By Simon Thompson
Given that for the last seven year or so, Hollywood has been a festering open sewer pipe of straight to streaming slop together with reheated pastiches of once great franchises (Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Lord of The Rings, Doctor Who and because whatever deity controls the universe despises us Buffy) with everything that made them cool and unique conveniently sandpapered over in the hope of appealing to some kind of consensus audience, writer/director Zach Cregger’s Weapons is an ice cold beer on a sweltering day.
The very fact that Weapons exists in the first place feels like some kind of glitch in the system, but to paraphrase Bob Ross ‘a happy little glitch in the system.’ It’s suspenseful, horrific, funny, and original which isn’t something you could say for most movies today, let alone horror.
Weapons is the kind of movie that is best experienced, while knowing the bare minimum about the plot, so I am going to give as basic a plot summary as possible so as not to ruin the fun. In a small town in America a group of seventeen schoolchildren all suddenly disappear at the same time, with none of the adults in the town being able to make head or tail of who or what is responsible for their disappearance.
Cregger’s script is a deft mixture of both comedy and horror, similar to Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson’s early work. Cregger understands the tricky practice of how to both build up, yet pay off tension effectively at the same time through dialogue, but also via careful misdirection and a specifically chosen sound design.
The film’s visuals and cinematography are a nice mixture between retro and modern, in the sense that despite being set in the modern day and the characters using contemporary technology such as mobile phones, the film still feels like it could have taken place anywhere from 1980s-2000s through the colour palette and overall surroundings.
Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and Alden Ehrenerich are all excellent in their respective roles, with their characters each representing the main theme of Cregger’s script, that being ordinary people being forced to deal with an extraordinary situation. Cregger intelligently has them reacting to the events presented to them, in a much more naturalistic way than most characters in a horror script tend to do. Cregger isn’t afraid to present his characters as being unlikeable and flawed, but gives them a real sense of humanity that most inferior screenwriters fail to include.
If you love both original storytelling and horror cinema, you owe it to yourself to see Weapons at your earliest convenience. This is the most excited I’ve been about an American horror movie since Get Out almost a decade ago, and hopefully unlike Jordan Peele, Cregger won’t tragically morph into an M Night Shyamalan like self-parody.
Weapons is out now in UK cinemas.
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