Weapons is the newest film by The Barbarian director Zach Cregger which tells the story of a small town following an incident where 17 kids all run away from home at 2:17 AM.

This is a film that is very difficult to talk about without spoiling it due to the mystery at the heart of it and how the themes and subtext relate to the mystery. Therefore this review will contain light spoilers from here on out, so for people who don’t want any spoilers I urge you to check out the film, it’s great.

The first and main thing that I want to praise about his film is its structure. I think that most filmmakers would choose to focus on either on or two characters if they were writing this film, and that’s a fairly logical conclusion that I think most people would understand as well. That just makes Cregger’s decision to focus on the POV’s of six different characters even more interesting. It makes an already ambitious film even more ambitious and difficult to pull off, and yet somehow it works. The thing that really struck me was how well paced the film was using this structure. The potential issue you could run into with this structure is that once you’ve ramped up the tension with one character, you then cut away to a whole new character and you risk losing all that tension. This is something that I think Cregger manages to avoid and I never felt like the tension dissipated upon changing to a different character’s POV. Another benefit of this approach is felt like it allowed the film to feel like a character study for all six of the main characters, and they all felt fleshed out and well-realised because of this.

One thing I find interesting is the debate raging online on whether this film actually had something to say. Now I think this partly goes to people’s presumption this this would be a film that tackles the subject of mass shootings in America, which you could argue it still does, however I do think it’s more just about general grief and how people deal with it. I think that the dream sequence involving Archer (Josh Brolin) is more about him trying to make sense of his son’s disappearance. That’s what strives his character’s actions in the film. I think that this is further evidenced by Zach Cregger saying that he wrote this film as a way to deal with grief he was feeling. I think the fact that this is a portrait of flawed people, that never judges them for by so, is a result of this exploration of grief. I also just want to take a minute to talk about the sequence of Alex (Cary Christopher) having to feed soup to his parents, which is legitimately heart-breaking and again, just further explains why Alex makes the choices that he does. It’s a film about people in pain, and ultimately that’s why I personally don’t think it’s got nothing to ay.

I could praise so many aspects of this film, I truly think it’s a very special film that’s worthy of a lot of discussion. I do think it’s a film I need to rewatch just because of how lofty and ambitious it’s trying to be, leading it to be a lot on a first watch, but ultimately I think it’s one of the best films this year and it’s one I think that everyone should check out.

Rating – **** 1/2