Film Review | 2:17 Wake-Up Call

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. 

Without delving into the necessarily secret plot turns and ingredients, it’s safe to say that the film’s core characters amid its complex matrix are Justine (Julia Garner), the classroom’s unjustly accused and ostracized teacher; a father of a missing child, Archer (Josh Brolin), who takes the investigation and various monster mash-ups in his own hands; and a certain wicked aunt, Gladys (Amy Madigan, creepy as can be), who shows up late in the story’s development. All three actors leap admirably into the pulpy splendor of the project, and carry the film, on the thespian front.

But much of this film’s power comes from its filmic devices and audio-visual-kinetic sheen. Whether by coincidence or cultural providence, Weapons falls in line with other prominent films this year with ostensibly rational stories and scenarios gone wild. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, during which life as we have known it has been radically undermined by demonic forces in the White House. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners inventively juices up its racially charged tale of fraught Southern black lives in juke joints with werewolfed hysteria. Neo-horror auteur Ari Aster’s stunning (literally) Eddington chronicles the wild implosion of a COVID-era New Mexican town, by reckoning forces of midlife crisis, power plays, and a supercharged Antifa army.

From a broader film historical perspective, the carefully intersecting jigsaw pieces in Cregger’s project reminds us of Michael Haneke’s 1994 film 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (which I fondly remember seeing at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival way back when). Both films artfully capitalize on the ability of cinema to fluidly juggle linear time and multiple perspectives. In both cases, we are led to key points in the story not through some omniscient and linear storytelling methods, but through episodic chapters which follow specific character’s subplots. Multiple angles lead to plot revelations like converging breadcrumb trails with a whizbang payoff.

There are many levels to appreciate in Weapons, including its status as one of the more adventurous cinematic wonders to have landed in the “horror” camp in years. In terms of a kitschier pop culture echo, the movie dares revive an old public service commercial trope: “It’s 2:17. Do you know where your children are?”

Weapons is currently playing on multiple Metropolitan Theatres screens. See metrotheatres.com.

See actor Josh Brolin’s interview after a SBIFF Cinema Society screening of Weapons here. View trailer here.