I’ve seen quite a few people online trying their best to describe Weapons. Truthfully there’s no great way to describe what this thing is - the best I saw online was a Letterboxd user calling it a mix between PTA and John Carpenter. It’s a good comparison but it’s still not right. What we have here is truly one of a kind. Here’s how I would describe Zach Cregger’s new film: what if Salem’s Lot was fifty percent a comedy, was told kind of like Magnolia and all of it worked.

 

The most notable thing of Cregger’s last horror endeavour, Barbarian, was the cut at the end of act one away from the action to Justin Long driving a sports car, singing with the radio with the sun shining in his face. It’s an arresting structural choice, we go from a rainy night in a creepy Detroit AirBnB to LA in a second, that made the film memorable. And the choice wasn’t just a gimmick either, it was like an injection for the film because suddenly the audience is not only curious as to what will happen next but is also curious as to how Long’s character is related to the opening. 

 

Where Barbarian fails is the last act. The film runs out of reversals and heel turns letting the first hour’s intrigue fizzle out. Weapons, however, does not have this problem. Cregger’s solution (essentially) is to do the Justin Long shift of perspective every 20-30 minutes, which could easily become tiresome but somehow the injection always works.

 

The setup is shown to us accompanied by a young girl’s voiceover, it’s the marketing of the whole movie - all the kids of Miss Gandy’s class, bar one, run out of their house at 2:17 in the morning, no one knows where to and no one knows why. Then we are into the narrative told in chapters, each chapter being named after the character whose perspective we inhabit.

 

This is where the Magnolia connection is coming from. This structure is no easy feat and Magnolia itself is not a perfect film (Weapons also noticeable has an hour shorter runtime) but what struck me the most is (in a PTA-esque fashion) how human and specific Cregger’s characters are. The first scene between Bill Skarsgård and Georgina Campbell in Barbarian had some great examples of Cregger’s eye for nuance in dialogue and how people really talk, but this takes it to another level. We immediately understand how Ehrenreich’s police officer, Paul, thinks when he meets the troubled miss Gandy (Julia Garner) at the bar, we know so much about Brolin’s Archer Graff just from seeing him sleep in his missing son’s Batman bed and know the exact kind of meth afflicted guy James (Austin Abrams) is within a second of screentime.

 

The structure only bolsters Cregger’s characters too. He gets to slip in little details about this small town to make it feel more real without even caring if the audience notices that Archer Graff’s son is the one bullying only survivor Alex, or understand the complex predicament of Paul’s boss being his girlfriend’s dad or even that James early on asks Justine Gandy for money before he’s been properly introduced. It is just there to make the world richer and everything feel more authentic.

 

We’re halfway into this review and I haven’t even mentioned how gnarly this movie is. While CG blood isn’t my favourite, I can forgive the use when we see fountains of it pour out of one character’s mouth. And I couldn’t even tell you how much CG was used when that character is torn to shreds or that other character’s face is splattered along the street because when you are watching Weapons you are too in the movie to ponder the effects. The horror forces you to look at it without giving you time to breathe and wonder how they did it or why it looks that way. Your eyelids will peel back and your mouth is guaranteed to be agape.

 

The gore and thrills aren’t there for no purpose either, they’re climaxes and punctuations of moments. The comparison people have made to John Carpenter comes from Cregger’s ability to build tension at a gradual pace till you’re pulling your hairs out and internally screaming, “GET OUT OF THAT HOUSE!” He really understands the rhythm of the edit, the shot selection - what should be in the foreground, what should be out of focus, what should be in the light and what shouldn’t - and, more importantly, how all the elements on screen work together to create mood and freak out audiences.

 

With all that said you might be wondering how this is 50% a comedy. Well, Cregger really shows here how he is just like Jordan Peele, comedy background and all. He understands that horror and comedy are at opposite ends of a dial but come from similar places. So not only can he flip the dial from one extreme to another consistently but the scary moments gain more from their proximity to funny moments and vice versa. It’s like as a kid when you figure out that going from the pool to the spa makes the spa feel warmer.

 

The best version of this is in the climax where we are cross cutting between Archer’s dilemma and Miss Gandy’s. Whenever Archer is on screen the audience howls with laughter and then with one cut to Garner’s face shrieks of terror fill the theatre instead. As the back and forth keep going it only gets funnier and scarier.

 

My overall thoughts are this: SEE WEAPONS IN A PACKED THEATRE. You don’t want to miss out. Films like this are a rarity and we should all be grateful we have something so insane, scary, funny, original and well crafted hitting the silver screen.