‘Weapons' Review: The Best Movie I've Seen All Year

Forbes

6 days ago

I had no idea what to expect going into Weapons, the latest movie from Barbarian writer/director, Zach Cregger. I'd seen one trailer. I didn't read anything else about the film. I went in blind, and you should, too. The following review will be spoiler-free outside of the basic premise. Trust me, you should go into this movie without knowing anything past the basics. I don't even want to spoil too much of my own reaction to this film. I'll do a follow-up post digging into the specifics in a couple days, here on this blog, so stay tuned.
The setup is pretty straightforward. One night, at exactly 2:17 am in the fictional town of Maybrook, seventeen children from the same 3rd grade class all simultaneously leave their homes and vanish. Only one child shows up to school the next day. Their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is immediately suspected of some wrongdoing. Why else would all these kids from the same class simply up and disappear?
What follows is part horror movie, part Brothers Grimm fairytale, part black comedy, with little nods to Stephen King and Roald Dahl, among others. It's really hard to describe. Even if I littered this review with spoilers, it would be hard to explain why it works so well, and why it feels absolutely singular and unique. I'm so used to formulaic slop, and not just in the horror genre. This felt new. Cregger's nonlinear, Rashomon-style storytelling helps the various characters and their stories unfold into something truly remarkable.
It starts out a bit slow, and at first I worried it was going to be just another horror movie with some jump scares and suspense. I couldn't have been more wrong. The two-hours and eight-minute runtime flew by, as we were sucked deeper and deeper into the weird, surprisingly hilarious and twisted tale of these missing children and the people searching for them, including Archer (Josh Brolin) the father of one of the missing kids, and school principal, Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong). The scene stealer, however, the dark horse of this film, was Austin Abrams as homeless drug addict, James – though he shares some of the best scenes with Alden Ehrenreich's Paul Morgan, a police officer who has seen better days.
I really enjoyed Sinners earlier this year (you can read my review here) but no matter how great it was, I couldn't help shake the sense that it borrowed just a tad too much from Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn. I don't think that takes away from how genuinely great the movie was (and honestly, what a year for quality horror!) but it was a nagging thought throughout. Weapons, on the other hand, is something unto itself. I've never seen anything quite like it, despite whatever cultural references are sprinkled throughout.
There are many ways you could interpret this film. Is it an allegory for school shootings? On some level, I think so. Is it about the many ways we, as humans, can be weaponized – our words, are interactions, our bodies, our thoughts? Definitely. But it's also a modern fairy tale that never gets bogged down in allegory. There is nothing preachy here, no in-your-face political message that takes away from your enjoyment of the film. In the end, it's just wildly entertaining.
There's so much to unpack here. Look for my follow-up piece here on this blog and on my YouTube channel.