Zach Cregger makes films through intuition. His knack for open-minded plotting comes from a background in sketch comedy and the treatment of filmmaking as a form of Lynchian meditation. Cregger taps into the subconscious dream states where the modes of expression are subversion and surprise. Like Barbarian (2022), Weapons feels raw and direct, drawn from clear sources (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1990) meets Magnolia (1999)), which directly influence the specific way the films upend conventions. Which isn’t to say the approach is reductive, but that it is uniquely original, because it combines such disparate ideas in novel ways.
Weapons is working hard to set the audience off-foot. Like Magnolia, it’s structured in novelistic chapters, tracking key characters through intersecting loops of stories. What happens is that all the children in a small Midwest town run away at 2:17am one morning, like spectral spirits possessed by some unknown darkness. The story is written and directed as though Cregger himself is curious what happened, which adds this uneasy sense of forward momentum, as the film unravels as an act of uncovering the secrets of this dark communal trauma. Where are the kids and what force of evil could have conjured such an event?
We start with a teacher. Only one of her third-grade students has shown up for class. The rest of the children are the ones who ran away. This causes the town to turn against her, her classroom being the one trait all the runaway children shared. Through this segment, lead with a strong performance by Julia Garner, her story intersects with our next two subjects: She has a fling with a cop (Alden Ehrenreich) and is confronted by a parent (Josh Brolin), who become our next main characters for their durations of the story, which continues to branch out through an interlocking narrative.
The film conveys information in fragments, likely due to Cregger’s process (if he does not start knowing where it will end, then foreshadowing is merely development), which reads equally as convenient and riveting, because the film does not build expectations based on evidence for what comes next, but tries to produce gasps and awe in an audience. As the film grasps at directing its audience, this also goes both ways: Its effective at eliciting an audience response and its full of small plot holes — a feature and a bug.
Critics are widely considering the film to be a comedic horror but that seems like a misreading. The text of the film is not unserious at all. It’s the performances, which are developed with nuanced tics and expressive acting, which create funny reactions (ideally from the audience). It’s not what is on-screen that’s funny but how it’s actively being perceived by an audience. Horror always holds this relationship to comedy, where the most grisly event can be laughed at by one person and cause the person next to them to sink into their seats. That’s why it’s such a personal genre that works as a bucket for all other genres. Because Cregger’s expression is so close to a screenwriting process of finding out what you think by creating the thing, it plays out with this sort of unpredictable immediacy. It’s not funny because of the filmmaker’s comedy background, necessarily (there are only a few outright written jokes in it actually), but it’s funny because it aligns so directly with terrifying surprises, which convey the same feeling as a good punchline.
That the film branches out from one narrative to another, never returning to a perspective as a focal point but continuing to develop it in the other stories, this leads to one of the film’s major difficulties. Some of the characters, who we thought were the main characters, do not necessarily get clean endings. The people we spend the most time with aren’t the point. Which also, as a downside, means that their narrative arcs, which are built on emotional investment, are not fulfilled within the themes of the film, as we branch in new directions.
Magnolia handled this in one way, bridging the gap between Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman as its working influences, but here, this secondary article is the driving influence. In a Robert Altman story, which can be full of interlocking characters that tell the audience about communal fragmentation (Nashville, 1975) and the moral ambiguity that comes with a very American kind of interconnectedness (Short Cuts, 1993), we directly understand that the divisions of the story are supported by these themes. For Paul Thomas Anderson, this is understood in Magnolia, because the text is about cosmic chaos, generational trauma being passed down, and fate being decided by chance.
This is the primary issue of Weapons, in that it’s told in an unconventional way, but this break from convention is used as a means Hitchcockian audience-direction, rather than as a morality play about what these characters actually have in common (generally nothing except what happens in the movie), and why it’s interesting that we should follow these diverting paths (only because it allows for surprising reveals).
Still, by filming horror in this way, Cregger has done something that feels new and through the disassociation of its characters and their individual texts, the film is disorienting in clever ways. Sure, it’s a mass of sometimes contrived concepts that can feel like a blueprint for the movie on screen, but still, the impact is undeniable.
Seeing Weapons in theaters is experiencing it as it’s meant to be seen. That the film’s primary approach is being at play with audience expectations, means that it also produces some very funny reactions from a tapped-in crowd. That it holds communal attention in order to tell us something about communal trauma, when we’re all experiencing some form of it, makes Weapons feel deeply necessary in the present horror climate.
Zach Cregger has improved on his process dramatically this time around. While Barbarian really has this sense of being a film of two halves, Weapons feels like a complete stream-of-consciousness. The film may leave out certain pieces of development (especially tying up what’s been introduced as being a central idea), but it makes up for its conveniences by working outside the box of what’s being made in modern horror cinema. Weapons is unique, because it combines good concepts in a new way, and while it doesn’t fully nail down its themes, that the story feels so unconfined by its subject means that the twists and turns really get to turn the knife on the audience. Weapons is immediate, a film built upon strong moments that open doors to more strong moments, and if it’s not cohesive and airtight as a piece of storytelling, it’s also a great expression of the idea that horror is irrational and that cosmic dark energies don’t always need a reason to create terror. Horror is the reason. And that’s what makes Weapons a great horror film.