Weapons, the feel weird/jumpy hit of the summer, might have applied the standard horror film goal of scaring the bejeesus out of you if it weren't so fiendishly clever as a cinematic experience. Writer and director (and co-music-score creator) Zach Cregger has concocted a brilliant filmic puzzle, lined with the shock tactics and dollops of gore we expect of the horror genre. Along the occasionally grisly and white-knuckled path, regular deposits of Grand Guignol humor lighten the sensory load.
But what ultimately allows the film to transcend the genre and stick stubbornly in our memory is its creator’s virtuosic storyboarding and ability to bring his vision to the screen. Easy or instant gratification is swapped out for a patient sense of pacing, through which even the meaning of the title arrives only deep in the game. (Hint: The secret resembles Charlton Heston’s big reveal at the end of Soylent Green.) A prevailing aesthetic here has to do with the power of “wait for it”–style restraint.
For a film so craftily interwoven with inside-out chronologies and secret narrative passageways, the central driving mystery of the story is laid out surprisingly plainly within its first few minutes. In the otherwise sleepy American town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, almost an entire class of 3rd-graders has gone missing, in a haunting fashion. At precisely 2:17 a.m., these children bolted out of bed and raced out of their houses like adrenaline-fueled zombies toward a whereabouts unknown.