WEAPONS. There is a moment in the highly anticipated horror movie Weapons when Josh Brolin, playing a distraught father asleep in the bedroom of his missing son, wanders in a weird, mysterious dream that claws at his grief and ends with a grotesque shock that jolts him awake. Scrambling at the covers, he shouts, “What the fuck?” It’s a good scare, artfully self-reflexive and extremely relatable for those of us pulled into the dreamscape of the film.
Along with a genuinely scary preview, much of the hype has been down to Weapons being written and directed by Zach Cregger, writer and director of Barbarian (2022). Hardly run-of-the-mill horror, it drew on genre techniques and conventions while braiding into the plot strands of misogyny varying from the banal hum of threat to Hollywood scandal to freakish cruelty and monstrousness. I’m still not over it and will likely never rent an Airbnb. With Weapons, Cregger draws the horror from senseless loss and its aftermath, again rendering it in the everyday, the dreamlike and the fantastic.
Weapons opens with the voice of a little girl declaring the following to be a true story (it’s not), recounting how Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), a newish teacher at Maybrook Elementary, arrives at her classroom one morning to find only quiet Alex (Cary Christopher) at his desk. The night before at 2:17 a.m., his 17 classmates all fled their homes, running barefoot and arms out as if in flight to some unknown destination. In the days and weeks that follow, the bereft parents’ suspicion and blame focus more intensely on Justine, who is buffeted by threatening calls, vandalism and shouted accusations at a school meeting. Her hard drinking (escalated, one imagines, by recent events) and messy affair with local cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) aren’t great coping methods, nor is skulking around Alex, whom her boss, Marcus (Benedict Wong), has asked her to stay away from after placing her on leave. Also spiraling in the wake of the disappearances is Archer (Brolin), whose son is among the missing. He’s been obsessively watching porch cam videos, shadowing Justine and haranguing the seemingly clueless police in desperation.
As the story shifts to follow one, then another character, we move forward in the narrative, and smaller and larger mysteries are illuminated. Each shift of focus also reveals more about the characters’ lives and struggles. They are, each of them, a hot mess (defend Marcus if you like, but his Disney adult Lunchables meal is deeply troubling), independent of the central tragedy. The pace, too, shifts, moving from the dread of an agonizingly slow doorknob turn to the nervy assembling of clues to panicked chases and sudden violence and gore. Cregger inflicts all kinds of stabs and punctures throughout, as well as images and mentions of parasitic creatures to skin-crawling effect.
Brolin and Garner deliver strong performances as equally bewildered people driven to sort out the mystery, if not their own lives. But it’s Amy Madigan’s jarring presence as Gladys that enlivens the action with her ghastly expressions, taking concern trolling and smiling imposition to new heights. (That she may have also halted in its tracks the budding resurgence of baby bangs is just one more thing to be grateful for.)
It’s impossible not to search for allegory and metaphors in a movie that leaves so much room for them, and the theme of grief — paralyzing, entrapping, enraging — is inescapable. Likewise, the oppressive silence required to return to normalcy in the wake of unresolved loss.
As Justine leaves the school, passing through a memorial pile of flowers, toys and candles, festooned with a banner reading, “Maybrook Strong,” we’re reminded we have a playbook for what we once called unthinkable. We have rituals like town hall-style grieving, the sending of thoughts and prayers, and established roles for parents to play when their children are slaughtered at school, sacrificed to those who profit from the wild proliferation of guns, as unique to America as our volume of mass murders. But to render the sudden vanishing of 17 children shocking again requires elements of the supernatural, some unknown cause looming in the dark, something other than ourselves. R. 128M. BROADWAY.
Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in Global Solidarity at the Mouth of the Klamath.
