Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger, 2025)

I watch around 200 or so movies per year in cinemas, and I’m bummed to report (now that we’re in mid-August) that 2025 has been the worst year for movies in a couple of decades, maybe even in my lifetime. Others have already written about the various industry factors that have caused a dearth of worthwhile films this year, so I won’t waste any time on that. But I will take the opportunity to use one new mainstream movie, Zach Cregger’s Weapons, to point out some unfortunate trends that are behind this problem, from a creative perspective rather than an industry point-of-view. Some critics have mentioned how Weapons and Cregger’s previous film, Barbarian, demonstrate the director’s familiarity with reliable tropes in the horror genre, though I’m afraid that I get less a sense of allusion or reference than derivative symbols and overused material, not just in Cregger’s movies but in nearly all contemporary horror films, a genre that’s historically been known for its daring and ingenuity, when it’s not just functioning in “sequels and rip-offs” mode.

I really wanted to trust the lead male actor Josh Brolin’s enthusiastic praise for this movie on social media, until I realized during the closing credits that he was also a producer for the film. Yes, there are elements to be praised from a cinematic standpoint. The actors (especially Alden Ehrenreich and Amy Madigan) are game, and their performances up the ante for the kind of portrayals that will reliably engage an audience. Josh Brolin and Julia Garner are well-cast in their central roles, if only as vehicles of expression since the film’s plot pivots around them and their reactions to outlandish situations. The film’s opening premise is that all of the students but one in an elementary school class, for which Garner’s character Justine Gandy is the teacher, ran out of their homes unnoticed at 2:17am on one quiet suburban night and remain missing. (The name of the school, Maybrook, might push the boundaries of good taste since it's a bit too intentionally close to Sandy Hook for comfort.)

While Cregger mounts the mystery and builds the tension admirably (and at times absurdly), the outcomes in the movie’s second half make the successes of it first half kind of pointless, except from a box office profit standpoint. The only remaining student in Miss Gandy’s class, Alex, has a sick aunt visiting who’s thrown his home life into demented chaos, carefully controlled by the film’s parameters though ultimately too silly (and again, derivative) to matter very much, aesthetically or otherwise. Amy Madigan turns in the film’s best performance as Aunt Gladys, a terminally ill witch with no background story and very memorable fashion sense. Even just watching how Madigan’s countenance changes from scene to scene is a lesson in how to inhabit this kind of whacked out, unpredictable character properly (she’s fully revealed after a series of clown-like jump scares in which only her makeup-caked face suddenly fills the screen).

As I was watching the film, I remembered seeing Amy Madigan in an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s play Buried Child, in which she co-starred with her husband Ed Harris. The memory threw into contrast the movie’s intellectual shortcomings with the artistic strengths of a stage drama that’s no less horrifying than Weapons on certain similar metaphorical levels. That comparison doesn’t undercut Madigan’s notable performance as Aunt Gladys since Zach Cregger’s film and Sam Shepard’s play are clearly very different enterprises overall. But it does beg the question: what exactly are you making for your audience and why? Also, if it’s a film or a play, what’s the dramatic provenance of your material since a dramatic representation is the particular medium that you’ve chosen as a writer/director?

And it's exactly at the intersection of these questions that a movie like Weapons, along with its totally obvious corollaries in the contemporary horror genre, begins to fall apart and unravel as art, losing both the audience and (serious) critics who’d have otherwise ensured its prosperity. Gladys brings with her into Alex’s home a little black thorny tree to use for her dark magic, and an ancient-looking golden bell with the number 6 engraved on its side. It’s more than a bit embarrassing when the horror movie Together starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, which is also currently screening in cinemas right now, has a nearly identical if larger emblematic golden bell overseeing its witchcraft and curses, not to mention that each film also features a gay male couple who suffer truly brutal and gruesome fates. These are not mere coincidences but a lack of imagination that lets down the paying viewer. Lurking behind the tired usage of the sinister golden bell is that idiotically hypnotic teacup in Jordan Peele’s abysmal Get Out (they gave him an Oscar for Best Screenplay for writing that?), an image which then became the logo for Peele’s film company, of course. These kinds of derivative tricks and blatant signposts aren’t scary, and they aren’t clever. They carry no greater depth or meaning whatsoever, and to put it bluntly, they’re just lazy.

So everything comes down to another blunt yet pointed fact: there are different forms of creative intelligence. Some are in service of commerce, while others are in service of art. The intelligence of Weapons, behind a fairly flimsy smoke-screen of so-called “elevated” horror, is an intelligence of technicality. The film succeeds visually and sonically, it’s well-performed, and its structure (arranged in chapters subtitled for individual characters, to allow for a variety of perspectives on the story) at least shows some ambitions toward audience engagement. When the intent is money-making, the technical aspects will get people to the cinema with the right kinds of promotion, as the very lucrative opening weekend box office tallies of Weapons attest. But the movie does not aspire to a higher and more important form of creative intelligence, one that brings technical prowess together with genuine ideas, ideas that have relevant long-term human resonance as well as aesthetic longevity. (Those who think that their own subjective interpretation of a film matters most would be wise to read Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay “Against Interpretation.”)

When the missing children come crashing through the windows and doorways of random suburban houses at the end of the movie, there’s a hint of a deeper idea that remains almost completely unexplored: the separateness and isolation of those individual homes on each suburban block, and the death of true community that they represent, which is a far more chilling, bizarre, and even truthfully surreal actuality of the sort that’s “too close to our reality,” as Sontag potently observed in her 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The film does descend into some darker corners and the always-obligatory horror movie basement, but rather than giving its audience real connected and developed themes to ponder by the film’s end, we get to watch the children devour Aunt Gladys and rip her body apart in fountains of fake blood instead. One guy online tried to argue that the ending is an image of intergenerational revenge, an overdetermined notion which he’s planting there himself as a kind of wishful thinking that the movie isn’t strongly constructed enough to support. Sure, the fate of Aunt Gladys harkens back to the violent endings supplied to us by classic fairy tales like those by the Brothers Grimm, but it’s a fairly flat finale that viewers will hardly care about at all once they’ve left the theater.

Ironically, I watched Weapons at the cinema immediately after I’d watched a Fathom Events screening for Ghibli Fest of the 1988 animated masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, yet another story of seriously imperiled children whom the audience is anxiously hoping will survive. As a powerful recollection of the filmmaker Isao Takahata’s personal memories of the widespread fire-bombings in Japan at the end of World War II and the struggles of people there to remain alive in its aftermath (adapted from Akiyuka Nosaka’s celebrated, heartbreaking memoir), the movie is a frame-by-frame model of how a story’s execution can fuse technical and aesthetic (and even historical) intelligences in ways that the movie’s audience will long remember. Does Weapons need to be Grave of the Fireflies? Obviously not. And yet it still needs to be more and go deeper than what it’s able to evoke in its current derivative form, in order for all of the films like it to mean something greater than the revenue that they return to those who crafted them.

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