thinks Alex must know something, but he couldn’t be responsible, could he, and he’s not forthcoming with info.

What proceeds from here is six versions of a story of the events on a particular day, a month after the kids disappeared. So first we get the teacher’s version, and then as her section ends, it reverts back to a particular starting point for someone else to relate events from their perspective.

It’s not the first time such a film has been done that way. As each section gives more clarity and adds more perspectives, in theory we have a better idea of what might have happened, if the explanation is the end destination that matters above all else.

If that destination doesn’t matter, then each section, each character’s perspective is meant to give us far more of a sense of who these characters are beyond the scope of the plot. Mileage is going to vary so, so much for people, because if you don’t forget about the central ‘mystery’ for a while, it’s going to feel like pointless wheel-spinning otherwise.

Justine is the teacher who stands accused of something despite clearly not having done anything wrong. In no way does the flick ever imply she has something to do with whatever happened. It does show her in a horrible light all the same, because… I guess Julia Garner wanted to do some extra character work? She’s a great actor that delights in playing difficult characters (her work in Kitty Green’s films The Assistant and The Royal Hotel is top notch), but there’s something to be said for actors who aren’t pandering to be liked by an audience.

See, for me, a character like this, an alcoholic who, when faced with a difficult situation where a whole town has ostracised her, doubles down on her drinking and wants to bring other people down with her, that’s not condemnation: that’s like meeting an old friend. Long have I written about fuck-ups in movies, but this kind of shittiness, well, it’s right up my alley. She is not content to wallow in self-pity and the opprobrium wafting off of an entire town that hates her; she has to bring down a former lover who’s on the wagon because she doesn’t want to be lonely.

I mean, can you blame her? I mean, yes, I guess, but watching it was flat out hilarious / horrifying for me. The way she decides in the liquor store that one 1 litre bottle of vodka isn’t going to cut it tonight, so she buys two, well, I knew things were not going to go well for anyone around her. But in a later scene where she waves to a cop who reluctantly acknowledges her, I just knew they would do some dumb things together.

That cop, who definitely had a name, is played by Alden Ehrenreich. Now Alden Ehrenreich is not a household name: I doubt most people could pick him out of a line-up, and if you said his name out loud most people would think you were saying the name of someone who was probably a Canadian hockey player or the Minister for Gray Buildings in East Germany before the wall fell.

No, NO, I assure you, he’s all Hollywood. He was in a Coen Brothers movie, where his hick character couldn’t pronounce the one line of dialogue that he was given, being “Would that it ‘twere so simple” to his director’s satisfaction, despite multiple attempts. And he played a young Han Solo in Solo! So he’s clearly somebody(?)

Here he’s just a guy in recovery, married, trying to start a family, and then Justine can’t let that happen because she’s hated and lonely. The one thing misery seems to love more than company is bringing other people down with you, so that you’re not too lonely on the way to the bottom.

What’s this got to do with the central mystery? Won’t someone please think of the children?

Nothing. Later on we see everything from that day from his miserable perspective, since ironically enough Justine is not his nemesis, nor is the bottle: it’s this junkie character who accidentally keeps making his life an unsweetened hell.

We also see things from the junkie’s perspective, and why wouldn’t we? Thieving junkie scum are people, too.

Each iteration adds something different, and they’re all leading to a particular destination, which is, where are the children, why were they taken, and will they ever be saved?

The flick resists an allegorical reading; it’s not really about school shootings, it’s not about what you do when you’re a town pariah or how to deal with your grief either like a decent human being or an American. Even though there’s a (dumb) scene involving a dream sequence and a giant gun in the sky, it’s nothing at all like a meditation on America’s death-bound gun fetish.

It’s actually just a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

There is some humour in it, I don’t want it to sound like a humourless slog. It doesn’t take itself too seriously; it doesn’t come across as pretentious or ‘elevated’ in its horror trappings. It’s a far more successful horror film than last year’s Longlegs was, even though it treads somewhat of a similar path (though it’s far less about mass murder and family annihilations).

But it still felt somewhat lacking. The ultimate explanation is horrible, and makes your heart break for poor Alex, the kid who wasn’t taken, who is the one that suffers the most and for the longest time. That poor little bastard. He’s a champion, and he carries the whole film, and quite rightly the film’s resolution of its central quandary / evil monster comes at his hands, as it should be.

The flick is well made, well considered, horrific in its intent and its delivery, but it doesn’t have thematic depth or really that much meaning for me beyond stating the obvious that kidnapping children is bad, hurting people for selfish reasons, or any reasons, is bad, and people shouldn’t do it.

Wow, some powerful food for thought, eh?

But I guess plenty of horror films don’t have that much to say beyond “boo” in countless ways, and yet we lap it all up when it’s cleverly or propulsively packaged.

Performances are fine, cinematography fine, people wear shoes when they’re supposed to and put in solid work, and it’s horrifying, sort of, in many bits, and then it ends, and you wonder “I hope Alex will be okay, one day”, and you think “but he’s American, so probably not.”

Maybe that’s the real state of America that this flick exemplifies and marinates in: a lucid nightmare that none of them (or us) can seem to wake up from, one that only gets stranger as the years pass.

6 times it’s always anything but the guns out of 10

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I can make your parents hurt themselves. I can make them hurt each other. I can make them eat each other if I want to. Do I want to, Alex?” - Weapons