Parent-teacher evening: Julia Garner gets schooled by Josh Brolin. Photo / Supplied
Parent-teacher evening: Julia Garner gets schooled by Josh Brolin. Photo / Supplied
Review by Sarah Watt
Sarah reviewed for the Sunday Star Times until 2019. After a career change to secondary school teaching, she now she works in alternative education with our most disadvantaged rangatahi.
Weapons, directed by Zach Cregger, is in cinemas now.
Scoring high on the originality scale, this horror movie taps into our fears about missing children and small-town retribution.
At its heart is the disappearance of 17 primary school kids, who are seen on CCTV and doorbell cam running out oftheir homes at 2.17am. Only tiny, timid classmate Alex Lilly is inexplicably left behind.
As the kids disappear into the ether, their teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is immediately blamed by the distraught parents, who descend on police and community meetings to demand answers. With local police stumped, Gandy takes the investigation into her own hands.
It’s a terrific set-up from the heralded director of indie horror Barbarian, Zach Cregger, who has an impressive cast for his sophomore feature. Josh Brolin stars as angry dad Archer Graff, Benedict Wong as the local police chief, and Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) is hugely enjoyable as a teetotal cop who falls off the wagon and into deep trouble caused by Garner’s beguiling schoolmistress.
Thrillingly, we then see the drama through the eyes of different characters, as layers of mystery are slowly peeled away.
As a horror film, Weapons delivers plenty of shriek-out-loud jump-scares and shockingly gruesome moments, but its strengths are its unfathomable thriller of a plot and multi-perspective storytelling. Ultimately, Weapons doesn’t quite deliver the resolution that it teases. But for a movie with compelling character-driven drama and atmosphere, it’s of a higher calibre than much of the genre.
