Movie titles can indeed be a slippery slope.
On one side, you have movies like the recent KPop Demon Hunters, a title that tells you directly what it is about yet can scare people away from its subject matter (for the record, I loved that film and can’t stop listening to the soundtrack.) Then you have a movie titled Weapons, which, while singular and simplistic, is about so much more.
This is one of the best premises for a film I can remember. In a normal town, a child narrator explains that, at 2:17 AM, all but one of the kids of an Elementary classroom woke up, ran into the night, never to return. That is as far as I can go, because …well, you will thank me later.
One of the key positives of the film is the structure. The film is told in chapters, as seen from the vast array of characters in the film. These include the teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, most recently the Silver Surfer in the latest Fantastic Four film), Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), one of the local Police Officers who was once Justine’s boyfriend, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew is one of the missing, Marcus (Benedict Wong), the school principal, and Alex (Cary Christopher), the one student from the class that did not vanish.
The film has other actors in it (including one actress I legit did not know was even in it until the end credits), and all are giving A game performances (especially Garner, who I honestly thought gave an award worthy performance), but the stand out by far is Zach Cregger, who directed, produced, and wrote the film (he even helped with composing the score). This is only his second film after 2022’s horror film Barbarian (which I still need to see), yet it does not take long to see how much of a knack he has behind the camera..
There is a lot of choices he makes of following the characters (we see a lot of shots with the back of heads). There is a lot of moments of stillness, build up of tension, and close ups (especially of turning door knobs). The end product is a film that plays out like an amplified version of The Twilight Zone for the 21st Century.
Parents, there was a moment during the film when I thought it was not that hard of an R rating: There is definitely swearing, and one minor sex scene which does not show nudity (only the sounds and shadows) and lasts only about five seconds. Then the second half (especially the final act) occurred, and …well, the violence. Yeah, it is a hard R indeed. High School and above.
I’ve heard some talk on line about how horror films are back. I’m not the biggest horror expert, but the ones I have seen over the last couple years of have been more hit than miss. Sure, we have had to endure films like Jeepers Creepers: Reborn, The Exorcist: Believer, The Deliverance, and 2018’s Slender Man, all of which give me a form of cinematic PTSD.
Still, we also got the likes of the original Speak No Evil, Talk to Me, The Coffee Table (my sincere apologies for not giving my friend CC enough warning for that one), The Substance, Heretic, the latest Nosferatu remake, Sinners (which I saw a second time and realize I was wrong the first time), 28 Years Later, and nearly any film associated with Jordan Peele.
Now add in Weapons, which is one of the year’s very best films, in any genre.
Overall:
Nothing else to say 