“Anything can be a weapon if you use it right.” This phrase was repeated to me endlessly as a child… by my mother. Sometimes, it came off as a cautionary slogan to keep me from running down the stairs, scissors in hand. But more often, it was said with an air of intrigue, like she’d just watched Jason Vorhees ice someone with a corkscrew. Zach Cregger, writer-director of the summer’s most anticipated horror movie, Weapons, understands the impact of a harmless household object wielded with malice. It’s not only an issue of disturbing proximity. (How many things could kill you in your living room? Your garage? The john?) It’s also a matter of association: Much like Joe Dante weaponized the microwave in Gremlins, Cregger has a great deal of fun pointing out the violent potential of a fork or an abnormally sharp vegetable peeler.
“What do you have against homes? Houses?” an AMC host asked Cregger during a recent interview surrounding Weapons. He was referring to the macabre domestic setting of Cregger’s new film, but also his 2022 debut feature, Barbarian, a runaway indie horror success that offered a twisted take on creepy basements and maternal instincts. Because Cregger’s films are more enjoyable if you know nothing about them, it’s best not to map out each twist and turn. Here’s what we all know from the trailer: One night, in the fictional town of Maybrook, 17 children woke up, got up out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark. And they never came back. The missing kids aren’t a random selection of Maybrook students, but the entirety of Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) homeroom class. Only one of Justine’s students remains, a meek boy named Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), who is hounded by the press and law enforcement, but ultimately cleared of any suspicion.
Justine, on the other hand, is not so lucky. She is the scapegoat for the entire town, and fields threats and accusations daily. “Why just her classroom? Why only hers?” furious parent Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) shouts at a PTA meeting. It’s a high-tension affair with the ambiance of a Salem witch trial. Justine navigates her life with a reasonable amount of paranoia, as she suffers through threatening phone calls and late-night ding dong ditch stunts. Her picturesque neighborhood, with its strolling residents and parked cars, has become a minefield of potential danger. She self-medicates with Big Gulp–sized tumblers of vodka on ice, and confides in her boss, Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), and her ex-situationship, Officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Naturally, these connections are fraught and complicated, and only enhance Justine’s deep isolation.
Weapons is a legitimately character-driven horror film, as Cregger’s script is populated by flawed and unique humans trying to cope with a shared tragedy. The filmmaker was thinking of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia while writing the screenplay—though his resulting work thankfully lacks the melodramatic verve of Anderson’s gargantuan Boogie Nights follow-up. The influence, instead, is most reflected in Weapons’ structure, which is split into six sections, each focusing on a different character within Maybrook. Their stories intersect at certain points, but Cregger teases out crucial events to maximize suspense. He also inverts the camera angles when repeating a moment, adding visual interest and aligning the audience with a different character’s point of view. Each character has a distinct role to play in uncovering the mystery of the missing children, but it is Justine and Archer who are actively hunting down an answer.
Each of Cregger’s primary characters is specific and memorable. Brolin’s turn as Archer—an ex-military man with a contracting company—is both gruff and understated. He’s so wracked by grief that he sleeps alone in his missing son’s bed and keeps messing up supply orders for his business. Paul, an alcoholic cop in an unhappy marriage, is bungling his job and pissing off his boss-slash-father-in-law (played by a delightfully grouchy Toby Huss). Principal Marcus is trying to fend off rabid parents and an increasingly unstable Justine, all of whom are disrupting his peaceful home life. In one of my favorite scenes, he is gritting his teeth on a weekend work call, when his husband breezes into the living room with their lunch: a tray of six hotdogs, baby carrots, ranch, and potato chips. Cregger, who got his start in the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U’ Know, loves to inject details like this throughout Weapons; sweet little slices of life to savor between the carnage.
Julia Garner has the most subtly complex role as Justine, who trembles in one moment and snaps into petulant fit the next. “I think it’s easy to mistake Julia as a little bit of a delicate person. But she has this really, really powerful core,” Cregger said in an interview. “I think her magic is that she’s able to access both of these parts of herself with a lot of compelling expertise.” Justine is multi-faceted, and her fear, anguish, and rage inform how she functions as a character.
It would be a disservice to Cregger not to mention how genuinely funny Weapons is, though it is a pitch-black brand of comedy. Its barbaric climax is bloody and grotesque, but also hilarious, if only due to the characters causing such mayhem. Cregger is also having a blast playing with horror tropes; in one scene, each time a specific character gets knocked out, he springs back up, and the gag repeats a ludicrous number of times. It’s cinematic “Tubthumping.” But the humor throughout Weapons doesn’t deflate how utterly horrifying it is. Simple but terrifying SFX makeup does a lot of damage, and jumpscares abound; during my screening, the man next me leapt at least two inches out of his seat at one point.
Having already achieved a tricky balance of horror and comedy, Cregger also plunges viewers into a world of mystery, but doesn’t bog his story down with exposition. A vocal fan of David Lynch, Cregger writes his first drafts under the spell of his subconscious, letting scenes appear on the page without scrutinizing their purpose. He also doesn’t explain them in the final script. There are supernatural occurrences in Weapons, but we don’t have to suffer through a monologue detailing chapters of mythology. The sinister force driving Weapons’ plot is examined only to an extent. What’s clear in Cregger’s film is that evil is all around us, in the white-trimmed houses we pass every day, in the lone SUV circling the block, in the local park—and in us.