Lost and Found: WEAPONS

Writer-director Zach Cregger’s Weapons is a tightly constructed roller coaster of a horror movie, as thoroughly surprising and satisfying as that comparison suggests. I can hardly remember the last time a movie of this genre had me gasping and laughing and on the edge of my seat for the entire time, not merely through its skillfully manipulated tension, but through its confident and enveloping filmmaking. Perhaps that was Cregger’s previous feature, the deviously twisty Barbarian. He’s quickly become a reliable crowd pleaser. Weapons manages to be a hugely entertaining horror picture that wears its themes lightly, but no less sincerely, while giving its characters such a full sense of personality in their potentially stock types that we’re rooting for them as humans, not just as props. It starts a month after a small-town tragedy. Seventeen elementary school students, all from the same class, have disappeared. One night they simply walked out of their houses never to be seen again. We start with the perspectives of three flawed investigators: the kids’ teacher (Julia Garner) who is harassed by angry parents despite being as confused and scared as they are; a grieving parent (Josh Brolin) demanding answers from a lethargic police force; and a floundering beat cop (Alden Ehrenreich). As the movie picks up momentum, its ensemble cast finds more perspectives take center stage one by one in a procession of chapters that interweave and intersect building to one wild culminating crescendo. 

The sustains a level of entertaining suspense throughout its 128 minutes even as it swells with dramatic human feeling and comic release valves. It feels like a real movie, well-designed and imagined, with intentional frames, elegant tracking shots, clever editing and focus pulls, and full of life in its details. That’s what allows it to arrive so seemingly easily at instantly memorable images, cut and crafted with precise understanding of how to play an audience. It’s so well-structured in its interlocking semi-chronological back-tracking chapters and criss-crossing side-characters, and so expertly photographed to manipulate attention, that it keeps the audience in a state of freefall uncertainty that heightens every scream and every laugh, with neither diluting the impulses of the other. (Amy Madigan can even get both at once with her supporting role.) It’s an impressive tonal balance, all the more impressive for perching on such precarious thematic preoccupations. You can’t make a movie about a mass disappearance of school kids without inviting the specter of school shootings. Seeing depictions of grieving parents, overwhelmed teachers and admin, confused cops, makeshift memorials of poster boards and teddy bears are both chilling and sadly familiar in that from-the-headlines way. But the movie plays fair with this sense of dread, this sense of a sick society casting about for blame without solving the underlying issues, letting it seep into the characters and build to a climax that provides surprising answers to its initial mystery that play like an ecstatic, fantastical release. Cregger has calibrated the movie for maximal broad reactions pulled off with subtlety and intelligence. What a thrill to be in the hands of a confidently clever filmmaker, the better to enjoy never quite knowing what’s going to happen next.