Weapons assessment – Zach Cregger’s slick Barbarian follow-up is a bumpy experience | Horror movies
No one actually noticed Barbarian coming, the playful 2022 horror about an Airbnb reservation gone horribly fallacious. That was a part of the plan, a teasing trailer that solely advised a small a part of the story and a swaggering title that promised one thing grander than we may initially see, and that is perhaps why I discovered the response to be slightly alienating. It was showered with euphoric reward upon launch and first-time writer-director Zach Cregger, whose background is in comedy, was instantly heralded as a brand new king of the style. For me, it was extra trick than deal with, a sizzle reel that confirmed Cregger to be a film-maker of appreciable talent but in addition one who papered over the cracks of an exasperatingly illogical and uninspired script with flashy gimmickry.
There’s been an inevitable shift within the hype machine for Cregger’s follow-up, the larger, bolder and, fortunately, higher Weapons, buzz that started when his spec script precipitated a talk-of-the-town public sale months after Barbarian overperformed. Trade rumours urged that Jordan Peele was so decided to land the undertaking that when his firm misplaced out to New Line, he parted methods along with his administration. There’s since been over two years of anticipation – Cregger evaluating the undertaking to Magnolia, stars equivalent to Julia Garner and Josh Brolin signing up, an all-out assault of a advertising and marketing marketing campaign – and so second time round, it’s just about not possible to not see this one coming. Credit score to the Warner Bros advertising and marketing group for nonetheless holding one thing again although, the jolting string of trailers highlighting sufficient of the usual WTF imagery with out actually revealing all that a lot past the putting premise.
Seventeen youngsters from the identical class are lacking. All of them acquired away from bed at 2.17am and ran off into the darkness. The police are baffled and the dad and mom are livid, aiming their anger at trainer Ms Grady (Julia Garner). She’s one among many alternating viewpoints, which additionally embody a mother or father (Josh Brolin), a cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a small-time legal (Austin Abrams) and the one child who didn’t run away (Cary Christopher), slowly constructing an image of what actually occurred that evening.
It’s a tantalising set-up, pitched someplace between Stephen King and the Brothers Grimm, and Cregger’s cautious sluggish construct retains us in thrall for essentially the most half, wanting to see simply how the puzzle-pieces match. The POV-shifting permits for his wonderful forged to every get their second, from Garner’s nervy, vodka-swilling hate determine to Ehrenreich’s quick-tempered philanderer, though Cregger’s characters are all fairly thinly drawn, resembling much less the protagonists of considerate brief tales and extra the our bodies one inhabits in a online game. They’re in service of a magnetic drip-feed thriller plot that unravels so compellingly that it takes us some time to note how empty all of it is. On the one hand, it’s a aid that in contrast to so lots of his style friends, Cregger isn’t all that within the dirge of trauma horror and whereas those that want to search for it would nonetheless discover a deeper allegorical learn of Weapons (in all probability the identical few who laughably claimed Barbarian was a robust #MeToo assertion), it’s largely an engine of brute pressure, much like a schlocky paperback you may’t put down on vacation. But it surely’s additionally crucially missing one thing, an added factor of shock or sophistication.
It jogged my memory of Denis Villeneuve’s lurid lacking youngsters thriller Prisoners and whereas it’s mercifully not as undeservingly self-serious, it’s equally good-looking, high-end packaging for one thing that’s extremely foolish and simple. The tricksy construction and repetition of scenes from completely different viewpoints would have one imagine there’s a labyrinthine plot to be uncovered however Weapons is way hokier and, frustratingly, dumber than it might appear, counting on staggeringly incompetent police and wilfully ignorant residents. Cregger stays a remarkably assured and alluringly immersive director, setting up some splendidly rattling shocks and moments of seat-clenching unsureness. His canny mood-conjuring grips us within the second (the movie is a enjoyable, reactive expertise with an enormous viewers) and he attracts a fantastically scary and nightmarishly odd efficiency from a late-arriving actor whose identify could be a spoiler to disclose however his storytelling crumbles even earlier than the lights come up. The finale would possibly up the violence to a wince-inducing stage however it doesn’t reduce anyplace close to as deep because it may have, chaos with out which means.
Cregger is perhaps increasing and enhancing his arsenal, utilizing his expertise extra successfully than he did in Barbarian, however there’s nonetheless one thing lacking. One thing sharper.