The phrase “What the fuck?” is repeated often enough in Zach Cregger’s Weapons that it takes on the resonance of a mantra or maybe a motto—a veritable mission statement of disorientation. It also gets increasingly funny because we know that if the characters who keep saying it in quick succession were only able to compare notes on their respective WTF experiences, they’d be less confused. On the basis of his two solo directorial efforts to date, Cregger loves to put audiences at a disadvantage. His preferred storytelling move is the head fake—a sudden, unexpected change of direction, a quick juke leading his characters on a new trajectory, like, say, down the stairs and into a dimly lit basement where something terrible is waiting for them. His favorite image, meanwhile, is that of a human skull being pulped: an apt symbol for a former sketch comic turned hot-shit horror director whose desire to brutalize the audience intersects with his equally pummeling mandate to make ’em laugh in the process.
Cregger’s 2022 Barbarian benefited hugely from the element of surprise, beginning as a send-up of millennial meet-cute tropes before descending—literally—into a fugue of subterranean depravity, with a buffet of pungent bad-taste gags shoved directly down our collective throat. There was something bracing about the film’s unapologetic nastiness: In a moment when people were starting to talk more and more about so-called elevated horror, it was sort of refreshing to see Cregger sink so low.
Weapons arrives duly hyped as Cregger’s big-swing follow-up project, shrouded in secrecy and pushed hard via a shivery, Longlegs-style viral ad campaign. Its aims are higher and headier than Barbarian’s; it’s more conceptual and also more convoluted, upscaling things from a modest B-movie scenario (what if there were an Airbnb with a weird basement?) to an exercise in sprawling, Stephen King–coded community portraiture along the lines of It or Needful Things. It’s also dealing in grander emotions, with a story line subdivided across a group of damaged protagonists. In interviews, Cregger has compared the film’s polyphonic conceit to no less than Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, claiming that PTA’s openhearted ensemble drama gave him “permission” to try to craft something new: a genre movie on an “epic” scale.
This is a fascinating choice of words given Weapons’ blank-check production values and Cregger’s own ascendant status. Historically, the most endearing horror movie directors are the ones who punch from underneath or who else thread their work through the seams of popular culture. Even a genuinely slick studio thriller like David Prior’s Lovecraftian The Empty Man felt low to the ground (and slipped under the radar as a result, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic). Cregger wants it all, though, and between its carefully manicured suburban surfaces, hellaciously stylized violence, and shrapnel-like fragments of topicality, Weapons is, clearly, the movie he wanted to make, with no hedging or compromises. The result is a supersized showcase that, sadly, spreads its maker’s gifts thin. It’s a curious and frustrating example of how, sometimes, more is actually less.
The setup is irresistible. We’re informed via a halting, tremulous voice-over that the story we’re about to hear is true—that in a small town, not too long ago, an entire third grade classroom’s worth of children (save one) vanished without a trace, and that to this day, nobody knows what happened to them or why. That last part is—per Cregger’s MO—a head fake, since Weapons spends a lot of screen time (two hours and change) outlining precisely what happened and why, systematically draining the mystery out of a prologue that works as nightmare fuel precisely because it’s so irreconcilable. The spectacle of pajama-clad kids, shot far enough away to be faceless and silhouetted against their neighborhoods’ porch lights as they scatter ecstatically—arms outstretched, like they’re all playing airplane—is instantly iconic in its evocative allusion to the Pied Piper. As in Barbarian, Cregger is interested in the idea that it’s possible, even in an age of surveillance and social media, to get lost in America, and also that there’s something terrible—evil, even—lurking behind any set of closed doors, including, maybe, in the house down the street. The problem is how he chooses to fill in the blanks—with lurid, absurdist details that suggest a director trying to top his peers (and himself) and only intermittently rising to the occasion.
The epic quality Cregger is aiming for is exemplified—and strained to a breaking point—by the decision to structure Weapons as a series of vignettes, each focused on a specific character and hewing closely to their subjective point of view. The first (and strongest) of these orbits Julia Garner’s Justine, the teacher of the missing kids and a prime suspect in the eyes of parents who can’t help but see her as the common denominator of an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon and wonder what she might have been talking about in class leading up to the students’ mass exodus. At a town hall meeting ostensibly designed to deflate local tensions, Justine is subject to threats and verbal abuse; the next morning, she sees that her car has been vandalized with blood-red letters spelling out “Witch.” Here, Cregger digs industriously into a contemporary culture of scapegoating and accusation—a context of mistrust that supports Garner’s plangent, nicely ambiguous performance as a woman who’s internalized the hatred of others to a point of self-loathing and taken it upon herself to figure out what’s going on.
Which she does, sort of, after a couple of false-alarm jump scares that feel more like due diligence than anything else. Justine is pissed off and suspicious, and she follows her intuition about the furtive behavior of Alex (Cary Christopher)—the lone student who didn’t vaporize—all the way to his family’s home at the edge of town. At which point Cregger deploys the same strategy of dramatic blue balling that energized Barbarian: He cuts away at the moment of truth and resets the game so that we’re following somebody else. Next man up: Archer (Josh Brolin), a contractor and father who’s more adamant than anyone else that Justine is involved in the tragedy while he privately grieves his past inability to tell his son that he loved him (a subplot right in Brolin’s sweet spot of impacted masculinity).
This pattern of parallel narrative expansion leads to some witty juxtapositions, like the contrast between Justine’s and Archer’s productive, self-directed investigations and the aimlessness of Justine’s police officer fuck buddy, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, cosplaying John C. Reilly in Magnolia). Or the device of having Justine’s boss, Andrew (Benedict Wong), previously hanging around in the background as the voice of reason, careen into another person’s section as a wild-eyed source of threat. This is the film’s most effectively prepared moment of convergence and the best example of Cregger’s gift for fusing goofiness with shock tactics.
There’s a fundamental relationship between humor and horror. Both modes are conducive to subversion and extremity and to prompting strong, involuntary responses from audiences excited to leave their comfort zones behind. The greatness of movies like Rosemary’s Baby or The Shining is how paranoia bleeds into farce and vice versa; the most interesting thing about a present-tense figurehead like Ari Aster is his interest in manipulating this tension (the same is true, even more obviously, for Jordan Peele, who reached a peak with the high jinks of Nope). Back during his days with the sketch comedy troupe Whitest Kids U’ Know, Cregger mined a very particular vein of post-millenial comedy: Call it post-edgelord, where the sheer inappropriateness of the subject matter—bestiality, political assassination, a gallon of PCP in a park—is such that the joke bounces back on anybody square enough to take it too seriously.
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The Whitest Kids U’ Know was funny without being particularly trenchant—like, say, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele at their taboo-skewering, code-switching best—and Cregger’s films feel, for better or worse, like extended sketches, swapping brevity for overkill without cutting particularly deep as satire. Moreover, if you do try to unravel the subtext of Weapons—which ultimately pivots on the presence of an elderly interloper exerting a malign sort of control over all of the characters—it’s less subversive than weirdly reactionary: a by-product, maybe, of the selective political incorrectness that Cregger wields like a badge of authenticity. Beyond the fact that the movie treats its characters like little more than chess pieces (making the big bad and their hypnotic influence something like a directorial surrogate), it seems to take an extra pleasure in abusing the ones who exist on the story’s margins, to vaguely uncomfortable effect. Where Barbarian seemed to critique a kind of top-down misogyny (albeit in an enjoyably unsentimental way), Weapons is actively channeling certain ambient child-in-peril anxieties without truly exploring them—or worse, it’s reinforcing them. There’s something ironic about Cregger’s love for secret rooms and hidden compartments; this time out, the revelation of what’s inside his proverbial panic rooms is almost as disappointing as if they were empty.
None of this would matter much if Weapons were just straight-ahead exploitation, but it’s obvious that Cregger has something on his mind; those “weaponized” children under the sway of a monster trying to remake them in its image warrants consideration. Ditto the film’s most provocative image, a twilight hallucination of a massive AR-15 looming over the town like a storm cloud that, to Cregger’s credit, goes fully unexplained—which is why it leaves at least a bit of psychic residue. He’s a fine craftsman with a savvy sense of pace and good instincts for casting; the movie is watchable and absorbing throughout, and it jury-rigs a crowd-pleasing finish that’s also clever enough to sow tiny seeds of doubt. The precise staging of the closing moments—the little crack that’s being left ajar in an otherwise open-and-shut case—is welcome; it may, in fact, leave some viewers whispering, “What the fuck?” as they leave the theater. But it could also be evidence of something more vexing than simple witchcraft: a filmmaker who knows what he’s doing but not necessarily why, a conjurer working on autopilot under his own spell.