Weapons

Zach Cregger follows up his 2022 surprise hit debut Barbarian (one of the best horror movies I've seen in a long while despite its mildly unsatisfying ending) with this more expansive sophomore outing about a bizarre, chilling event in a small town. One night, at 2:17 AM, every kid but one from a third-grade class mysteriously wakes up, runs out of their home, and disappears. The parents and the rest of the community are understandably shaken by the sudden, inexplicable loss of so many elementary school children, and suspicion naturally falls on their homeroom teacher, a somewhat troubled young woman named Justine Gandy. The film is told in chapters that each focus on a single character's perspective on the aftermath of this strange event. The first chapter centers on Ms. Gandy, played well by Julia Garner (We Are What We Are, Grandma, The Assistant). The always reliable actress, who often conveys more without dialogue than when speaking, makes us empathize with the character while not necessarily liking her.

The second chapter, which centers on the most hot-headed parent, Archer Graff, played by Josh Brolin, is less intriguing because the character isn't written or played with the same level of nuance or mystery. It also features a baffling image in a dream sequence that seems to exist to clue us into what this movie is an allegory for, except that idea disappears faster than the kids at the beginning of this picture do. (Did Cregger decide this heavy metaphor would be pretentious and divisive, but then forget to cut it out of the movie when he abandoned the concept?) The subsequent chapters range from more intriguing to less compelling, and despite several of them being out of tone with the others, the overall mystery keeps us fully engaged throughout the film's 128 minutes.

I'm a sucker for movies like this. I used to make movies like this back when I worked with kids at an arts program. I find these ever-expanding mysteries endlessly fun to watch and rewatch, even when they're not especially well-written or well photographed, like this one. Each chapter fills in more of the backstory, introduces us to new characters, and builds to a stimulating cliffhanger before jumping back in time and exploring the events from a different POV. This is the Lost style of storytelling, in which how the mystery is unfolded is ultimately more interesting than the mystery itself. As a result, movies like this never pay off as well as they set up and cliffhang. Still, as long as the characters are interesting and the ending isn't a total let-down, it makes for a more than satisfying trip to the cinema.

It is frustrating, however, that this movie doesn't have a better script. I had a similar experience with this as I did with another of this year's best films, Sinners. Watching it, I was fully engaged and excited. Once it was over, I couldn't help but wish it was the great movie it had the potential to be. I'd blame the current economic realities of the film industry for the fact that so many of the most interesting movies of the past few years have been low-budget horror films that engage on several levels despite their subpar narratives, but both Sinners and Weapons had decent budgets. So it must be the damn auteur theory.

See, there used to be this job in movies called a screenwriter. These were people who spent nearly all their time mastering the art of cinematic storytelling, writing visually-oriented stories with characters we got invested in, situations that grew and developed, solid internal logic that required little suspension of disbelief, a strong subtext that got us thinking about myriad themes, and dialogue that clevery obscured the motivations of the characters, rather than explaining them to us. Screenwriters are still around, but they all work in TV now, which means they almost never have to write beginnings or endings to stories, just reams and reams of endless middle.

Apart from a few old timers who are almost considered auteurs themselves, the job of screenwriter is now pretty much left to directors, some of whom occasionally work with a collaborator, but I'm constantly surprised at how many directors who really should have writing partners don't. I can only assume it would diminish their status as an auteur and even as a brand if they had to lower themselves to collaborating with someone who knows how to write a great script and devotes all their energy to that art. Maybe it's harder to sell a movie if it didn't spring forth from one brilliant talent that can do it all? M. Night Shyamalan, Jordan Peele, Robert Eggers, Coralie Fargeat, Oz Perkins, these folks often have one great screenplay in them, but would people really think less of them if they worked with a screenwriter their next few times out?

The other person who used to exist in the film world was called a cinematographer, but that job has been almost totally phased out. How much better would a movie like Weapons be if it were photographed rather than digitally captured? This movie, like countless contemporary films, looks like utter dogshit. Grey, flat, lacking any definition. It was shot by Larkin Seiple, the man behind the camera for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Luce, and To Leslie (though not the superior-looking Barbarian). The reason so many of us lament the loss of 35mm film isn't because digital cameras can't create images as good as celuloid (we can all point to dozens of films shot digitally that look fantastic), it's just that back when all movies were shot on film, filmmakers had to have a certain level of compitance and talent even to get an acceptable image. They were required to devote time to using light and shadow, showing and concealing parts of the frame, to achieve their desired effects. Today, with high dynamic range cameras, filmmakers don't need to use any lights at all. This is great for documentaries and no-budget indies, but it significantly denigrates feature films (and TV, for that matter). So even though digital cinematography can look as good as film, well over 80% of the time it doesn't.

Once upon a time, scenes that took place at night had actual blackness. The main focus of the shot was illuminated, but everything around it was dark. Directors, cinematographers, and (yes) screenwriters needed to get creative about figuring out how to motivate a light source, because otherwise the frame would be blank. Today, we can just shoot anywhere under any conditions, and the camera will pick up something. Fearing that Weapons might be one of these lazily shot horror movies, I made sure to see it in one of the few remaining cinemas that still bother to mask their screens when running widescreen movies. Since the "black" bars of letterboxing still give off white light that shines in your eyes, causing the image to wash out, I also didn't go see this in IMAX, though it was playing in my favorite IMAX theater. Thinking it was probably not shot in IMAX or optimized for that large screen format, I anticipated the same experience I had the last time I saw a standard cinemascope movie in an IMAX theater, a muddied picture with more grey on screen than image. I stayed till the end of the credits for Weapons and saw that it was supposedly "optimized for IMAX." Are you kidding me? This movie isn't even optimized for the room where the color grading was done!

Needless to say, Weapons was a somewhat frustrating experience, but I'm still rating it and ranking it pretty high on my list, because it's one of the better films I've seen this year. For its many faults, it delivers what it promises and keeps you solidly entertained from start to finish, something that's getting rarer and rarer. Cregger has also become the first filmmaker to craft a role ideally suited to the acting style of that pint-sized scenery chewer, Amy Madigan. The Julliard equivalent of the Tasmanian devil shows up about halfway through this movie and really ups the creep factor right when it needs a boost. With only two films under his belt, Cregger has already established some common ideas and predilections that I imagine we may soon be referring to as Creggeresque. If this is this guy's sophomore slump, I think he's got an exciting future ahead of him.