No one really saw Barbarian coming, the playful 2022 horror about an Airbnb reservation gone horribly wrong. That was part of the plan, a teasing trailer that only told a small part of the story and a swaggering title that promised something grander than we could initially see, and that might be why I found the reaction to be a little alienating. It was showered with euphoric praise upon release and first-time writer-director Zach Cregger, whose background is in comedy, was immediately heralded as a new king of the genre. For me, it was more trick than treat, a sizzle reel that showed Cregger to be a film-maker of considerable skill but also one who papered over the cracks of an exasperatingly illogical and uninspired script with flashy gimmickry.
There’s been an inevitable shift in the hype machine for Cregger’s follow-up, the bigger, bolder and, thankfully, better Weapons, buzz that began when his spec script caused a talk-of-the-town auction months after Barbarian overperformed. Industry rumours suggested that Jordan Peele was so determined to land the project that when his company lost out to New Line, he parted ways with his management. There’s since been over two years of anticipation – Cregger comparing the project to Magnolia, stars such as Julia Garner and Josh Brolin signing up, an all-out assault of a marketing campaign – and so second time around, it’s virtually impossible not to see this one coming. Credit to the Warner Bros marketing team for still holding something back though, the jolting string of trailers highlighting enough of the standard WTF imagery without really revealing all that much beyond the striking premise.
Seventeen children from the same class are missing. They all got out of bed at 2.17am and ran off into the darkness. The police are baffled and the parents are furious, aiming their anger at teacher Ms Grady (Julia Garner). She’s one of many alternating viewpoints, which also include a parent (Josh Brolin), a cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a small-time criminal (Austin Abrams) and the one kid who didn’t run away (Cary Christopher), slowly building a picture of what really happened that night.
It’s a tantalising set-up, pitched somewhere between Stephen King and the Brothers Grimm, and Cregger’s careful slow build keeps us in thrall for the most part, eager to see just how the puzzle-pieces fit. The POV-shifting allows for his excellent cast to each get their moment, from Garner’s nervy, vodka-swilling hate figure to Ehrenreich’s quick-tempered philanderer, although Cregger’s characters are all rather thinly drawn, resembling less the protagonists of thoughtful short stories and more the bodies one inhabits in a video game. They are in service of a magnetic drip-feed mystery plot that unravels so compellingly that it takes us a while to notice how empty it all is. On the one hand, it’s a relief that unlike so many of his genre peers, Cregger isn’t all that interested in the dirge of trauma horror and while those who wish to look for it might still find a deeper allegorical read of Weapons (probably the same few who laughably claimed Barbarian was a powerful #MeToo statement), it’s mostly an engine of brute force, similar to a schlocky paperback you can’t put down on holiday. But it’s also crucially lacking something, an added element of surprise or sophistication.
It reminded me of Denis Villeneuve’s lurid missing children thriller Prisoners and while it’s mercifully not as undeservingly self-serious, it’s similarly handsome, high-end packaging for something that’s incredibly silly and straightforward. The tricksy structure and repetition of scenes from different viewpoints would have one believe there’s a labyrinthine plot to be uncovered but Weapons is far hokier and, frustratingly, dumber than it would seem, relying on staggeringly incompetent police and wilfully ignorant citizens. Cregger remains a remarkably confident and alluringly immersive director, constructing some wonderfully rattling shocks and moments of seat-clenching unsureness. His canny mood-conjuring grips us in the moment (the film is a fun, reactive experience with a big audience) and he draws a fantastically scary and nightmarishly odd performance from a late-arriving actor whose name would be a spoiler to reveal but his storytelling crumbles even before the lights come up. The finale might up the violence to a wince-inducing level but it doesn’t cut anywhere near as deep as it could have, chaos without meaning.
Cregger might be expanding and improving his arsenal, using his skills more effectively than he did in Barbarian, but there’s still something missing. Something sharper.
