Briefly Reviewed – Zach Cregger’s ‘Weapons’

I’ve been intrigued by Julia Garner ever since I watched Ozark, a terrific series on Netflix. She gets a hell of a role in Weapons, and the film is one of the best I have seen this year. The story isn’t much. A bunch of children disappear. What happened to them? In other words, it’s a mystery. Genre films are very difficult to crack because someone earlier has almost always thought of whatever variation you are thinking of bringing to the table. But writer-director Zach Cregger does something brilliant. He breaks his screenplay into chapters named after the various characters, and each chapter tells the story from that character’s point of view and also adds to what we know. Again, this is not “new”. Stanley Kubrick did something like this in parts of The Killing, where the narrator strings together a robbery while moving between various characters whose portions are shown individually. (Usually, heist films are about the collective, the unit that executes the robbery.) But Cregger uses this technique throughout and keeps surprising us. A more linear screenplay would have been boring. 

At one point, we see a man running towards a woman, wanting to kill her. This comes out of nowhere, as we are in someone else’s point of view. So it’s a shock. Later, when we get this man’s point of view, we learn why he behaved that way, and we get to know the technique the “villain” uses to make people do their bidding. Right from the title, Weapons keeps us off balance. You think it refers to guns or bombs or something, but it’s something else. There’s a fairy-tale horror element, like in those stories about children and a wicked witch. But Cregger doesn’t explain too much. Instead, he unleashes set piece after brilliant set piece. The climax is a stunner, and like in many places in the film, it’s also morbidly funny. Best of all, there’s just a minimalistic background score, which makes some scenes even scarier. There’s a moment where the Julia Garner character is sleeping in her car and someone takes something from her. The camera stays on her, and I was squinting, not knowing where the scare would come from or if there was even going to be a scare. Well done – both this scene and the whole movie!