There’s a moment in the spine-tingler “Weapons” when a semiautomatic rifle appears onscreen. The vision briefly knocks you back because it’s both creepy and somewhat surreal, but also because it’s freighted with extra-cinematic significance: The AR-15 rifle is among the firearms of choice for mass shooters in the United States. What makes the rifle here especially unnerving is that the story hinges on the mysterious disappearance of 17 children, a narrative hook that can’t help but evoke the real-life horrors of school shootings.
“Weapons” isn’t overtly about those familiar tragedies, though maybe it is just a little, or perhaps the writer-director Zach Cregger simply wants to shake you up. He has a talent for both creating and maintaining an ominous mood, deploying a classic approach to freaking out audiences by suggesting the very worst (things seem bad!) and delaying the reveal (they are!). That’s true in “Barbarian” (2022), his solo directorial debut that draws from the horror-film playbook while tapping into real terrors. Cregger deepens that movie’s shadows, but the most nightmarish thing in it is a bright room and old-fashioned human depravity.
Told from different, often overlapping points of view, “Weapons” opens soon after the kids vanish in Anytown, U.S.A. Their parents are freaked; everyone in shrieking distance is. Footage from scattered security cameras shows that the children left their homes unaccompanied in the middle of the night, apparently voluntarily. They moved quickly, insistently, as if pulled by an unseen force toward an unknown destination. Each ran with their arms extended at their sides at a similar angle. They looked like kids do when they’re pretending to fly, like when they’re having fun, an association that makes their exodus eerier.
All the kids were students in the same class. Their teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), has almost predictably become the focus of some parents’ confusion and rage. She insists that she had nothing to do with the disappearance and loved the kids, though few parents seem to buy what she says, including Archer (Josh Brolin), whose son is among the missing. Her boss, Marcus (an appealing Benedict Wong), is sympathetic but his patience has its limits, particularly given some of Justine’s tut-tut behavior at school. She’s previously breached protocol, mostly, it seems, by being nice to students. That she could probably breeze through the winding aisles of her local liquor store with her eyes closed seems more concerning.
Cregger has divided the narrative into sections that are driven by different characters, which allows him to put competing viewpoints into play. After some place setting (this is a true story, an unseen girl warns in voice-over), Justine revs things up, getting the party started. Garner is a pleasurably idiosyncratic actress, and while she can reliably commit to whatever nonsense her characters deal with, she has a native resiliency. She seems canny; she can play tough. Garner’s Justine is jittery and given to lonely-night boozing, but while the character is a mess, the actress’s intelligence gives you confidence that she will clean up when need be.
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The post ‘Weapons’ Review: These Classmates Are Not All Right appeared first on New York Times.
