In fast-rising director Zach Cregger’s movie, mystery deepens amid a vividly realised everyday.
American suburbia is the backdrop for ambitious new “elevated horror” Weapons. Where is the ambition in that, you may ask? The answer comes from writer-director Zach Cregger (Barbarian), a Hollywood fast-riser who at 44 could still just about be called a bright young thing. And his film is nothing if not sure of its own invention.
The movie opens after the disappearance of 17 children from the same fifth-grade class. Each of the kids ran happily from their home in the middle of a single night, then vanished into the black. Somewhere off camera, Cregger dares you not to want to find out more.
Suspicion falls hard on their teacher, Justine (Julia Garner, terrific). And so for the opening act, she scrubs the daubed graffiti “Witch” from her car, but also meets up with an ex. The curtain is pulled back at length on her life outside school. The more basic horror fan may wonder what the hell the movie is up to.
I can take this one. If Stephen King is one touchstone, Cregger has also talked about drawing on Paul Thomas Anderson’s panoramic LA opus Magnolia. Flouting genre conventions, Weapons duly unfolds as a set of character studies, artfully overlapping. If Justine is taken for a witch, concerned local parent Archer (Josh Brolin) is a bullish witch-hunter. We spend time with a local cop, then the neighbourhood junkie.
And when it works, the movie is really a kick. The dread mystery at its heart looms over a vivid everyday, filled with liquor stores and pin-sharp dialogue. The movie looks luminous; unlikely moments prove jarringly funny; and Cregger conjures a hyper-eerie mood that, every now and then, turns truly nightmarish.
That’s the good news. The bad is that, the longer the film plays, the more the horror turns hokey. Worse yet, for all its towering ambition, Weapons has the depth of a puddle. (A movie about missing children should have at least some emotional payload.) Cregger is seriously talented. You also sense he needs to spend less time watching movies before he makes a great one.
