It all happened at 2:17a.m. - a time stamp that may forever shake an unassuming town in Pennsylvania. A class of third-graders all ran from their homes and seemingly disappeared into the abyss. Scratch that. All but one disappeared. Weird, right?
The film is told from the perspectives of different characters as they overlap, cross paths, and eventually converge. There’s the teacher (Julia Garner), a cop trying to solve the case (Alden Ehrenreich), the principal (Benedict Wong), a grieving father (Josh Brolin), a local junkie (Austin Abrams), and the one student who remained (Cary Christopher). The decision to tell the story this way is an effective one, especially because it’s a device not often used in horror films. Not only does it let us into the intimate lives of these characters, but it also forces us to attempt to piece the story together on our own, like a cinematic puzzle.
I’ve seen a lot of people say that this film takes a page from Stephen King’s world, but I’d argue that it’s more M. Night Shyamalan in the way that it constantly sparks curiosity and grips tightly to its odd and deliberately baffling concept until the very end. We’re constantly asking, “What the hell is going on?”
There are a lot of creepy and disturbing moments here, but even amid all the darkness, the film manages to be wildly amusing and even comical at times. Josh Brolin delivers a “What the fuck?” line that is way funnier than it even should be. The real star is Amy Madigan, who plays an unhinged old lady with questionable motives and witch-like behaviors. It’s a batshit performance that joins Longlegs’ Nicolas Cage in the club of sadistic, powder-faced menaces.
In a film shrouded in ambiguity, it’s natural for us as an audience to seek meaning and attempt to make connections with neat allegories. In my view, this film is not purely just about one thing, but many things at once. It’s about how collective grief and trauma can sometimes create more chaos than community. It’s about the pervasiveness of substance use. It’s about how everything can be used as a weapon—our minds, our bodies, our vices, and yes - actual objects. Watching the film, it’s also hard not to think that it might allude to America’s all-too-common school shooting problem.
In Weapons, not everything comes to the surface. And sometimes we don’t get the full answers. But that might be the scariest thing of all.
* 9/10 *
