In “Weapons,” an entire classroom of children except for one goes missing one night and doesn’t come back home, leaving an entire town at a loss for clues.
When kids go missing from a class, who’s first to blame? The teacher gets held accountable for any student who goes missing.
Julia Garner plays a schoolteacher, Justine Gandy, whose class mysteriously disappears and never returns. The town speculates that Gandy did something to the children, being that it was her entire class and not any other. Being the talk of the town and facing her depression from her students’ disappearance proves to be one of her character’s biggest conflicts.
Archer Graff, played by Josh Brolin, is the father of a missing kid from Ms. Gandy’s class. The way that he acting choices in this film are similar to Liam Neeson’s character in the “Taken” movie series. Graff dedicates the near entirety of his time to finding his son and doing whatever it takes to find out where he’s being held.
Benedict Wong’s character, Principal Marcus Miller, is an interesting role. He inadvertently becomes afflicted by the main antagonist of the film, but he could have had a more prominent role. The way Miller tried to reassure Ms. Gandy lacked a sense of urgency to the plot and slowed down the movie.
Austin Abrams portrays a drug addict named James Anthony who gets involved by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His addiction not only feeds his dopamine, but also the plot in causing him to act. Anthony’s does not help him for the rest of his screentime, in turn causing his demise.
The young Alex Lilly plays Cary Christopher, the only grade school student that doesn’t go missing out of Ms. Gandy’s class. He faces some unlikely challenges for a kid at his age and handles each situation thoughtfully and carefully, concerned with the safety of others. Christopher ultimately saves the day and proves that his character may be small but is more than mighty.
The film’s horror feel is highlighted intimately through the consistent, tight-focused shots. One scene that made me start to hide my face in shock involved one of the afflicted being manipulated to move. The scene had to last two minutes with them being shadowed in the middle of the screen without any real noise.
“Weapons” is divided up to focus on certain characters and display their time in the limelight. This creates a foreshadowing effect that adds to the film’s eerie feeling by expressing empathy for specific characters.
The way that “Weapons” takes its intimate feel makes viewers want to root for the characters even more than they already did. Viewers also take away that you can never understand what some people are going through, as you may not know what people feel that they can’t tell anyone else.
“Weapons” may be defined from multiple aspects from this film, but the real weapon hits personally through dealing with the uncontrollable conflict of depression and then making a change to do things out of the ordinary.