There are films that put their trust into an audience’s ability to get behind a slow build, Weapons is just such a piece. Told through the different vantage points of the main players in a Groundhog Day fashion, you relive the same day over and over. Each stanza reveals more information and the picture become clearer and more menacing.
Julia Garner plays Justine Gandy, a grade school teacher who arrives at her class one day to find all of her students (except one) mysteriously missing. You are given no clues at first and Ms Gandy becomes the brunt of the towns anger and suspicion. It turns her life upside down.
As you discover the townspeople’s lives (secret and otherwise) you are drip feed clues to the ultimate circumstance of the missing children’s lives. Then when Gladys Lilly (Amy Madigan) arrives on the scene with her strange red wig and overdone red lippy things take a decidedly dark turn and your sense of curiosity is changed to one of dread.
The facade of normalcy of the town’s inhabitants is torn away. Weapons graphically distills a creepy vision of American life that get weirder and weirder at every turn. When the final resolve happens, it pulls everything together with humour and more than a bit of out right horror.
Rob Hudson
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