This message comes from NPR sponsor Capella University.
Interested in a quality online education?
Capella is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.
A different future is closer than you think with Capella University.
Learn more at capella.edu.
Okay.
Well, the intriguing and seriously creepy new film Weapons is one of those movies that works best the less you know beforehand.
So we'll be careful here.
It's by the guy behind the horror film Barbarian from a few years back.
The film follows what happens after 17 children get out of their beds on the same night at the same time and disappear into the suburban night.
The community is left asking why and pointing fingers.
I'm Linda Holmes.
And I'm Glenn Weldon.
We're talking about weapons.
This is Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
This message comes from Apple Pay.
Forget your wallet.
It's all good because with Apple Pay, you can pay with a simple tap of your iPhone the wallet you never forget at millions of places worldwide, including websites, apps and anywhere you see the contactless symbol.
Security is built in with Face ID, so you don't have to worry about your cards getting lost or stolen.
And the best part, you still earn the card rewards, points, and cash back you love.
So say goodbye to the buy fold.
Add your card to Apple Wallet and start paying the Apple way.
Terms apply.
This message comes from Schwab.
At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs.
You can invest and trade on your own.
Plus, get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs.
With award-winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab.
Visit Schwab.com to learn more.
This message comes from NPR sponsor Capella University.
Sometimes it takes a different approach to pursue your goals.
Capella is an online university accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.
That means you can earn your degree from wherever you are and be confident your education is relevant.
A different future is closer than you think with Capella University.
Learn more about earning a relevant degree at capella.edu.
Support for this podcast and the following message come from Strawberry.me Be honest.
Are you happy with your job?
Are you stuck in a job you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place?
Are your reasons for staying really just excuses for not leaving?
Let a career coach from Strawberry.me help you get unstuck.
Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner and claim a special offer at Strawberryme slash, NPR.
Thank you so much for having me, especially here with two heavy hitters such as yourselves.
Mm-hmm.
Well, let's do it.
You can hit heavy yourself.
Weapons is set in a suburb called Maybrook where one night, at exactly 217 in the morning, 17 of the kids from the same third grade classroom run away from their homes in a very creepy way.
And I mean that literally the way these kids run is creepy.
The community is quick to blame the class's teacher, Ms.
Gandy, played by Julia Garner.
Josh Brolin plays Archer, one of the parents of the missing kids, who's sure Ms.
Gandy knows more than she's telling.
And then there's Alex, the only kid from Ms.
Gandy's class who didn't go missing that night.
He's played by Carrie Christopher.
Why was he spared?
Well, there is a clear answer, but I guarantee it's not the one you're going to see coming.
Weapons was written and directed by Zach Kreger, whose previous film Barbarian threaded the same creepy funny needle.
This one does.
Weapons is in theaters now.
Linda, we've been hearing your grunts of assent.
What do you think?
Yeah, I thought this was great.
I enjoyed this a lot.
I walked out of it and I said, that was really good and very upsetting.
It is sort of viscerally an upsetting movie, but I found it to be one that earns that...
Especially because I think the performances are so good.
I think they're using really sturdy actors here.
Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, etc.
At one point he sort of jump scared outward and like just pressed his arm into my side for about two seconds.
He needed you there.
And then he goes, my bad.
And I said, no, no, I get it.
Perfect horror fans.
And then we went back to enjoying it in peace together.
Occasionally muttering as you do this.
When somebody's going to do something and you're going.
I loved this.
I had a great time.
I think.
It's exceptionally directed.
There's a chase late in the movie that is one of the scariest, creepiest and funniest chases that I've seen in a long time.
Loved it.
Had a great, amazing time.
Yeah.
I mean some of those images you mentioned.
I mean, like there's a scene where we get these shots of the kids running and they're so layered, those shots, because they're literally like some of the kids are in the foreground, some of the kids are in the background.
Yeah.
And the landscape they're running over has these little hills and valleys like lawns and driveways and culverts.
And we're going with them.
So we see them kind of going up and down.
That is imagery that just locks in place in your head.
I'm going to have it for the rest of my life and I'm grateful for it.
Jordan, what'd you think?
Huge fan.
I had a lot of fun with Barbarian.
I think it's a better concept than it is a movie.
Oh, sure.
It's fun.
It deserved to be a hit.
It really comes out swinging.
Everybody's giving it their all.
Zach Krieger has tapped into performers who really want to meet him where he is in terms of his movies.
This is a better movie.
And it's so exciting.
And I felt the same thing going from Smile 1, which is an incredibly scary like jump scare you to death movie.
And then Smile 2 is a better movie.
And it's like, wow, Parker Finne. didn't just have one good idea that he cashed in on.
Like, he's coming back and he grew as a filmmaker in a horror franchise.
And with horror as well, I feel like if you do good...
Like kind of one time people will ride for you.
So it's super exciting to see somebody who came off of a movie that was like hey kapow, huge twist that really threw people for a loop and then come to this movie, unfold it so differently and also ride on a marketing campaign that is so effective from the trailer and yet still does not tip off its hand at all.
I was amped from the trailer and then came into this and throughout the movie was checking myself being like dang I.
The trailer gave me no indication of how this is going right now, and so that was super exciting too to feel like I got like a full meal from the trailer, but that it did not betray the five courses that were going to come before me super excited.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, totally.
Oh, yes.
And not knowing exactly what you're going to get makes this all the better.
What really struck me is the confidence of this filmmaker.
Totally.
Like, this movie...
Right from the jump, raises this incredibly intriguing questions and isn't just content to just raise the question.
It loads it with all of this, what we talked about this kind of aesthetic quality and symbolic weight.
And we got to shout out the director of photography, Larkin Seipel, who he makes the suburbs at night look beautiful.
As scary as they are.
This is it.
Beautiful, mysterious, but also ugly and depressing.
All at once.
All at the same time.
And there's a lot of use of both over the shoulder shots, which are a pretty standard way to do POV stuff.
But also, especially at the beginning with Ms.
Gandy, Justine, you see A lot of shots of kind of parts of her body she's cut off in different ways.
You're only kind of gradually introduced to her as a full body figure.
You know what I mean?
Yep.
Right.
Absolutely.
And there also are a few embedded, you think there's going to be a jump scare and there's not.
And that's very important.
You've got to do the intermittent stuff so that everybody doesn't know exactly what's happening.
Yeah.
Yeah, of course, because we do get a snippet from a kid's point of view, and that is shot from a three-foot-high perspective.
So we're kind of siren-songed at the beginning into this big huge, intriguing mystery.
That, And then the film kind of goes.
You know what.
We'll get to it.
Yeah.
And then spends the bulk of the film building out the world of this town from all these various viewpoints.
We see the same scenes from different characters' eyes.
Because he knows that when the payoff comes he's going to land this plane.
And that's – if you learn nothing –
From this.
Listeners who haven't seen this movie yet know that this is delayed gratification.
The movie.
The frustration I was feeling.
I was feeling like there were like, oh boy, you better deliver for me, man.
This is it.
And you better have a plan for all these pieces that you've dropped in all these different stories.
Yes.
Right.
We get to the fireworks factory at its glorious.
So what you're feeling is technically it's impatience.
This film made me impatient.
But the film was completely in control of that.
And again, I could talk about this forever.
This film gets the suburbs at night in a way that is not this Spielberg.
Kids on bikes suburbs at night.
It's way darker, actually, than the Stranger Things suburbs at night.
This is... I saw the TV glow suburbs at night.
This is sinister.
There is a malevolence here.
And these kids, we mentioned it, but these kids run...
In an unnatural way.
Yeah.
The first time I saw it, I thought, okay, I get what you're doing.
You're doing this wildly impractical running that they do in anime like Naruto and Attack on Titan, where you just lean forward and you throw your arms behind you, which just it looks cool, but if you trip, goodbye to your teeth, right?
That's what I thought they were doing.
But it's different.
It is a full-on run. with the torso very rigid and straight up and the arms held out to the side.
And the vibe I was getting from that was that terror of war photo from Vietnam, from the Vietnam War, where the nine-year-old girl just fleeing the napalm attack.
That's what I think is happening there.
And this is such a great-looking film, despite this...
Which, again, is a squalid, urban sprawl, strip mall suburbs.
I mean, the beauty of the strip mall liquor store, right?
The shot where we follow Julie Garner into the liquor store and we watch her turn through the aisles to the vodka section.
Knowing exactly where she's going.
It's left, right, left again.
And what that sets up for that same journey eventually in the movie is...
Dear God.
Absolutely.
We know at that point, we know so much about her character.
We know she's not browsing.
She's hunting.
And her quarry is vodka.
She has an appointment with that specific shelf in that specific spot.
They know each other very well.
They go way back.
What did you guys make of the film's fractured approach, though?
I mean, would this film be different if it was told in a more straightforward way?
Do you have a sense of what's gained and what's lost there?
I thought it worked really, really well.
What I love about this is that it feels completely original.
You get something that feels really lively and interesting to me.
And I think the structure although it's not the entire reason for that is one of the reasons for that.
You mentioned, Glenn.
There's a confidence to structuring the movie this way because there is a whole series of little pieces that are laid down that are critical to understanding everything about the story you eventually are getting.
But they feel at the time like well, this feels important, but I'm not sure what it's going to turn out to be about.
Right.
And there are some reveals that are withheld, so long that you start to think like is there something to this?
Are we – jumping past this but at the same time you have a movie with enough just like exciting scary fun moments that like i actually turned to the guy next to me at one point and kind of muttered see i don't like eyeball stuff yeah same and he said it wasn't eyeball stuff and So it's also that kind of movie.
And I absolutely, by the way, think go see it in a theater.
Gosh, please go see it in a theater.
Definitely.
I was so glad I was seeing it in a theater with a crowd, with a guy next to me who I could tell that I don't like eyeballs.
So that's what I would say.
The thing that I'm excited so much about this, like double delivery from Zach Krieger and, like we mentioned, Parker Finn is there was a school of horror film director that arose out of the arthouse merging with mainstream success horror bubble.
That happened at the end of the 2010s.
Where, you know, kind of became the meme of elevated horror and trauma, trauma, trauma.
There's that super cut of Jamie Lee Curtis when the new Halloween iteration came out.
That's just her saying trauma.
Trauma.
It's trauma, like over and over again.
Trauma.
Trauma, specifically.
But what I like about like the smile thing and barbarian slash weapons is these movies are just good old scary movies.
Sure, there's a lot going on.
We can talk about the trauma.
But, like these are original movies and they're super scary and they look great and they kind of feel like the next maturation of these really like formally and artistically ambitious horror directors that are fully merged with a studio system that now knows how to platform really artistic horror in a way that perhaps it wasn't necessarily looking for to do in a way before that late 2010s bubble, And now we're getting some really great popcorn horror directors coming out of that that aren't necessarily just adapting Stephen King.
And that is so exciting.
And I think Julia Garner is... in this lead role is such a perfect representation of that because she's like kind of an oddity sort of a figure like I find her destabilizing I never know what she's gonna do next like that clip of her from the show Ozark where she just screams you're gonna have to kill me And there's something about the way she screams it where it just keeps going for an impossibly long time.
You're like, wow, that's an actor's choice.
Yeah.
I thought she was by far the best thing about Ozark and the best thing about Wolfman the one they made with Christopher Abbott, which I didn't think was that good.
But she was good in it.
She was was such a perfect vehicle for being a woman in distress who's being put upon by this community, but who's also kind of an unlikable jerk sometimes.
This is important.
She's like kind of a dirtbag, and she can straddle the tonalities of that character so well.
She's such a perfect vehicle.
Agreed.
For this like scary dark movie that is also hilarious, intentionally without being a horror comedy.
Julie Garner is definitely in her horror era because, as we see shots of her in this movie poking around a dark house, I was thinking well, you did that in Wolfman.
But you've got so much more to do here.
I loved how she's not permitted to just be this kind of angelic elementary school teacher.
She's not just constantly wiping a tear at the thought of the children.
She can be simultaneously a concerned teacher, but also a narcissistic one and one who makes bad choices.
And, you know, shout out to the kid, Carrie Christopher, as Alex.
The second half of this film is resting on those tiny little shoulders and he bears it up.
We can just say there's another actor in this film who you won't see in the trailer, because they factor into the why of it all in a big way.
Just going to say here, they nail it.
They're great.
No notes.
But Jordan, about that horror comedy thing, you're our horror expert.
I wouldn't sell this movie to listeners as a horror comedy.
Like I wouldn't call Barbarian a horror comedy.
This is just a horror movie with some very funny bits.
You know, Justin Long turns up very briefly.
And if they get a Spike Denzel relationship, I'd love it.
I would not complain if Justin Long keeps turning up in this guy's film.
But in your head do you have films that you think of as horror, comedies and others that are horror with funny bits?
Is there a useful distinction there at all?
I think there is a useful distinction.
And this is actually something I've only in the past couple of days started really thinking about, because Scott Mendelsohn actually posted something on Twitter I thought was really compelling, which was comedy has started to be cannibalized by other genres where, like not all, but like so much horror is comedy now.
Drama is comedy now.
Romantic comedy has had this happen specifically.
Exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
True.
True.
You don't feel lied to by a trailer.
How often do people feel lied to by a trailer because people don't know how to market the most effective part of the movie and get it to the fans who are going to want it?
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. which is what the genre is built on, is buildup and release of tension.
And comedy is a way in with that.
And it just creates a wonderful balance in a movie like this.
And I felt like the trailer absolutely gave me the right sense of what the movie was going to feel like.
With the exception of what you're talking about, it doesn't market the comedy.
But It gave me an accurate sense of the movie, but gave me no sense of what was gonna happen.
And that's a really difficult balance.
And as the movie was going on, I was like I have no idea whether they're ever gonna care.
In this movie, what happened to cause these kids to disappear?
Sure.
The obvious reference in some ways is school shootings, right?
You have a classroom full of kids who are all gone, whose parents are grieving for them.
There is one kind of overt nod to that idea that I found very interesting, because it's just asserted and then they don't like spend the rest of the movie talking about it, which I thought was really interesting.
And that's one of those things that I kind of went back and I was like huh and I thought about it.
Like they are referencing this, but obviously they're He's confident enough that he doesn't have to go back and make it a whole conversation about that with a whole set of very like elbow, elbow.
Do you see the parallel I'm drawing?
You know what I mean?
I think other movies have taken this kind of approach of like terrible thing happens in town.
And like the town is shuttered and like there is this sort of mass reaction to what has happened across the whole town.
Whereas the way this happened, in its isolated pockets and generally these people are kind of wandering in a place where not necessarily everyone around them is going to react to them according to the tragedy that they're mired in.
Right.
Did feel very real to the experience of how things happen in life and silos and boxes of like social media algorithms and the way that people can be cut off from what seems like a monolithically big event and be like, oh no, I hadn't heard about that.
And surely everybody in this town knows about.
But I liked the very like contained explosion aspect of not everybody in this town is out searching for these kids, like it is on these people having this crushingly awful experience, with no reprieve of a common community to tap into to help them.
They are simply alone And nobody is sure, I think, when to treat this as something that has happened and is over, as opposed to something that is still happening and being resolved because there's an idea of like.
At what point do you just look and say this happened.
I will never understand it, which I think is a very natural question to ask yourself.
And all of this isolation, like I said, it recalls school shootings in a way.
It recalls post-pandemic in a way or post-lockdown part of the pandemic.
I don't know.
As you can tell, I just thought this was great.
I enjoyed it so much.
I...
Gosh, I thought it was great.
Well, that's it.
You heard us.
We all kind of loved it.
And now we want to know what you think about weapons.
If you're still on Facebook, you can tell us there.
You can do it on Letterboxd.
Or you can leave a note in the hole of an old U-tree at midnight under a half moon, and we'll somehow get it.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Jordan Cruciola, Linda Holmes, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Love it.
Thank you, Glenn.
And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio.
And you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor free.
So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link. in our show notes.
This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Janae Morris and Mike Katzeff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy, and Hello Come In provides our theme music.
Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Glenn Weldon, and we will see you all next time.
This message comes from NPR sponsor, Viore, featuring the Core Short.
Receive 20 off your first purchase on any US orders over 75 and free returns at viorecom slash NPR.
Exclusions apply.
Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
This message comes from Bombas.
You need better socks and slippers and underwear because you should love what you wear every day.
One purchased equals one donated.
Go to bombas.com slash NPR and use code NPR for 20% off.
This message comes from Warby Parker.
What makes a great pair of glasses at Warby Parker?
It's all the invisible extras without the extra cost, like free adjustments for life.
Find your pair at warbyparker.com or visit one of their hundreds of stores around the country.
