Avis des critiques

It’s not even that Weapons is demanding a lot of work from the audience – and that might be exactly what rankles some about it... But it’s hard to fault Cregger for making a horror movie that is more concerned with its own scary, twisty immediacy than its optics as a social critique.

What stands out about Cregger’s work in Weapons is how preternaturally self-assured the filmmaking is. While not exactly bereft of jump scares or gore — the filmmaker continues to be a big fan of showing skulls being crushed apart by blunt force trauma — the film devotes considerable attention to the sleepy rhythms of small-town life, and the enveloping numbness of living in the aftermath an unimaginable violation.

Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022’s Barbarian is easily as weird, wicked, and fun – what it’s not, however, is the chilly, nightmare headf**k we’ve been told it is.

Weapons is nearly an hour longer than the average creepy movie – Imaginary (2024) or Baghead (2023) – but Cregger’s mosaic approach justifies extra running time as he asks us to put pieces together for ourselves while delivering jolts with sudden crossed wires.

Cregger has clearly made a study of horror films and thrillers, and he understands the importance of pacing as well as how laughs can amplify scares. He winds you up, keeps you on edge, calms you down only to wind you up again. At the same time, because he has divided the movie into segments that develop the story from various points of view, the tension tends to pulse on and off like a hard-working blender.

[I]t’s mostly an engine of brute force, similar to a schlocky paperback you can’t put down on holiday. But it’s also crucially lacking something, an added element of surprise or sophistication.

“Weapons” might have been a richer experience if it doubled the size of its cast and fully embraced the scale of Anderson’s earlier work, but the movie that Cregger made is more effective because of how it collapses horror convention, rather than how it explodes it.

Cregger’s confident direction and the maniacal commitment of the actor in that late-arrival role allow the comedy to co-exist with horrific violence and escalating suspense in a concluding stretch with a dash of Lord of the Flies. It’s as explosively bloody, viscerally charged and masterfully choreographed a denouement as that of any horror movie in recent memory.

The fun of this smart-as-hell movie is in the structure Cregger has created for his screenplay. It becomes a puzzle for the viewer as the film basically is divided into 15-minute-or-so chapters, each titled with the name of a character at the center or periphery of this mystery.

Weapons takes its time laying out an elaborate story, repeatedly shifting perspectives and main characters until the myriad strands come together in immensely satisfying fashion... And despite Weapons’ ample horrors, the picture is also darkly comic, finding grim humour in the story’s fantastical, playfully absurd extremes. Indeed, some of the funniest scenes intertwine with the most nerve-wracking as the characters come to grips with Cregger’s unimaginable, inventive shocks.