Weapons / Zach Cregger (2025)
I love this movie. Unabashedly. It is good. I believe that. Even after five viewings, I still love it. I keep telling myself this. Don't forget, you think this is good.
And it's true. Julia Garner is really, really good. Josh Brolin is really, really good. Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, Austin Abrams (as the strung-out James). All really, really good. And you probably didn't hear, but Amy Madigan is exceptionally good as Aunt Gladys.
The story unfolds in a non-traditional, but not wholly novel structure that replays some or all the events in partially overlapping timelines centered on most of the individual characters above. We get the story doled out to us in pieces, sometime introducing new information. Sometimes filling in an extra detail already exposed.
At the top, we get the setup via a child narrator: "This is a true story that happened in my town. So this one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different. Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy's room was totally empty. And do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark... and they never came back."
The shuffled story that follows shows the characters, one at a time, and sometimes together, carrying on after the kids have gone and a handful of flashbacks. We also get a few flashes of Stephen King-like visions of spooky kids and weird smiling faces.
I really, really like this film. I liked it until I started writing. The structure, like Pulp Fiction (Tarantino), Short Cuts (Altman), Go (Liman), Elephant (Van Sant), Magnolia (P.T. Anderson), Crash (Haggis), Rashomon (Kurosawa), Babel and Amores Perros (Iñárritu), is not totally unique. This list of filmmakers illustrates the stakes of the storytelling gambit. Do it right, and the movie is a classic.
Cregger begins with the rightfully jittery Justine Gandy (Garner), suspected of involvement in the mass disappearance by parents, fearing for her safety and appropriately curious about the disappearance and frustrated by being told she should not join the ongoing investigation for the children.
It becomes clear she's really looking for information and not just trying to see if they are on to her. And in the next chapters, we see mayhem released on the town and eventually the origin of the chaos.
Well, I was hoping your mom and dad would make me feel better, but it doesn't seem to be turning out so good.
Does Cregger pull it off? I really, really like this movie. But maybe not. Maybe he doesn't. The most successful of those movies that successfully employ the shuffled scene structure walk a line between curiosity and satisfaction. More and more is slowly revealed until we get a resolution that has the characters or their disparate timelines colliding in the frame.
In this case, we never get a finished braid. It's not quite that characters are left adrift, but they don't get a tidy wrap up. None of them. Except the dead ones. Oh yeah. There is horrible violence, often effectively played for laughs. But the surviving characters are left right where the the movie ends. Justine is proven not guilty for the audience. We don't know if her life ever goes back to 'normal,' though it seems unlikely.
Some of the surviving characters do arrive at Alex's home where the pace of the film picks up and builds to the crescendo. There isn't a Spiderman pointing moment that punctuates so many of the films, which feels a little unsatisfying on rewatch. The final action set piece of the film, in which Gladys is finally paid back for her evil deeds by Alex, who has been paying attention to her methods all along, is a stunning sequence. It's played for some laughs (Ferris Beuller running through suburban yards and homes to beat his sister to his bed comes to mind) but also shows the desperation of a person running out of options in real time.
There are holes that can be overlooked in the horror rating, but can't be overlooked in the critical review. Unevenness in character development and tone make this a film to be recommended to horror fans, to popcorn fans, but not to critical film viewers.
Key scene
Spoilers below.
Interrupting lunch at Marcus's house. This is a useful scene for understanding the film's construction and the way Cregger plays with tone. We are welcomed a domestic routine that feels lived in, the tray holds a meal it looks like Marcus (Benedict Wong, thankfully free of the handcuffs of Marvel lore) and Terry (Clayton Farris) have eaten together hundreds of times before. As they tuck in, someone at the door. It's Gladys for some reason? Marcus tries politely to send her away, but Terry invites her in. Just as she expected.
Then, as they watch confused, Gladys takes her time assembling the mise en place for her spell. They look on, trying to remain polite until all hell breaks loose. As with Cregger's Barbarian, the film goes from social commentary on awkward interpersonal dynamics to something horrifying in a snap. The violence in the kitchen is shocking and somehow the tone still supports a giggle, if you were so inclined. Marcus is turned and the film turns with it.
Own it
My Letterboxd review