How do you follow up a breakout horror hit like Zach Cregger’s oozy Barbarian? Early gossip told us that, after resolving a bidding war for his next project, the young director would be blending the sensibility of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia with something altogether more macabre.
That comparison is not entirely deranged. Like Magnolia, Weapons quickly resolves into a collection of interlocking stories, each told from the perspective of one key character. There, however, the relationship with Anderson’s film ends.
Weapons is the best Stephen King adaptation to not actually be adapted from a Stephen King story. All the elements are in place. A weird disturbance spreads unease about a small-town community. Everyday soap opera plays out as the supernatural elements blossom. We end with a hectic conflagration that drowns audience and actors in a reservoir of blood. Heck, there’s even something like a cackling clown in early undergrowth.
You couldn’t call Weapons original – the TV series The Leftovers also feels like an influence – but it is executed with such class that few will mind so many variations on familiar melodies.
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We begin with a voiceover explaining how, in the small hours of a strange morning, all but one of 18 members of the same elementary-school class rose from their beds and, arms extended, ran silently into apparent oblivion.
Weeks later the entire town is, understandably enough, in a state of bewildered distress. Fingers are being pointed at the class’s teacher. Surely, as the adult connecting these children together, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), must have had something to do with the vanishing.
Cregger’s script is careful to leave the accusations vague, but, in a world clogged with conspiracies about abducted children, we have some idea what is on parents’ minds.
Helped out by good actors, the director sketches fleshy characters with impressive economy. Jessica is a caring teacher, but she is far from perfect. Her immediate responses to the stress are to buy two fat bottles of vodka and, later, to tempt Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), a recovering alcoholic, into boozy adultery.
Morgan, a cop at home to his own compromises, lets a drugged-out suspect (Austin Abrams) loose after smacking him in the jaw. Archer Gaff (Josh Brolin), one of the raging parents, turns irresponsible private investigator and rounds on Justine.
Slotting together into a broader temporal jigsaw, those characters’ stories – plus a few more – ask as many questions as they answer. What is going on in the spooky house with the blacked-out windows? What is the red-lipped vision that appears in the form of hallucinatory jump-scares? One apparent reference to the film’s title continues to baffle the current reviewer.
All this is carried out amid – another King staple – rigorously curated contemporary Americana. Dark End of the Street is playing in the dark bar where Justine meets up with Paul for that ill-advised liaison. Everywhere we are reminded of a complacent ordinariness that, in horror, so often fails to contain ancient effusions of pagan dread.
When the macabre does fully show itself, no concessions are made to taste or restraint. Though Weapons is lavishly shot and expensively acted – Amy Madigan is deliciously gamey in a role we won’t spoil – it ultimately settles into the rhythms of premium-brand pulp.
Folk who enjoy complaining about the “elevated horror” – a term no film-maker uses – of Robert Eggers or Ari Aster will have nothing to fear from a closing catastrophe that leaves no tendon unbroken or no artery untapped.
Cregger does, however, constantly find ways of making the familiar new, not least in a final bout of insanity that has more to do with classic silent comedy than it does with King’s modern Gothic.
Recommended to those with strong stomachs and black senses of humour.
In cinemas from Friday, August 8th
