After more than a decade of suffering – and often crazy semantic – debate about the concept “Elevated horror“It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that the most exciting new voice in mainstream horror is a smart guy who is obsessed with scary basements.
Zach CreggerS “Arms“Is not a basement movie to almost the same degree as his 2022 debut”Barbarian“IS A BASEM MOVIE (FEW THINGS ARE!), But this sad, sprawling, and fun-hel Vision of Suburban Despair Takes Similar Pleasure in Levaging a High-Concept Premise For” Low “Genre Thrills. OR, WHAT HAPPENS IN BURYING A NIGHTER Under The Floor Under The Floor under The Floor under The Floor under The Floor. Invariably represents Gets subsumed by the full-body shiver of the fact that people were living on top of it the whole time.
That framing may have destroyed the first twist of “barbarian”, but I promise it does not reveal anything least destroyed about “weapons”. For one thing this is an ensemble film With a plot that hangs less surprising than it makes a process with collective self -discovery. For another, all its most important characters are trying to hide their horror to one degree – to build new future for themselves on top of a shared basis for unthinkable loss.
When “weapons” begins, that loss has already grown to shadow every street in the sleepy eastern suburb of Maybrook. It originates from a bizarre incident one night a month before, when – just at 02:17 – all except one of the 18 students in Justine Gandy’s third class classified from their beds, opened the front doors to their houses and ran to the dark with their arms spread as if they were called to it with a dinner bell (a spectacular card).
No one has seen a trace of the children since, and instead of a better alternative, their parents have turned their anger and confusion to Justine (Julia Garner), whose seemingly humble behavior makes the young teacher an even more natural outlet for these feelings than she had already been. She must know something. Have seen something. And Brawny Local Dad Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son is one of the missing children, is determined to find out what it might be.
But Justine is just as hell at getting answers, and in her own way as wounded and wobbling as she tries to sneak through life without them. A recurrent alcoholic whose sensitive appearance believes in both the tetchiness of an addict and a teacher’s durability, Justine becomes equally busy with Alex (Cary Christopher) -The one who remains the child from his class-as an archer is with its parallel investigations will form the basis for a light non-linear plot that seems to allocate half of the people in their own leadership.
The film is divided into a series of discreet but interconnected chapters, its characters circle each other like the bullets from a loaded revolver. The ambivalent police Paul (a must -have Alden Ehrenreich), who happens to be Justine’s ex, is becoming increasingly opposing a local meth addict (Austin Abrams) when his marriage with the police chief’s daughter falls apart. The Mild School’s principal (Benedict Wong As Andrew) focuses his energy to ensure that Alex adapts to his new class. Alex, in the meantime, surrenders the same concern to his parents, who have been paralyzed by shock since their son became their city’s version of “The boy who lived.”
Somehow this movie is fun. Sporadically at first, and then outrageous at the end. Based on the instability he felt after the sudden death of his whitest children know that Castmate and close friend Trevor Moore, Cregger meets every Maybrookian in his most vulnerable moment and takes more and more furious pleasure to reveal how powerless they are to control where their grief and confusion lead them from there. It is easy to run someone who is already winging, a fact that “weapons” observes for their tragedy even when spinning against a semi -coherent but very Catartic farce about free will – a farce where injures people injures people until everything is in the grip on someone else’s pain.
Like “Barbarian”, Cregger’s second function uses horror to decorate comedy and vice versa, blur the lines between them to create a similar boundary between victims and monsters. And much like “Barbarian”, “Weapons” – for all its greatness and trust – is not particularly interested in mining that no man’s land for great ideas. There is a stretch of this movie where it seems that it may be on the verge of diagnosing the injury that has inspired America to eat themselves alive (look for it during the nightmare sequence where someone sees a giant AR-15 that floats in the clouds above them), but “weapons” take themselves less seriously when it goes.
Instead of sugar coating, the ability to become a whole is again and/or exaggerating the extent to which a mutual understanding can allow these characters to identify their common enemy, the movie cannon balls in the gloomy absurdity of a world that has lost control of itself. HILARIOUS AND UNHINGED ENough to Compensate for the Story’s Minimal Character Depth (IE Archer’s Whole Schtick is that he’s vaguely divorced and regrets not being able to say “I love you” to his son) and superficial lore, the load 15 minutes of ”we have been 15 minutes of. Anxiety Together with Cartoon Ultra-Violence That It Creates A Sublime Harmony Between Sketch Comedy and Kiyoshi Kurosawa Horror. I suddenly have a strange handling to see the lone island of Remake “cure”.
However, even in conjunction with the late 1990s, Kurosawa is not the most obvious filmmaker to quote as an influence here. Epic of the non-standards in today’s studio horror output have long been compared to a genre riff on “Magnolia”, an unfavorable comparison that ultimately misunderstands how this film works.
Too small with half there ”Magnolia” was bursting at the seams, Cregger’s script is both less propulsive and more siloed than Paul Thomas Anderson’s biblical opus. One is a symphony, and the other a simple canon. Where “Magnolia” embraced an organic messiness, “Weapons” unfolds in a series of rigid stanzas: We meet Someone in Crisis, they try and fail to self-medicate, they look for answers, Weird Shit Happens, and the Cycle start again when the madness is about to reach fever pitch.
In that respect, at least, the comparisons “Magnolia” do not seem too far away, but “weapons” move with such an off-charter once that “punch-drunk love” seems to be the more relevant PTA movie. Its plump point, its beaten energy, its open -hearted characters in desperate search for a ship to contain their emotions … “weapons” may have been a richer experience of the doubled size of its role and completely embraced the scale of Anderson’s previous work, but the film that Cregger made is more effective because of how it collapses, rather than what it explains.
The non-linear form of its story not only allows “weapons” to hide the aged genre pattern for excitement and release, it also allows Cregger to condense it until he has completely caused the distance between horror and comedy, terror and relief, self-control and surrender. This is not a puzzle film – there is no fun to have a timeline or map how the characters all relate to each other on a flat surface. On the contrary, what is important for “weapons” is how they stack on top of each other like the floors in a house that has been shared against themselves. A house built by someone who cannot withstand being alone with their pain.
“Many people die in many really strange ways in this story,” whispers a child to us in the film’s opening story, but it is the strange – and tragedy – how these people live in this story that makes “weapons” so deadly in the end.
Rating: B+
Warner Bros. will release “weapons” in theaters on Friday, August 8th.
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