The trigger effect: "Weapons"

Zach Cregger is shaping up as the current American horror renaissance's narrative strategist-in-chief. His breakthrough film, 2022's Barbarian, was founded on two seemingly unrelated plotlines that dovetailed at a critical juncture; his follow-up Weapons is more of a mosaic-movie, endlessly triangulating new information from the stories tesselating around its spooky centre. It has a terrific inciting incident, announcing what would appear to be the collective influence of the various It adaptations, an older, Grimmer strain of bedtime story, and the Crash Test Dummies' "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm": at precisely 2:17 one morning, an entire class of eight and nine year olds emerge from their homes, their arms raised to their shoulders like puppets-on-strings or playground Spitfires, to run unseen into the night. (It's one of recent horror cinema's most lyrical openings: an irrational image of total liberation.) The kids' disappearance can't, this time, be pinned on a vengeful clown, so the focus shifts onto those left behind, smalltown folks who don't need much prompting to start pointing fingers and assigning blame. Class teacher Justine (Julia Garner) becomes the initial figure of suspicion, incurring abusive phone calls, having "WITCH" painted on her car and being placed on indefinite leave. Ordinarily, she'd have our sympathies wrapped up, but Garner, an excellent performer who could well do with a hit such as this on her CV, instead makes Justine wiry and frazzled: she takes to drink, pushes away those who care most for her, and makes life doubly difficult for her employer (Benedict Wong) by following untouched pupils home from school. When bad things happen in life, it's how we respond to them that defines us; when bad things happen in Weapons, and they often do, how the characters react shapes and reshapes the film.

Justine's, it transpires, is one of multiple stories being told here, and through this compartmentalisation Cregger can maintain the element of surprise that elevated his previous film. (Which is a handy point for a critic to wave you off to the multiplex if you want to experience Weapons unspoiled; this review will be waiting for you on your return.) This camera, Cregger's own finger of suspicion, will also be pointed at Archer (Josh Brolin), a grief-stricken parent who counts among Justine's most vocal accusers; a beat cop (Alden Ehrenreich) who, in his own shrugging way, gets dragged into the case of the missing children; Wong's headmaster; a drug addict (Austin Abrams) who's picked the worst possible week to drift through town; and an orange-wigged weirdo (Amy Madigan) with an uncanny knack of turning people against one another. Some early responders have cited Rashomon, with its constantly shifting perspectives, as a possible point of reference; structurally, however, Weapons struck this viewer as owing an even greater debt to Altman's Short Cuts, another kaleidoscopic ensemble piece rotating around the loss of a child. An actor before he turned filmmaker, improvising his way to semi-prominence with the troupe known as The Whitest Kids U' Know, Cregger writes the type of roles actors love to play: neither obvious monsters nor innocent victims, and generally withholding some secret, big or small, from us. He's stuck an ace up everybody's sleeve, which the film can whip out and itself play at some point; as a consequence, Weapons proves one of those horror movies where plot feels less significant to the overall design than characters we're invested in and prepared to follow down deep dark holes (or into housing equivalents of same).

Sporadically, however, we get a hint that Cregger is reaching for something more substantial than cheap multiplex thrills: it's there in the title, in one staggering dreamtime image of a giant gun in the sky, its barrel timestamped with the moment these lives were changed forever, and maybe even in the choice of posters in the bedroom of Archer's son ("Bombs Away", "Fury Road"). Where Barbarian was a small, well-turned tale of the unexpected, Weapons feels vastly more expansive, a vision of American society at least as informed by successive high-school massacres and the losses of Covid as 28 Years Later was by Brexit. Cregger's ambition, it strikes me, is to draw a connecting line between unprocessed grief and violent anger. These characters have developed their own coping strategies (drink, drugs, conspiracy theories); yet no-one's really addressing the issue of the missing children, so loss curdles rapidly into frustration and rage. Everybody's triggered: it allows Weapons to feel zeitgeisty without getting unduly literal or specific about it. (There's no social media, crucially.) Does it matter that the new film is as glib around America's collective weight of trauma as Barbarian was around #MeToo? The gloss this filmmaker paints over his constructions may be diverting and surprising, but the one thing Weapons isn't is moving in any way, and the film visibly shrinks when its own finger reaches its final destination. (From everybody's responsibility, all this is suddenly the doing of one old crone who can be easily conquered and divided.) Still, the journey to that point is weird, funny, surreal, jolting, never dull, and more than a little cuckoo; the film is both an unusual delivery mechanism for jumpscares and very much of a moment where we're having to process scrambled thoughts and feelings on the run, on an hour-by-hour, story-by-story basis. Equal parts grand gesture and fairground ride, Weapons is essentially Cregger's Magnolia, though it may also be his Southland Tales.

Weapons is now playing in cinemas nationwide.