Zach Cregger, director of "Barbarian," explores the fear and anger that consume an otherwise stable American community, where 17 children go missing.
At 2:17 a.m. on a school day, 17 children disappear simultaneously. They roll out of bed, open their front doors, and run into the night, arms outstretched, like stealthy airplanes flying low over the lawns of their quiet suburban community. The children have one thing in common: they are all students in Justine Gandy's now-empty third-grade class, save for one shy boy named Alex, as bewildered as the town's furtive parents to have been spared such a peculiar fate.
Director: Zach Cregger
Writer: Zach Cregger
Stars: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich
It's an intriguing place to start a horror film, made all the more unusual by "Weapons" writer-director Zach Cregger's decision to have a local girl describe the film's seemingly supernatural premise. How much of the shocking and shockingly bloody events that follow could he have been aware of? It doesn't matter. As the unnamed young narrator says of her companions' disappearance, "The police and the higher-ups in this town... couldn't solve it," a statement that sets us up for a mystery that will remain unexplained, one that has recently become a successful horror subgenre, with films like "Hereditary" and "Longlegs" leaning toward ambiguity.
For three-quarters of the film, this approach lets our imagination run wild. Only when the answer emerges does "Weapons" begin to lose its appeal. Regardless of how you feel about the ending (and many will enjoy the film's darkly comic finale), Cregger has achieved something remarkable, creating a cruel and twisted bedtime story, in the style of the Brothers Grimm—not the children's Disney version, mind you, but the kind where characters kill at will and the audience struggles to sleep afterward.
Significantly expanding the scope and potency of his sinister powers of suggestion, Cregger arrives at this final nightmare of 2022's brilliantly disturbing "Barbarian," in which a hellish vacation rental was merely a facade beneath which all manner of evil had been allowed to fester. He possesses a mind exceptionally adept at revealing the threats lurking behind seemingly harmless settings—in this case, a Pennsylvania town called Maybrook, where a mass disappearance turns placid parents into an angry mob.
The relatable setting and imperfect collection of characters (made up of people whose flaws make them even more relatable) suggest the best Stephen King film that Stephen King never wrote. As long as the children remain missing, our minds are free to make any associations that arise. Some might gravitate toward QAnon-style conspiracies, where shadowy child predators prey on the nation's youth (tonally, the film resembles Denis Villeneuve's dark "Prisoners"). For me, the community's reaction reminded me of the painful aftermath of a school shooting, as parents search for answers, comfort, and blame, roughly in that order.
Josh Brolin, playing the irascible guy who likely bullied his classmates at school, plays a father named Archer Graff, whose son Matt has disappeared. He shows up at a school assembly and implicates Justine (Julia Garner), demanding to know what the teacher did to her children. This accusation hits especially hard in such politicized times, as real-life parents unite to confront school staff and policies they fear may be brainwashing their children.
Rather than choosing a single character to follow throughout the film, Cregger divides the mystery among six people, separated into distinct chapters, beginning with Justine. Only one (the last) has all the answers, while the others provide fresh perspectives on the overall situation, as the story rewinds with each new section, allowing us to relive key scenes from someone else's perspective: there's the teacher (Garner), the father (Brolin), the police officer (Alden Ehrenreich), the school administrator (Benedict Wong), and two others whose identities are best kept secret.
The pieces fit together like an expertly crafted puzzle, inducing a sense of satisfaction as certain details fall into place, from the identity of the person who scrawled "WITCH" on Justine's car to why the scruffy drug addict (Austin Abrams), assaulted by the police, risks approaching the station. Throughout the proceedings, Cregger glimpses a face with smudged, clown-like makeup.
For over an hour, the film adopts a somber, serious tone, reinforced by Larkin Seiple's steady camerawork and a bone-rattling score. But once Gladys appears, "Weapons" takes an unexpectedly over-the-top turn. By then, Cregger has upped the ante, presenting an adult turned homicidal by the same suggestive force that drove the children to run away from home. But as we begin to understand why all this is happening, the runaway ideas Cregger's concept unleashed in our minds narrow down to a single, inevitably limiting explanation.
As in "Barbarian," the violence escalates in the final stretch, as the title becomes clearer and we realize that the community is made up of two kinds of people: targets and weapons, and virtually anything, from an impressionable child to a vegetable peeler, can become dangerous in the wrong hands.
Comments
Post a Comment