3 months ago
22
WEAPONS ★★★½
(MA15+) 128 minutes
Horror movies never really go out of style but right now, they’re having a moment. Filmmakers with a gift for the macabre are finding funding can be had for scripts that fiercely embrace extreme weirdness.
Julia Garner plays Justine, whose class goes missing in Weapons.
Zach Cregger won his place in this select company three years ago with Barbarian, a contorted exercise in body horror with enough twists to make the head spin and the skin crawl.
Its success helped to precipitate a bidding war for his screenplay for Weapons, a bigger and even more serpentine story that Cregger says was strongly influenced by his admiration for Stephen King. And it has already paid off spectacularly, earning him $US10 million ($15.3 million) for writing, directing and producing the film.
It’s a small-town tale that takes off when all but one of the children in Ms Gandy’s class at Maybrook Elementary disappear from their homes overnight and fail to return. Security cameras at some of the houses show them running out of their front doors with arms outstretched at precisely 2.17am and melting into the darkness. Seven hours later, only Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) turns up for class.
Josh Brolin as Archer, the father of one of the missing children.
Their parents are understandably grief-stricken, outraged and desperate for answers, and Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is in their sights. Josh Brolin, cast as one of the fathers, Archer Graff, leads the attack before embarking on his own investigation. He wants to know why all the children came from her class and why she can’t give them any clues as to where they’ve gone and why.
Cregger has said he sat down to work on the film in a similarly clueless state, trusting his ability to write his way to a solution. I can believe it. Ingenuity is high on his list of talents. Nor am I surprised that he began his show business career as the founding member of a sketch comedy group.
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He displays a strong taste for gallows humour, along with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous and a disdain for credibility which means that logic is thoroughly upstaged by shock value. If you’ve been paying attention, for example, you’ll be hearing alarm bells long before the authorities have detected even a whisper. However, there’s a touch of pathos here as well, in passages of voiceover narrative delivered in the innocent tones of one of the remaining schoolkids.
The story unfolds from half-a-dozen different points of view, beginning with Justine then Archer, fanning out to take in Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local policeman having an adulterous affair with Justine, and finishing up with Alex. With every version, we get a snapshot of the way the neighbourhood works, and we come closer to the answer to the mystery.
Even so, I wasn’t quite prepared for the blood-soaked finale – a protracted episode of suburban mayhem unleashed in a collision of black farce and gothic insanity. Cregger has found his metier.
Weapons is released in cinemas on August 7.
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