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Weapons (Zach Creggar)

Creggar's Barbarian was a promising, often admirable debut that never fully came together. So the question for Weapons is whether Creggar fulfilled that early promise, while the answer is a bit murky. Creggar, first off, crafts great openings full of mystery and dread--that was true for Barbarian and it's equally true here, where all the kids but one in a single classroom get up in the middle of the night at the exact same time, run out the door, and never return. The trouble for both films is that Creggar isn't great at providing an explanation equally inventive, relying on familiar genre tropes that explain the narrative but never live up to the opening idea. So Weapons is narratively exciting and disappointing, just like Barbarian.

That said, Weapons is also a more cohesive and satisfying experience overall. One major problem with Barbarian is its inability to meld its parts: it's told from two different perspectives that subdivide the movie, both of which have quite different tones: a creepy, subtle tone in the first half, and a comedic, satirical one in the second. Neither part is integrated, they merely dovetail. Weapons solves this problem through amplification: it tells its story from multiple different perspectives, with one minor player in one section becoming the POV of the following section. Each section fills in the one before it while setting up the next, so everything is integrated from jump. That means Creggar can work in tonal shifts more organically since the tone of each section is suggested by its POV character. He can also raise tones and carry them across sections, so that the movie becomes a complex layer of them. That's the movie's biggest success, actually, its ability to marry the sombre, the scary, and the comedic in increasingly complex ways that pay off majorly in the climax, which is in turn one of the creepiest, absurdest, funniest things you'll see at the end of a horror film. The thing is a triumph of tone, and that control over tone and storytelling is Creggar's biggest advancement on Barbarian.

Creggar also wisely abandons the social commentary that Barbarian tossed in so cavalierly and never did much with. There are a lot of avenues for banal social commentary in a movie like Weapons, and the movie never bothers with any of them. The movie also never bothers to explain much of its central concept, and while this is fine because long familiarity with the genre elements will tell you everything that the film doesn't, it’s also the surest evidence of how Creggar uses genre tropes as a crutch to help him past imaginative difficulties. The title and the imagery supporting it are suggestive and loaded, but the movie never explains enough to lend them any weight. It makes you wonder why it bothered with the idea at all?

This is fundamentally an expertly crafted, satisfying horror film (even the jump scares here are excellent) that walks a tightrope of tones. It's also a movie whose story is not as interesting as it could've been. So Weapons doesn't fulfill the promise of Barbarian, it just refines the experience into a better version of the same kinda thing. Very much worth watching, but not bound to redefine the modern horror film.

Weapons often feels more insignificant as the picture progresses, cribbing both it's look & tone from a most surface-level reading of Magnolia (and the tabla-infused soundtrack to Punch-Drunk Love), stapled together with the kind of horror tropes that somebody of that type of comprehension could muster with a more than ample budget (the needle drops here are egregious and simple to the point of dumbfoundedness), with nothing else to really even declare.

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Leaving the door explicitly open to the threat of of a needle-wielding addict who jabs a cop on TWO occasions, that cop, who, directly worries about being infected with AIDS or hepatitis, only to cut to another scene of that cop having violent sex with another character is baffling, and really the kind of one-eyed notion that bears little payoff to either three characters, nor to the threats/dangers surrounding them. While Benedict Wong's character watches a nature program about invasive fungus taking control over ants, only to reiterate what is already happening to the main victims, is likewise Screenwriting 101, though, again, not a deep thought that pays off in the least. I cannot begin to explain the main villain without ceding to the "othering" that seems to be happening in horror at the moment (as with Longlegs, and the 80's-era worshipping in general) about a character so outside of anyone's realm that, of course they are complete monsters who are between gender norms and are capable of just about anything terrible beyond imagination. Not as dubious as an AR-15 floating above a house in a dream within a dream that leads to a jumpscare (obviously!), but pretty bad form without any real teeth to speak of. Failed comedy guys breaking into horror in a BIG way is less an actual thing than most executives probably banked on it being (at least to a rational moviegoing world, but confused or not, we are all still buying tickets, so we all lose), but there can only be one Tarantino or one Jordan Peele or one Nirvana or whatever. Also, I can't say the audience even has sympathy for any of the actual children here, who they are or why they matter, but again, the big finish is supposed to make that all better, right? Also, Brolin's kid was the unharmed kid's class bully? What?!

On the brighter side, Creggar did manage to make Whitmer Thomas seem, visually, like human being for a few seconds, so it wasn't an entire loss.

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pianocrash wrote: cannot begin to explain the main villain without ceding to the "othering" that seems to be happening in horror at the moment (as with Longlegs, and the 80's-era worshipping in general) about a character so outside of anyone's realm that, of course they are complete monsters who are between gender norms and are capable of just about anything terrible beyond imagination.

This is merely conventional. Witches are often represented as androgynous. But it speaks to Creggar's over-reliance on convention.

pianocrash wrote: While Benedict Wong's character watches a nature program about invasive fungus taking control over ants, only to reiterate what is already happening to the main victims, is likewise Screenwriting 101, though, again, not a deep thought that pays off in the least.

There's also an early sequence in the classroom where 'PARASITE' is written on the board as part of that day's lesson. I don't know why this is spelled out so thuddingly. It's not as tho' it forms an important part of the movie or its themes. I mean, you have to infer that the witch is trying to heal her cancer by feeding on other people's lifeforce, the character is so thinly sketched. The why is so clearly subordinate to the how that I don't know why they bothered to spell out the parasite thing and at the same time underexplain it. Also, why the AR-15 cloud? Why the title? The whole 'weaponized people' part is incidental, an occasional means to an end for a character with an unrelated agenda.

The movie has plenty of issues if you think about it, but I found it riveting while it was on.

I really enjoyed this, and have little to add to Mr Sausage's explanation of how Creggar succeeds in striking tonal eclecticism (Josh Brolin just hits that funny bone) and thrusts forward the narrative - each section feeling shorter until the last, like the tightening of a noose. Yes, there are plenty of problems

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Why do all these key characters see images of the witch prior to being involved in the narrative, or even known to her? Just to establish some set pieces and give tense heft to those sections? Why did Brolin triangulating the running patterns come off as original - the detectives and FBI are both on the case and didn't think to do this? What?

but they felt largely forgivable. Yes, after Barbarian's lame posturing at explicit social commentary, it was refreshing to see a take on a theme that opted for tone rather than overstatement.

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For me, this film brought up some broad themes of not only child abuse, but the ways in which adults and systems are blind to and inevitably let down children. Of course there has to be some catharsis, but Creggar admirably denies us the "happy ending" we seek, and allows the trauma lingering -as something one lives with actively rather than simply experienced in the past- beyond the credits. I liked how even the adults like Garner who go above and beyond, who are attentive and offering, etc. still can't break through until the damage is done. Really depressing stuff underneath it all.

I really liked Weapons. From the premise, I was expecting it to go in the direction of JG Ballard's 'Running Wild', but I didn't expect the direction it actually took, even though

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witchcraft and the occult often underpins a lot of the more arthouse horror films at the moment

. I liked the multiple viewpoints perspective and thought Cregger crafted a range of interesting characters. A nice blend of watch-through-your-fingers and absurd humour too.

I thought this was fantastic. Sausage gets it right: the tonal shifts and layerings are masterful. With Alex’s section I felt a little disappointed in the reveal; but the finale erased any misgivings.

Mr. Sausage really nailing and explicating my own thoughts through his posts, leaving me without much more to say, other than I think this was was better than it was “good,” if that makes any sense!