One Thing I Like About Weapons

I was going to try and be circumspect when talking about Weapons, describing the core of what I found so impressive without spoiling anything that makes it work.

But I quickly realized that my experience while watching Weapons was that it was constantly expanding, going off in directions I hadn’t expected. I honestly can’t identify which details would spoil the magic. I avoided reading too much about the movie beforehand, and I still wonder whether I’d have enjoyed it even more had I known absolutely nothing about it.

So I’ll say that I thought it was excellent, and in fact I can’t come up with a substantial complaint about it, a single moment that didn’t land exactly like it was supposed to. I absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys horror and suspense movies.

And I recommend seeing it not just unspoiled, but in as large an audience as possible. I saw it in IMAX on an afternoon on its opening weekend. The big screen didn’t add much1 but the crowd absolutely did. It was so satisfying hearing dozens of people around me gasping, groaning, or laughing at exactly the right moments. I’m often so clinical when watching movies that it’s such a pleasant experience to be surrounded by people still capable of being vocal when they’re enjoying something.

Everything after this is a potential spoiler!

My favorite aspect of the movie is the way it was structured: split into chapters, each showing basically the same time period but from the perspective of a different character.

And my favorite standout image of the movie (in a movie filled with some pretty great imagery) is the front door of the house where the climax takes place.

That door is shown repeatedly, and I’d swear that it’s most often shown with the exact same camera setup: seen from a distance, with the door in the exact center of the frame. And there are multiple shots that show the exact same thing: the door opens, revealing nothing but pitch blackness behind it.

The reason that stands out to me so much is because it seems like it should be the oldest trick there is, and yet it’s still tense and primally unsettling every damn time. It seems like it would stop being creepy after being used so many times, and yet the movie does something surprisingly different — and often funny — each time.

(Straying off the “one thing I like” idea to talk about how one scene is just so good. It’s when Justine is watching that door from inside her car across the street. The way the whole scene is shot and edited is pure suspense movie perfection. Especially having the attacker stride out of the door and then right past the car, and then while the camera stays locked on Justine, we hear the car door open. My crowd was laughing and screaming at the same time. It was fantastic).

The movie’s overlapping story structure is the reason that same shot can keep working and keep being surprising over and over again. Because the movie is constantly re-contextualizing things we’ve seen before, letting some ideas and mysteries hang out unresolved in the audience’s mind while resolving others and introducing new ones, we’re actively engaged in piecing the story together and never allowed to fall back into the simple, predictable rhythm of a horror story.

Most impressive to me from a screenwriting perspective is that the individual “scary door” moments happen out of order chronologically, but are still presented to the audience in the familiar order of foreshadowing, suspense, escalation, escalation, and climax.

And it also plays with that dynamic at the core of a great horror movie, where there’s a disconnect between what the audience knows, what the characters know, and what the filmmakers know. Weapons is excellent at anticipating exactly what the audience is thinking at any given moment, and then confirming it, subverting it, or stretching out the suspense.

When I heard that Weapons was written and directed by Zach Cregger, the writer and director of Barbarian, I came in with a whole set of expectations. And when I saw how addict James’s storyline was playing out, I expected it to be essentially a repeat of Justin Long’s segment in Barbarian: clueless guy blunders into a murder house.

So I was happy to see that it was much less of a jarring tonal shift than it was in Barbarian, but it still played with the same idea: a character who’s completely oblivious to the fact that he’s in a horror movie. In Weapons, it feels less like a sudden comedic interlude distracting from the protagonist’s story, because the entire movie is structured as overlapping stories. And the main character in each is barely aware of everything that’s going on in the other characters’ stories.

I kept being reminded of Poker Face, which typically uses the same structure of going back in time at the beginning of Act 2 to repeat the events of Act 1 from a different perspective. It plays off that same idea of a disconnect between what the audience knows vs what the characters know, but there, it’s to show how Charlie pieces together clues to solve a mystery where we already know the solution.

There’s a glimmer of the same thing near the beginning of Weapons, while the audience is still being subjected to a barrage of intriguing mysteries to be solved. Justine’s car gets vandalized, and the question of who did it is left unanswered. Later we see Archer outside Justine’s house, and he happens to have two cans of red paint in his truck.2 It’s ultimately a meaningless mystery of no real consequence, but I hadn’t even realized that it was planting an idea in the back of mind as foreshadowing for what would happen later. Until the movie was over, I hadn’t consciously made the connection between the witch hunt persecuting Justine, and the fact that a literal witch was causing all the problems.

And maybe I’m being too generous to myself, but I don’t think it’s just a case of my missing obvious details. I think that Weapons does so much clever stuff with pacing, foreshadowing, and especially misdirection that it encourages you to actively engage with assembling the pieces of a story while also discouraging you from second-guessing or over-predicting everything.

There are several excellent individual scenes in Weapons, with some unforgettable imagery and masterfully-executed suspense scenes (like the one with Justine sleeping in the car). But if it had been presented chronologically, even if it had saved Alex’s story for last and gone back for one long expository flashback, it probably would’ve felt like a solid, well-performed, but still B- movie about a witch, a suburban neighborhood, and a little boy who’s really bad at feeding people soup.3 And it certainly couldn’t have lived up to the level of intrigue raised by its opening, with the little kids running into the darkness, arms outstretched.

I think there’s kind of a problem with “horror movie inflation” where the stakes have been raised so much that things that would be pants-wettingly horrific in real life barely even register as scary in fiction. You either have to keep showing ever-increasingly horrific images in the climax, or reset the audience’s expectations so that creepy stuff is really, really scary again.

I still say that The Blair Witch Project is one of the best executions of this, even though I don’t care to ever see it again. Its last image is one of the all-time best in horror movies, even though it’s not at all scary out of context. It only works because it’s spent the entire movie making you tense, annoyed, and uncomfortable, to the point that you’re primed to jump out of your skin at any creepy sounds or sights in the night.

Which isn’t to suggest that Weapons doesn’t allow itself to go over the top, of course. A couple of the kills are genuinely horrific, and the climax is tense and bonkers.4 But they feel impactful, instead of just being “killing off side characters on the way to the climax,” because of the way the story structure stretches everything out and shows us moments out of order.

The principal’s attack at the gas station, for instance, is a scary, unexpected jolt, even if you remembered it from the trailer. We first see it during Archer’s story, where it ends that chapter with a climactic cliffhanger. It furthers the intrigue around the mystery of what’s going on (it’s still happening, and it affects adults too?), and it fills us with dread later on when we see the beginning of it play out, knowing how it ends.

In fact, I was struggling to think of any criticism I had of the movie, any bit that didn’t land, and the closest I could come up with was that the principal’s partner was camping it up to a level that felt out of place in a movie where most of the performances were more grounded. But I quickly took a step back and realized I was bringing my own prejudices to it. I’m so primed to look for negative stereotypes that I didn’t consider that they’re simply a cute couple, with their matching Minnie and Mickey T-Shirts. Which makes what happens later really horrifying, instead of just shockingly violent.

Weapons feels expansive instead of straightforward because ideas are seeded in the audience’s mind and allowed to linger, making you wait for the resolution. But it doesn’t feel frustratingly delayed, because there’s always a story in the works with unanswered questions that you can chew on. What’s the deal with the cop’s relationship with his wife and father-in-law, and how does it play into the larger story? How are the junkie’s needles going to come back to have significance later? We’ve seen Justine be both persecuted innocent and reckless alcoholic who has a history of “inappropriate” relationships; is there more to her story? What’s the deal with Archer having a dream about a giant assault rifle floating over a house?

After I saw Weapons, I finally let myself read reviews of it without fear of being spoiled, and I was genuinely surprised to see the recurring complaint that it wasn’t “about” anything, or that it suggested social commentary but failed to deliver on it. Several people wanted it to be an indictment about suburban America, or some kind of story about the horror of school shootings.

I guess I can see where that’s coming from; I know I often go into movies in cinema studies mode, looking for symbolism and demanding that everything have some deeper meaning. That’s what makes a movie smart, right?

Maybe there is a level of satire in Weapons that I simply missed, but my main takeaway was that what makes this movie smart is that it’s a masterfully-executed horror story, manipulating all the tools of cinematic storytelling to deliver on moments that are intriguing, horrifying, or comedic, sometimes simultaneously.

We see a kid has run directly towards a broadcast tower in the distance — is there some kind of sci-fi government conspiracy? Is Justine playing the victim while she’s secretly a witch? Is there some dark force hiding out in the woods? I thought Archer’s dream wasn’t intended to be symbolic, but another bit of weird misdirection, forcing us to think about what it “means” when it was actually (if I remember correctly) just an image from a poster on his shitty kid’s wall.5 I mean, when he wakes up from that dream, his first words aren’t “a-ha! A clue!” but “What the fuck?!”

1
Apart from maybe giving the full impact of Alden Ehrenreich’s mustache, which is pretty exceptional.

2
I believe I actually said “a-ha” out loud in the theater.

3
Come on, Alex. More in the mouth, less on the floor.

4
I loved that the junkie relentlessly coming back to attack Archer is repeated so many times that it goes from being a jump scare, to being a pay-off, to being funny, to being annoying, to being “okay, we get it,” then back to being funny, and then, somehow, back to being tense again.

5
Making the only identifiable missing kid also be the most recognizable bully was a nice touch. If there is anything deeper in Weapons, I thought it was just the simple idea that people don’t need to be perfect to deserve your sympathy.

1 Apart from maybe giving the full impact of Alden Ehrenreich’s mustache, which is pretty exceptional.

2 I believe I actually said “a-ha” out loud in the theater.

3 Come on, Alex. More in the mouth, less on the floor.

4 I loved that the junkie relentlessly coming back to attack Archer is repeated so many times that it goes from being a jump scare, to being a pay-off, to being funny, to being annoying, to being “okay, we get it,” then back to being funny, and then, somehow, back to being tense again.

5 Making the only identifiable missing kid also be the most recognizable bully was a nice touch. If there is anything deeper in Weapons, I thought it was just the simple idea that people don’t need to be perfect to deserve your sympathy.