When you carefully examine the infrastructure connecting the pristine upper middle-class houses of Maybrook, Pennsylvania to the gleaming elementary school where 17 students in the same class have mysteriously run off into the night never to be seen again, you can see the malignant cancer that is eating away at the soul of America.
The facade is everywhere. Buildings are dark and derelict, bridges are corroded, and liquor stores are stocked full to the brim with cheap alcohol, their automatic doors patrolled by hawking junkies. Zach Cregger’s sophomore horror film, Weapons is set against the backdrop of a divided nation, a nation fighting a cold civil war that threatens to turn hot at any moment.
Weapons’ inciting incident is instantly iconic, 17 children running free at 2:17am, arms outstretched like jet fighters that have just loosed their missiles at foreign targets. George Harrison’s Beware of Darkness haunts the montage, a track from his 1970 album All Things Must Pass his own epic ode to freedom released amongst the disintegration of The Beatles.
If The Beatles can come apart so acrimoniously then so can the fragile myth of small-town Americana.
America loves a scapegoat rather than to search for the root cause of the problem. The Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism, Trump’s ICE courthouse arrests, let alone the legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow laws serve the fractured nature of Trump’s second term. The fact that all 17 children in Weapons were from Justine Gandy’s third-grade class places her directly in the firing line of grieving parents who need someone to blame.
Justine is young, single, opinionated, over familiar, gives a shit, and has the temerity to have a messy, complicated love life. The ire of the parents is based upon rumour and conjecture, Justine the lightning rod for all the storms of controversy to conduct themselves appallingly.
Played by the great Julia Garner, the deserving heir to Jennifer Jason Leigh, Justine is everything. Roe Vs Wade, Sandy Hook, Trump’s executive order dismantling the Department of Education, the unprecedented book bans in schools, only 1% of which are implemented by students themselves.
More to the point, Justine is a human being trying to live day to day in extraordinary circumstances. She’s harassed, stalked, prank called, vandalised and attacked from all angles. The camera is subjective, hanging directly over her shoulder or from her point of view often in long takes. The cinematography has a direct lineage traced back to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, based upon the Columbine High School massacre, and further back to that film’s inspiration, Alan Clarke’s Elephant, depicting sectarian murders during The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Van Sant and Clarke’s minimalist films are horrific and offer no answers. The murder of innocents in Northern Ireland was halted by painful introspection, the murder in America continues to this day. Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, more than 390,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school.
“A finely tooled horror film that scares us into thinking for ourselves”
Cregger’s horror film is maximalist and hints at some explanations – namely in a septuagenarian character that comes to stay in Maybrook, openly invited by a caring family. That character, bombastic with shades of Ruth Gordon’s Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby, reveals themselves to be a parasite feeding on the body politic of America, leeching off the populace who are in a collective coma, weaponizing everything they can to stay relevant and in power, polite liberals ignoring the ridiculous costume until they have outstayed their welcome – and then it is too late.
The Trumpian allegory doesn’t stop there. The character utters an appalling threat that could be posted on Truth Social, “I can make your parents hurt themselves, I can make them hurt each other… I can make them eat each other if I want to.”
The character’s power is to manipulate the truth and make normal people do dreadful things to one another as the recognised line of moral decency has been carefully eroded for social media witches and warlocks to suck the marrow of America bone dry.
Weapons could be all of this or none of the above as its Rashomon narrative expertly unfolds. What Weapons reveals itself as is a finely tooled horror film that scares us into thinking for ourselves and offers hope in the form of unlikely partnerships.
When the simple sound effect of a car door opening off screen is the most terrifying thing the audience will experience all year, Weapons deserves its place as an instant classic within the horror film canon.