“Lean into the question, lean away from the answer.” That’s the mantra that Zach Cregger, the filmmaker behind Barbarian, embraced for his mysterious new horror-thriller Weapons. The film’s cryptic trailers have given away little, other than hinting at the general premise: When all but one child from elementary school teacher Mrs. Gandy’s (Julia Garner) class mysteriously vanishes on the same night at exactly the same time, the town of Maybrook is left questioning who — or what — is behind their disappearance.
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“I think everybody is sick of trailers that show you the whole movie,” Cregger shares with ComicBook. “That’s not a profound thing for me to be saying. With Barbarian, we were able to just show kind of a hint of a movie and just the premise and let people know: ‘It gets gnarly.’ And it worked.”
In fact, most of the footage glimpsed so far in trailers is from early in the film. To set the tone, a town girl narrates: “This one Wednesday is like a normal day for the whole school, but today was different. Every other class had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy’s room was totally empty. And do you know why? Because the night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark. And they never came back.”
For Weapons, “we kind of just had the same rule” as Barbarian, Cregger says. “When we were shooting the movie, I was saying, ‘The cold open of the movie? That should be the trailer. And then we’ll show a couple of things and let people know it gets gnarly.’”
Warner Bros., which is the distributor of the New Line Cinema release, agreed — resulting in an ominous trailer that raises more questions than it answers, with shots of the missing students interspliced with clips of makeshift memorials, concerned principal Mr. Marcus (Benedict Wong), and worried parent Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), who asks the big question: “Why just her classroom? Why only hers?”
Just as mysterious is the film’s title. “I think, on some level, it functions more poetically than rationally, maybe,” a tight-lipped Alden Ehrenreich, who plays police officer Paul Morgan, teased of Weapons, careful not to give anything away. “It just has a feeling to it, but I think there’s something related to the destructiveness of the characters is probably part of it, but it’s not just that. And there’s some moments in the movie that make it clear that it’s really not just about that. So it feels like a sort of poetic title for something that is about a certain side of the human personality that can wreak havoc.”
And Garner, who is at the center of this emotion-driven mystery, summarized the title as such: “The people can be weapons.”
Weapons — written and directed by Cregger and starring Julia Garner (The Fantastic Four: First Steps), Josh Brolin (Dune), Alden Ehrenreich (Ironheart), Austin Abrams (The Walking Dead), Cary Christopher (Days of Our Lives), with Benedict Wong (Doctor Strange), and Amy Madigan (The Hunt) — is only in theaters and IMAX August 8.
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