Granted, the key players of Zach Cregger's latest high-performing high-concept horror experience occasional night terrors wherein a surreal scenery has seemingly escaped the late David Lynch’s dream journal.
The latest from “The Whitest Kid U Know” with a Jordan Peele-grade, sketch comic come directorially alive second act, “Weapons” wields a profound unshakability that lies in its social commentary.
Witchhunts never went away, in our world and in one where “Ozark’s” Julia Garner plays an elementary school teacher whose entire class—save for one student—disappeared overnight.
A pulp-fictional structure is devoted to chapter-divided character studies before magnolian collisions, and eventually, an unveiled villain’s jump-scare emergence from behind the dark magic-draped curtain.
Beyond enriching the current state of the genre with a multiple-narratives-at-once layout a la Tarantino and early Paul Thomas Anderson, Cregger and company reportedly siphoned calculated inspiration from Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners.”
If the 2013 Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal psycho-thriller preached anything, it was that the kids are most definitely not alright.
Here, the unlikely tandem tasked to investigate the overlooked threads responsible for snatching innocent children from their beds: Garner and Josh Brolin, who stars as the incensed father of one of the mysteriously departed.
He demands answers, firstly from Garner and next from the parasitic kooky aunt who shan’t be named, lest you welcome your algorithm sending you everyone and their mother’s next Halloween costume.
Alden Ehrenreich (“Hail, Caesar!” “Solo: A Star Wars Story”) also works wonders as Officer Paul Morgan, essentially running his own movie-within-a-movie racket; in the process, he reminds us he’s always been more Hobie Doyle than Han Solo.
The “where did they go?” conceit has driven the ratings of many prestige TV sagas. Now, it’s taking over the box office—over $160 million against a $38 million budget—courtesy of New Line Cinema edging out Netflix in a bidding war for a prescient, present-day tale.
An original film with capeless modern resonance would have been the exception to the rule, if superhero supremacy were not already waning. Its theatrical success confirms people don’t just want to talk about the heavy “unavoidables.”
Better yet: they want to collectively grieve to a point where it becomes healthy to see the alternative—where acts of grave defiance beget improbable returns—play out, and recognize that even when staged upon the big screen, you can never truly get back what’s been lost.
By this notion, “Weapons” is a school shooting movie where not a single school shooting takes place.