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staking out fresh territory among the pop horror vanguard led by Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, and their equally warped auteur brethren. He’s a natural fit; like Peele, Cregger’s comedy background gives him a knack for calibrated set-ups and delightfully appalling payoffs.
He knows that good horror lives and dies on a sturdy punchline withheld just long enough to get his audience to squirm. Cregger demonstrates even sharper comic-horror instincts withWeapons navigates a sprawling, jigsaw system of traumas and secrets that evokes the “small town in peril” yarns of Stephen King , kicking off on the morning following the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of 17 children, all of whom were, in happier times, taught by Justine Gandy . Only one student shows up to her classroom that day: Alex , whose sullen mush offers little clarity to the authorities or the community’s grieving parents. Few grieve harder, or louder, than Archer Graff , who curls into his missing son’s empty bed each night and can barely function at his day job as a local foreman. Yet, in his own morbid way, Graff seems to be doing more for these kids than the police , who are either too overwhelmed by the scale of this tragedy or too cautious to properly interrogate Justine—the only suspect, in Graff’s view. Naturally, the foreman looks for meaning in measurable things like charts and security footage, desperate to find his son and a scapegoat; with Gandy’s troubled past fueling his suspicion, he eagerly foists blame at her feet. As for the teacher, after being placed on leave by the school’s sanguine principal , a private search for answers leads her to Alex, whose haunted gaze has only deepened since his classmates’ mass disappearance, and, as we soon realize, was also there long before.From here, Cregger carefully peels back the private lives of his central characters, using a chapter structure that hops perspectives and occasionally toys with the foreboding tone. Gandy, we learn, spends her nights nursing a bottle of vodka, occasionally keeping her bed warm with a local cop/recovering alcoholic named Paul . The testy moments they share are a brief reprieve from the weight of a tragedy that has consumed the town around them, its misery rendered in grim, all-too recognizable imagery. With empty classrooms, fading memorials, fierce town meetings, and an assault rifle that hovers over Maybrook like an advancing storm cloud, Cregger carefully yet purposefully weaves a supporting theme of American school violence into his film’s viciously tense atmosphere.is steeped in loss and paranoia during its first hour, punctuated with symbols and other arcane clues that snap into sharp focus during its dizzyingly eventful second half. Cregger puts his ensemble through a tangle of collisions throughout—some emotional, others quite literal—ratcheting up tension before retreating to his next chapter , a rhythmic design that gives the audience a chance to catch their breath before doom shoves its way back in. Soon, Cregger begins revealing the true shape of his mystery: Maybrook has either been brought low under some malign influence, or its social rot was always there, waiting for some unspeakable thing to come along and expose it. What truly blights Maybrook is for you to discover, though it’s enough to say that Cregger has successfully put a gnarly new spin on folk horror that reflects an ongoing erosion of social trust. Through this, his film establishes keen tension between Garner and Brolin , which initially makes it seem as though-type reckoning. No doubt Cregger is playing with his audience’s collective awareness of the busted reality outside the theater, where infrastructure is failing, homes are bunkers, and schools resemble mausoleums, to subvert expectations. In many ways,is a topical ensemble drama; thrillingly, it has darker, more genre-driven ambitions beyond that. Cregger mixes all this despair, cynicism, and brutality into an impressively wicked and heady brew—and a ferociously entertaining horror movie, besides.Jarrod Jones is a freelance critic based in Chicago, with bylines at The A.V. Club, IGN, and any place that will take him, really. For more of his mindless thoughts on genre trash, cartoons, and comics, follow him on Twitter or check out his blog, DoomRocket.
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