Virginia native Zach Cregger’s second movie as writer-director, “Weapons,” is a small-town horror mystery that’s skimpy on the small town and even the mystery. Cregger doubles down on a gimmick that he used in “Barbarian:” Whenever the plot demands that he reveal what’s going on, he starts the story all over again from the vantage point of another character. Cregger pulls this stunt six times in “Weapons,” and the movie becomes an exercise, less a thriller than Six Short Films in Search of Suspense.
Cregger is shrewd, and make no mistake: He’s got game. The prologue is beautiful and eerie, easily the film’s highpoint. One night in a small Pennsylvania town, an entire classroom of children, save one, prance out of their homes in the middle of the night, their arms held out in identical postures that render them something like silhouettes of little airplanes, or, per the title, missiles. The gothic shadows, accompanied by George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness,” put you in a state of supreme satanic panic. What happened to the children? It is such an uncannily resonant idea, merging anxieties over school shootings and the bottomless maw of dangers available online, that it is astonishing another horror filmmaker hasn’t gotten here first.
You are primed to assume that “Weapons” is to be a vast conspiracy film, of interlocking associations, that will render a portrait of a community in extremis — an impression that Cregger has encouraged by referencing Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling “Magnolia” in interviews. It is not that kind of movie. It’s ambitious, no doubt, but closed off and weirdly hermetic. It’s an instance of a young director flexing to uncertain ends.
The hopscotching between characters is meant to trick you into seeing “Weapons” as an epic, while excusing Cregger of the responsibility of establishing how the town breathes. This movie is distractingly under populated. We see no media lurking about. We see no formal investigations taking place. The concerned parents are seen in mass, once. There are no incidental moments, and hardly any supporting characters at all.
We’re never given an impression of how the town, as a collective entity, reacts to the disappearance of the children. The rotating protagonists, played by gifted actors like Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong and Amy Madigan, live in their own worlds, assigned roughly one co-conspirator a piece.
I thought of last year’s “Longlegs,” and how it seemed beyond Oz Perkins to include more than two people in a supposedly bustling F.B.I. office. The cool kids these days seem to be incapable of letting a gust of life into their art projects. That said, this year’s “Freaky Tales” used a structure similar to that of “Weapons” with quite a bit less self-importance, and quite a bit more of a sense of community.
In the case of “Weapons,” dead ends abound. Brolin’s character is a building contractor who utilizes his knowledge of zoning maps to uncover a clue to the disappearances, a great idea that barely goes anywhere. Ehrenreich is a police officer struggling with alcoholism, though that detail is forgotten the moment it’s broached. I never believed Julia Garner to be a teacher who cares too much for her children, given that she doesn’t seem to be concerned about them at all save for how their disappearance distorts her life — a potentially disturbing irony that seems to arise here by accident.
Yes, it’s moody, but this movie has no texture.
The characters are pieces in a model, clues to a puzzle that, when revealed, allows you to understand why Cregger took so long showing his hand. The identities of the characters suggest that Cregger is interested in infrastructural failure, in how law enforcement, education, and relatives collectively fail these children. And, Cregger, so shrewd, throws in a few symbols for critics to follow like bread crumbs in the aim of over-reading the whole enterprise. But the ludicrousness of the villain, and the obviousness of their plan, fosters a hazy line between irony and incoherence.
I hate to be one of Alfred Hitchcock’s dreaded logic police, but you could drive a Panzer through this thing’s plot holes once the full design of Cregger’s intent is revealed. If the film were working on an emotional level, who cares? But the stick-figure characters and the narrative’s constant restarting keep you at a distance, ready to notice things amiss.
“Is it scary?” Not really. I got bored seeing fragments of a story repeated over and over for 128 minutes. Certain moments are unpleasant, tapping into a fear of children and authority figures being manipulated by a malign party. (This movie really does bear a resemblance to “Longlegs.”) But since the children here are assigned no personalities, including the survivor, who is directed to speak like a robot, that disturbance exists mostly at an intellectual level.
As he showed in “Barbarian,” Cregger is already great at making neighborhoods creepy, at suggesting the depths of, ahem, barbarity that are obscured by banally affluent architecture. He’s great at suggesting how fragile gentrification might be in keeping us from tearing one another apart. But so far there’s something impersonal to his approach. Cregger doesn’t yet have the swing, the poetry, which is necessary for making a movie this nonsensical work. While watching “Weapons” and seeing its precise and airless scheme unfold, I missed of all things the intuitive lunacy of Jordan Peele’s movies, of which I’ve been critical.
Why have convincing and vital portraits of community become so difficult for Hollywood and even independent American cinema? I am positive that this is a signifier of our modern sociopolitical maelstrom. We don’t have directors like Robert Altman anymore, who weaved tapestries of communal life. In “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia,” Paul Thomas Anderson seemed to be announcing himself as Altman’s heir, but until recently he turned towards insular and alienated character studies.
Insular and alienated are in right now.
Such trends are probably due to filmmakers working with the resources they have, and compounded by the general impression that the best of America is behind us, plus, you know, that whole “social media/AI rewriting the social order” thing. There’s telling the truth in art, which is refreshing, on occasion, and there’s reveling in armchair nihilism that probably accelerates the very decline that nurtures said nihilism. My point is that optimism and faith in community can be brave, and nourishing.
Thank god, then, for Hulu resurrecting the animated series “King of the Hill,” which ran for 13 seasons on Fox from the late 1990s through 2009. The show followed me from late high school to my 30th year, and is a major source of nostalgia. One of my brothers and I talk about the Hill clan like they are extended family.
The new and 14th season of the series, this is a continuation rather than a reboot, is the best years-later show that I’ve seen since the third season of “Twin Peaks,” with which “King of the Hill” has more in common than meets the eye. They are both extraordinary representations of small towns that blend the surreal and ecstatic and absurd with the minute textures of life.
The great accomplishment of the new “Hill” season is in how it moves. Creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, returning from the original series and partnering with new showrunner Saladin K. Patterson, have managed to recapture that ambling, one-thing-after-another vibe that animated not only the original “Hill” but Judge’s “Beavis and Butthead” and many other shows and movies of the 1990s.
If a friendly portrait of a small conservative Texan town, largely written and performed by Gen X leftwingers, strikes you as exotic, especially now, that might be the quiet point of the show. “King of the Hill” is authentically interested in small town life that’s not reducible by media talking points. Stereotypes are upended, while a strain of progressivism —essentially a common sense form of empathy — manages to flow even through the fictional Arlen, Texas. Keeping things from getting too sentimental is an undertow of loss. The show is haunted, riven with disappointment, populated by characters hiding behind a mirage of how “things used to be.”
As in “Twin Peaks,” the notion of splintering — not only of community but of self — runs through the new round of “Hill.” A classic character is first seen as a wreck, a shut-in who has nearly eaten himself to death in the wake of COVID-19. Elsewhere, another regular attempts to bring person-to-person interaction back to the alley via a lending library. These reveals are played as jokes, but they hit you at other angles too.
I laughed loudly a few times during each the season’s 10 episodes, so yes, it is also funny. But that’s not the reason that “King of the Hill” has stuck with me for years. Judge and Daniels and their many collaborators conjured the soul of a town, reminding viewers that such things do exist, and the new season is in tune with that mission. It is in touch with the despair that grips modern life while remaining optimistic and human.
‘Weapons” is in theaters everywhere. All seasons of “King of the Hill,” past and present alike, can be streamed on Hulu and/or Disney +.
