It has not yet been finally clarified whether the two events are really related. But the story is simply too good to tell it at this point: After his disturbing horror sensation “Barbarian” has increased more than ten times her budget worldwide (and still appeared directly at Disney+ in Germany), broke out a top-class bidding bidding for the successor project by the author and director Zach Cregger. Netflix, New Line Cinema (Warner Bros.), Tristar Pictures (Sony) and Universal Pictures wanted “Weapons – the hour of disappearance“Be sure to have. In the end, New Line takes the race for $ 38 million (including ten million for Cregger himself).
So much for the secured facts. But shortly after the decision, Jordan Peele (“We”, “Nope”) fired his management – and this broke out the speculation: Apparently Peele absolutely wanted to produce “Weapons” with his company Monkeypaw – and was therefore extremely upset that the project did not go to his home studio universal. After reading the script, the director of the best horror film of the past 25 years was so hyped that he had drawn such drastic personal consequences. And what should we say? Now that we have seen the mystery horror “Weapons” ourselves, we can understand it all too well.
The class teacher Justine (Julia Garner) has to cope with the fact that 17 of her 18 students all disappeared without a trace on the same night.
At 2.17 a.m., 17 students got up, ran out of their houses and disappeared into the dark of the night in a straight line. Since then, there has been no trace of them. And as if that wasn't mysterious enough, all missing children also come from the class of primary school teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) – only her student Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) was still in his usual place the next morning. Little surprising has been nothing since these events in the once tranquil US small town of Maybrook.
Justine is hostile to the assembled parenting – and flees in desperation in alcohol and an affair with the police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich). The building contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) simply cannot accept that his son has disappeared forever, so he clings to everyone so little. And the headmaster Andrew (Benedict Wong) stands between all the chairs: he has to calm down the applied parents, but at the same time also take Justine out of the fire line – after all, the police investigation showed that all children had run out of their homes all by themselves …
Uncomfortable
The central mystery and the police investigations are already in the past at the beginning of “Weapons” and are only grossly retired by a girl's voice from the off in the first few minutes before the title fading. Zach Cregger is less about the disappearance of the children themselves, but about the effects on the residents of the small town. And he researches these in the following chapters, which are named after one of the people involved and are increasingly overlapping, in truly monumental cinemascope images full of breathtaking tracking shots.
Zach Cregger himself described “Weapons” as “horror epic” and, of all things, called Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece “Magnolia” as inspiration. And indeed: the chapter structure, which is increasingly forming into the overall picture, ensures a feeling of epic size in conjunction with the bluntly overwhelming images that you rarely experience in the horror. And even if it is always about the grief work of the protagonists in between, the tension is kept up throughout: – sometimes only in the background – clues can be discovered what the children could be all about.
The 17 students stormed out of their houses at 2.17 a.m. Some of them were filmed by door cameras.
Why is the film actually called “Weapons”? Why were parasites in the classroom took the day before the disappearance (which can be seen from the still not defeated board)? And why does Archer appear in the dream of a huge floating assault rifle, the brightly glowing ammunition indicator of which shows 217 remaining cartridges? (And don't worry, we haven't spoiled anything here, “Weapons” is full of such mini mysteries that keep you in the entire term over and over again.)
“Barbarian” enjoys such a unique reputation, because Zach Cregger puts a 180 ° turn in the middle and the audience suddenly finds itself in another film. In “Weapons” the change is by no means so blatant-but here too, Cregger (in contrast to “Lost” & Co.) succeeds if he ends his mystery puzzle as a dry-bös-like horror after resolution. Especially with an infinitely cathartic finale that unfolds such a satisfactory force that it really tears you out of the seats when it is cheered on.
Conclusion: No matter whether you are “weapons – the hour of disappearance” as “the ''Magnolia'Among the horror episans ”, as“' 'Fargo'meets'Lost'”Or as a“' Barbarian 'with a good shot'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri'“Try to describe – the hype is definitely real!