{"id":326700,"date":"2025-08-08T02:02:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T02:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/326700\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T02:02:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T02:02:11","slug":"weapons-review-six-characters-reveal-bloody-slices-of-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/326700\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Weapons’ review: Six characters reveal bloody slices of the truth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The rise of evil is more believable than its defeat. Implausible horror movies ask you to buy that a curse can be broken, a killer bested, nightmares tidied into a neat resolution. But filmmaker Zach Cregger<\/a> enjoys making a mess. His buzzy breakout, 2022\u2019s \u201cBarbarian,\u201d<\/a> tangled several narratives in one basement, jolting audiences with a bold tone shift and a conclusion that darted away before we could ask questions<\/a>. \u201cWeapons\u201d is an even grander statement of disorder-by-design. A compellingly sloppy tale, it splices together a half-dozen protagonists and no heroes \u2014 these six spiraling victims never grasp the full story behind the violence.<\/p>\n

An unnamed little girl narrator claims this is a true crime kept secret, as the locals are ashamed they can\u2019t explain a thing. Sure, sure. The setup alone seizes our attention. A classroom of third graders has vanished in the middle of the night, each child running headlong into the shadows with their limbs outstretched like paper planes. In an eerie montage, editor Joe Murphy shows us the goodbye sprint of all 17 kids \u2014 we understand the scale of the town\u2019s tragedy even though only two of them get names. When the story picks up a month later, none of the lost children have come home.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on? And why was one child, Alex, played with solemnity by Cary Christopher<\/a>, left behind? Cregger has said that he started writing the script before he knew the answer, and the plotting shares that sense of discovery. The main characters\u2019 tales aren\u2019t manipulated by forced coincidences \u2014 they simply overlap. Each section fills out the fuller picture as though Cregger is layering transparencies on top of an overhead projector.<\/p>\n

The first segment follows the children\u2019s teacher, Justine (Julia Garner<\/a>), who is under harsh scrutiny at an assembly crowded with distraught parents who accuse her of being either negligent or complicit. Her most vocal critic, Archer (Josh Brolin<\/a>), is the father of the class bully, now missing. Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong<\/a>) tries to protect Justine from the heckles (and her own bad decision-making) but the shouts of \u201clock her up\u201d chase Justine straight to the liquor store, where cinematographer Larkin Seiple\u2019s<\/a> steady shot through the booze aisles tells us she\u2019s beelined to the vodka many times before.<\/p>\n

Justine\u2019s opening section is the longest, and it showcases the film\u2019s two key fixations: failure and people tip-toeing around peering through cracks. (There\u2019s enough gliding hallway footage to fill several listings on Zillow.) Garner excels at pale, quiet girls like Justine who are all nervous energy and self-destruction. Several of the awful things that happen to her aren\u2019t mystical at all. An aggressive confrontation with her ex-boyfriend\u2019s wife (June Diane Raphael<\/a>) is her own darned fault, and when she tries to do an ill-conceived stakeout, she gets drunk and falls asleep.<\/p>\n

An ordinary script would put Justine at the center of the action so we can have fun watching her make one mistake after another until she magically saves the day. But she\u2019s not up to the challenge, and Cregger has other characters to introduce. Half of them are less preoccupied by the mystery of the missing kids as they are with the drama of their own lives, from tension with their boss to a desperate need for cash.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a police officer named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich<\/a>) and his main obsession, James (Austin Abrams<\/a>), a junkie who is so caught up in getting his next fix that he lives in his own splinter comedy. It only ever seems to rain in his scenes, and when spooked, James dives into his tent head-first like a cartoon cat. Clownish Gladys (Amy Madigan<\/a>, meddlesome and needy) rounds out the ensemble, sporting bright \u201970s polyester leisure suits while adding a dash of Italian giallo melodramatics. She hints at what \u201cSuspiria\u201d would look like transported to the suburbs. The retro needle-drops by George Harrison and Percy Sledge give the film its own style, as does the fantastic main musical theme (by Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay and Cregger) that\u2019s a harmony of harp, piano and rattling bones.<\/p>\n

Horror fans have seen plenty of unlucky cops ring the right doorbell at the wrong time, only to get mercilessly dispatched. Knowing Paul\u2019s name and his own problems doesn\u2019t add that much to the overall storyline, but it does put a fun spin on clich\u00e9d beats, even if Cregger is too much of a prankster to want us to feel extra empathy for the guy. Elevating side characters to main characters means there\u2019s too much going on for us to work up much empathy for anyone except Christopher\u2019s abandoned boy. But it does give us a sense of the world as a place where the ordinary is fused to the outrageous, where normal life and normal houses and normal people can be suddenly, brutally destroyed.<\/p>\n

Cregger is great with details. He gets a fantastic, audience-wide gasp just from the noise of a door opening off-screen. There\u2019s as much pathos in the production design as there is in the people. One character, for reasons you\u2019ll observe, wordlessly switches from soup cans that require them to use a can opener to ones with a pull tab. Nobody mentions the change, but when you spot it, it breaks your heart.<\/p>\n

Here, as in \u201cBarbarian,\u201d Cregger understands the scary hush of a residential street and the perils of not knowing, or trusting, your neighbors. Part of the issue is that kindness has, in the community\u2019s time of crisis, been deemed \u201cinappropriate\u201d \u2014 the word Principal Marcus uses when chastising Justine for driving a stranded kid home. (Later, however, his strict boundaries seem smart.) But it\u2019s still a cold statement on inhumanity when Justine flees into a convenience store for safety, only for the clerk to order her back outside. The dialogue\u2019s percussive f-bombs get a laugh and make the point that people in crisis can\u2019t come up with a snappy comeback.<\/p>\n

A former sketch comic<\/a>, Cregger knows how to work a crowd. The combination of his assurance and his characters\u2019 confusion is wonderful in the moment, as though you\u2019re listening to a spiel from someone who sounds crazy but might be making all the sense in the world. (A scene just like that happens in the movie.) <\/p>\n

The ending is strong and satisfying and leaves you discontented in all the right ways, even as \u201cWeapons\u2019\u201d spell lifts after you leave the theater. Some of the ideas that felt significant in the darkness don\u2019t stand up to daylight: the dream sequences, an image of a floating gun, the film\u2019s own title \u2014 which doesn\u2019t seem to go much further than Archer\u2019s description of the children running like \u201cheat-seeking missiles.\u201d It\u2019s particularly annoying that the end credits insist that the shape of a triangle is, for whatever reason, symbolically significant. Still, I like the idea that terrible questions don\u2019t always get answers \u2014 and I hope Cregger keeps asking them.<\/p>\n

‘Weapons’<\/p>\n

Rated:<\/b> R, for strong bloody violence and grisly images, language throughout, some sexual content and drug use<\/p>\n

Running time:<\/b> 2 hours, 8 minutes<\/p>\n

Playing: <\/b>In wide release Friday, Aug. 8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rise of evil is more believable than its defeat. Implausible horror movies ask you to buy that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[56035,17951,16314,117692,6659,77,3063,13627,30412,117693,16307,16374,457,62109,16,15,5320,117694],"class_list":{"0":"post-326700","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-sense","9":"tag-character","10":"tag-child","11":"tag-cregger","12":"tag-crisis","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-film","15":"tag-james","16":"tag-julia-garner","17":"tag-justine","18":"tag-kid","19":"tag-paul","20":"tag-people","21":"tag-section","22":"tag-uk","23":"tag-united-kingdom","24":"tag-weapon","25":"tag-wrong-time"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114990687505689234","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}