Something wicked this way comes in Zach Cregger’s allegorical small town fable.
At 2:17 a.m., an entire class of children – bar one – walks out into the dark of night and vanish without a trace. That’s the hook Weapons lures you in with, and it’s a good one. But, like the gingerbread cottage, it’s also a bluff. By the time the film starts, that eerie procession has already happened and Zach Cregger drops us into the immediate aftermath, the clock already ticking, the wound already open, and the situation being narrated by an unnamed child. A survivor? A witness? It’s not entirely clear, and therefore entirely unnerving. Cregger uses that in-media-res jumping off point not as a shortcut, but as a signal: the point might not be how the children disappeared, but how their absence eats the town alive.
The people left behind are pure Stephen King archetypes. Julia Garner’s Justine Gandy, the local teacher whose class seems to have been singled out, Josh Brolin’s Archer Graff, an angry father who wears his grief like armour, and convinced that the only way out of the situation is through everyone who stands in his way. Alden Ehrenreich’s Deputy Morgan is the small-town lawman, married to the Police Chief’s daughter but hobbled by a barely under control drinking problem and compromised by extra-marital dalliances while Benedict Wong’s Principal Miller is the solid, quietly decent figure whose moral centre and calm authority anchor the community. Even the twitchy, desperate junkie and would-be burglar played by Austin Abrams feels like a King creation – a man with nothing left to lose who stumbles into something much bigger than himself. Even the Pennsylvania town of Maybrook feels but a turn of the page away from one of King’s Maine located boroughs. But if the setting and players are pure King, the malefactor at the heart of the mystery is pure Roald Dahl.
Now it may sound like there’s nothing particularly original or new here in Cregger’s follow-up to his breakout horror hit Barbarians, and from a certain perspective that’s not entirely unfair. Once the mystery is laid out and the film gives up its secrets, there’s something very familiar about it all. But the dark joy on offer here is not necessarily in the originality of the tale. Like all good campfire stories, it’s in the telling and that’s where Cregger really excels.
Split into overlapping chapters, Weapons explores the town and events from half a dozen different viewpoints, each one building on and recontextualizing the others. There are shades of Rashomon in the constantly shifting and non-linear focus but instead of contradicting or correcting one and other, the perspectives combine to deliver a kind of compound narrative interest, accentuating the numbing horror of the event and insidiously replacing it with the growing terror of the cause.
As a mystery, it answers every plot question it asks with satisfyingly dark answers but in amongst all the viewpoint shifting, it never over-explains or strips the shroud completely from any of its characters and their motivations.
Powered by a masterfully woven structure, terrific performances and a macabre sense of theatricality and the absurd, Cregger’s folksy fairy tale is deeper and darker than it might look at first glance and while he plays with the same small town corruption as King and Dahl’s fascination with combining darkness and whimsy, at its heart Weapons explores the abject horror of the parent/ child bond being irrevocably rent asunder, and its haunted empty classroom leaves little room to misinterpret what the allegorical root of this story could be. It’s right there in the title, after all.
