Weapons

Weapons. Gripping from the first word of the sing songy narration. A mystery is plopped into our lap as children disappear in small town Pennsylvania. WTF IS GOING ON IN THIS SMALL TOWN? The inestimable Julia Garner -Ruth from Ozark- walks into her elementary school classroom. Her life is now changed. Forever. The horribly young narrator tells us truth. This is the prologue that the whispery narrator hands us off to Garner's Justine. "this is where the story really starts". Smart script follows a Rashamon style format. Chapter after Chapter where we see each character experience the same time period from different views. We see what they see versus what they tell us they saw though. Mystery Train/Pulp Fiction intersections of timespace. It's really effective, we meet some people in backgrounds of others folks POV. Hella Invasion of the Body Snatchers creeping paranoia. The more we know about the mystery the less we understand. Such a good trick. DP Larkin Seiple is exceptional. He lensed Everything Everywhere All at Once, some other stuff I've never seen and a ton of cool music videos. He does some really memorable and amazing big crazy shit here. He also does a ton of small disturbing things to keep you just off kilter. Writer/Director Zach Cregger kills it here. Tricky, clever writing as I said, and he gets half court jump shot performances from all the actors. Special props to Cary Christopher as Alex the little boy at the center of this rising storm. Josh Brolin continues to build 'Josh Brolin as' characters. Josh Brolin as fucked up CIA guy, Josh Brolin as... whatever. I dig it. Here he's fucking awesome, Josh Brolin as angry, confused, raging father. I looked at him at one point and said, 'Damn, he was in Goonies a million years ago.'. Alden Ehrenreich, young Han Solo, continues to impress me as an actor. He can disappear into so many characters. He's very good here. Amy Madigan as Gladys is insane cool creepy, like Tilda Swinton in Snow Piercer, but more. Give her some awards. This still isn't the kind of movie that gets awards. Yet. Again, everything in this movie is fantastic, in both senses of the word. This is a great movie. It just occurred to me what a influence Something Wicked This Way Comes is here. See this movie. Highly Recommend. Not sure where it's streaming, my friend stole it.