Latest news with #WhitestKidsU'Know
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Feel-Bad, Feel-Good Movie of the Year
This article contains spoilers for the movie Weapons. The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions. The sleeper-hit horror film, written and directed by Zach Cregger, has a distressing but undeniably hooky premise: One night, at 2:17 a.m., all but one student in the same third-grade class got up out of their beds and ran out of their suburban homes with their arms outstretched, vanishing into the night. Where did they go? Why did they run away? The story hinges on an intriguing mystery, but often, opening the mystery box can backfire. Yet by eventually laying out the reasons behind the kids' disappearance—and thus making sense of the tragedy—Cregger is doing two things: First, he's doing his job as the maker of entertainment, creating a dynamite ending that offers real closure. Second, he's underlining the fallacy of catharsis. Weapons is a movie about a local misfortune that then reveals the enigmatic villain behind it and delights in her comeuppance. Yet it also reminds the viewer that vanquishing evil doesn't undo the terrors it has already wrought—and that there's only so much relief a conclusion can actually bring. Cregger, who was a founding member of the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U'Know, has said that he began writing Weapons after the tragic accidental death of his close friend and former collaborator Trevor Moore. While the incidents at the core of the film are mythic and supernatural, they also feel utterly senseless; much of Weapons follows the characters trying, and failing, to understand the bizarre thing that's happened to them. Archer (played by Josh Brolin) is the father of one of the missing children; Justine (Julia Garner) is the teacher who doesn't know where her students went; and Alex (Cary Christopher) is the missing children's one remaining classmate, whose continued presence is as curious to everyone as the vanishing of his peers. Each of their isolated stories, including those of a few other, more tenuously connected townspeople, functions as a chapter in a larger tale. Cregger is chronicling a community, albeit a dispersed one: People seem to barely know one another, and the town's institutions, such as law enforcement and the school administration, have responded ineffectually at best. The central conceit of the kids' disappearance is horrifyingly contemporary—their flight into the night is captured by Ring cameras—but in a neighborhood of identical-looking houses, it's also troublingly plausible that nobody can figure out where they went. Eventually, Archer and Justine start to make some progress in their respective searches for the kids, nudged forward by weird dreams and their desire for answers. Yet the person to finally stumble upon the children is an unhoused, drug-addicted man named James (Austin Abrams), who finds them standing zombified in a basement while he's trying to burglarize what he thinks is an empty home. Cregger thus stages the movie's most pivotal moment from the perspective of the community's least emotionally invested member. The unconventional choice hints at the director's disinterest in a tidy search-and-rescue, and the relief that comes with it. Instead, like Paul Thomas Anderson's multicharacter opus Magnolia —which Cregger has cited as inspiration— Weapons is rooted in diffusion, tracking lost souls struggling to connect; the action only really begins when they start talking to one another. After a barrage of freaky, teasing scares, and a lot of ominous attention directed at Alex's house, where something evil is clearly going on, Weapons gambles on providing solutions. The film recounts what happened from Alex's point of view. It reveals that his parents have been possessed by his peculiar great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), a dying witch who has set up camp in Alex's house to drain the life of those around her. When the souls of Alex's parents prove not to be enough, she enlists the boy to help her bewitch his classmates too, luring them into the house; Alex obliges only when Gladys threatens to kill his parents if he doesn't help her. Madigan is the big reason the final-act revelation works. Chalking up all this madness to one person's doing might be hard to buy, but her performance is astonishing; as Gladys, she seamlessly slips between brassy charisma and steely menace. The character generates the movie's biggest laughs and its best jump scares, and her magic is both cryptic and formidable: She can weaponize the people she bewitches as undead assassins, leading to a showdown in which she keeps throwing her thralls at Archer and Justine once they finally figure out what she's up to. The catharsis of her defeat is twofold: Not only is Gladys taken down, but her demise also comes at the hands of the children she's captured. Alex figures out how to work Gladys's magic and sends them after her, running and screaming, until they tear her apart like a pack of hyenas. The moment is pure cinema joy, even more so because of the transgression—it is a real spooky delight to realize you're with a packed crowd, cheering on a group of third-graders who are intent on murdering an old lady with their bare hands. But Cregger gets to have his cake and eat it too. The threat has been taken care of, by way of the kind of kinetic filmmaking that might make anyone punch the air. The battle, however, was long ago lost. The voice-over narration tells us that Alex's parents remain catatonic, and, after a couple of years, some of the recovered children have only just begun to speak again. Weapons offers a fantasy of triumph, and it's a satisfying one, but with that exhalation comes many more details to ponder. The wreckage of grief and loss all the characters have been mired in is hardly swept away. As a result, Weapons is the feel-bad, feel-good movie of the year—a rare horror masterpiece that leaps beyond its genre without abandoning its sick, sad heart.
Cosmopolitan
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
Is ‘Weapons' Based on a True Story?
For a story about 17 kids who disappear from their homes in the middle of the night, it feels silly to ask is this real? Well it would, if not for the opening lines of Weapons, 'this is a true story.' That narration comes from the voice of a little girl and gives urban legend. It's a clever trick by writer-director Zach Cregger, who knows exactly what those words do to an audience. But even with that, Weapons is not a documentary. Warning: Spoilers ahead! With a nearly perfect Rotten Tomato score, Weapons follows a small town's unraveling after 17 children vanish in the middle of the night. The film's structure borrows from the 'multi-perspective' tradition, hopping between the viewpoints of a guilt-ridden teacher (Julia Garner), a grieving father (Josh Brolin), a conflicted small-town cop, and the lone child who stayed behind. Though it feels like a ripped-from-the-headlines drama, there is no sleepy Pennsylvania town called Maybrook, no real-life witch named Gladys who lured children into her basement, no 2:17 a.m. mass exodus of elementary schoolers into the night. Still, while the events are made up, the emotional backbone is real. Cregger has said that the initial spark for Weapons came after the sudden death of his friend and Whitest Kids U' Know collaborator Trevor Moore in 2021. Grief and the strange, suspended reality it creates is a driving force in the story. The missing children, the fractured families, the town slowly turning on itself is all filtered through that lens of personal loss. So no, Weapons is not based on a real-life case. There's no crime to solve, no cold files to pull from. But it's also not pure invention. It's a work of fiction anchored by very real feelings of grief, paranoia, and the fear that the people you love can vanish in an instant. That might be why the 'true story' line sticks. It's not true in the journalistic sense, but it's true in the way a ghost story can be—emotionally real and spiritually credible. That said, Weapons also works as a shadow commentary on America's ongoing gun violence epidemic, particularly the impact of school shootings on communities. At least that's what an English teacher would glean. There is familiarity in the imagery of empty desks, grieving parents, and teachers grappling with guilt. In Weapons, the children aren't victims of bullets but of an otherworldly predator. Yet the emotional landscape– the collective trauma, the search for someone to blame, the helplessness in the face of an unthinkable event—mirrors the reality many communities face after mass violence. Cregger never names this parallel outright, but it's there in the DNA of the movie. The different perspectives—teacher, parent, police—map neatly onto the roles we see dissected in media coverage after school shootings. By framing the horror as supernatural, Weapons creates enough distance for the audience to engage without shutting down, while still confronting the same core fears. Slay, Zach.
The Hindu
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘Weapons' trailer: Josh Brolin and Julia Garner search for creepy kids in Zach Cregger's new horror
The first trailer for Weapons, the upcoming horror film from Barbarian director Zach Cregger, is here, and it's as unsettling as fans might expect. Headlined by Josh Brolin, the film centers on the eerie disappearance of a group of schoolchildren in a small Florida town, unraveling a terrifying mystery. Joining Brolin are Julia Garner and Alden Ehrenreich, along with Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, Austin Abrams, June Diane Raphael, and Cary Christopher. The story plunges into psychological horror territory as the community descends into fear, suspicion, and something far more sinister. Weapons marks Cregger's highly anticipated follow-up to his 2022 hit Barbarian, a sleeper box-office success that became a cult favourite for its inventive scares and offbeat structure. While Cregger originally made his name in sketch comedy with Whitest Kids U'Know, his transition to horror has been seamless. 'The anatomy of a scare is very similar to the anatomy of a laugh,' Cregger has said, noting that both rely heavily on timing, tension, and surprise. Produced by Roy Lee and Miri Yun (Vertigo), along with Raphael Margules and J.D. Lifshitz (BoulderLight Pictures), Weapons is set for theatrical release on August 8 via New Line Cinema. The trailer teases an atmospheric thriller with small-town dread and supernatural undertones. With echoes of Barbarian's tonal unpredictability, Cregger appears ready to expand his horror footprint.
