“Weapons,” “Harvest,” and the Shackles of the Horror Genre

Horror is an accursed genre. Because it promises to deliver a specific sensational effect, its stories are obliged to fit into preordained patterns. Its popularity depends on predictability, and the task of providing the expected thrills renders the genre even more formulaic than superhero blockbusters. Zach Cregger’s new movie, “Weapons,” is, in this regard, an exemplary horror film—reducing social complexity and elaborate fantasy to a narrow outcome. The action starts at 2:17 A.M. on a week night, in a middle-class suburban neighborhood somewhere in Pennsylvania, when seventeen (of eighteen) students in a local elementary-school class get out of bed, leave their homes, and vanish. A voice-over narration briefly recounts the departure and sets up the subsequent investigations by police, administrators, parents, and the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), whose students these were.

The parents turn on Justine, blaming her for the disappearances. She, meanwhile, suspects that the one remaining pupil in her class—a quiet, and, if not bullied, at least slighted and aggrieved, boy named Alex (Cary Christopher)—may have been involved. The principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong), puts her on leave, both to placate the parents and for her own protection, and forbids her to have any contact with Alex. As the investigations continue, they lay bare a tangle of neighborhood ties and conflicts: Justine reconnects with a police officer named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), who is in a relationship with Donna (June Diane Raphael), whose father, Ed (Toby Huss), is the chief of police and therefore Paul’s boss; a petty thief named James (Austin Abrams) learns of reward money and works to rescue the children; when the most vociferous of Justine’s accusers, a man named Archer (Josh Brolin), is stonewalled by the police, he gathers clues independently and comes up with his own theory.

“Weapons” is essentially a mystery, and a good one, if conventional. In a clever move, Cregger divides the film into discrete chapters, each labelled with the name of the character at its center. To show events from different points of view, time frequently rewinds, revealing intersecting moments in the characters’ lives. Coincidences mount up, creating a tension-filled labyrinth that emphasizes the inescapable role that serendipity plays in the rational, deductive process of investigating. Yet Cregger’s storytelling is slick and textureless, featuring characters whose personalities are reduced to their plot functions and a town that has no characteristics beyond its response to calamity. In order to stoke shocks early on, when the action is still mundanely procedural, Cregger shows characters’ nightmares. Later, once a series of gory doings propels matters into prime horror territory, the movie takes an altogether different path, a supernatural one.

It turns out to be a road to nowhere. The many physically revolting and morally repellent acts that ensue amount to little but a gross-out joke. The source of evil? Don’t expect to find it in “Weapons.” Is corruption festering in the apparently homogeneous suburb? Not particularly. Does hatred brew within? Look, rather, for an excess of trust and generosity. Does the horror go beyond mere sensation to embody the unconscious or introduce potent symbolism? “Weapons” forecloses such inner reverberations and outward implications by its rigid adherence to plot and to superficial effect. This loss is all the greater because Cregger makes the central disappearances powerfully unsettling, the fleeing children running from their homes with their arms reaching downward in an inverted V. Behind the visual jolt of these outstretched arms is a disconcerting historical echo; they call to mind the arms of the fleeing napalm-burned Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, in the famous 1972 photograph of the aftermath of a South Vietnamese air raid. Nothing in the film suggests that the resemblance is intentional, but the coincidence, if that’s what it is, is indicative of Cregger’s tunnel vision. Oblivious of resonances, he seems not to see what he’s doing. Facile sensationalism cuts the movie off from its own most powerful implications, blocking any view of a recognizable world.

In “Harvest,” Athina Rachel Tsangari’s adaptation of a 2013 novel by Jim Crace, horror doesn’t arrive until midway through. Once it arises, though, it retrospectively clarifies the dramatic setup and determines the rest of the action. The movie, set in a remote Scottish village in what seems to be the Middle Ages, is in the subgenre of folk horror, which locates destructive power in pre-modern lore. (Prime recent examples of the form are “Midsommar” and “The Northman”; classics include “The Wicker Man” and “The Juniper Tree.”) But, whereas the plot of “Weapons” is driven by the demands of genre, “Harvest” uses some of the trappings of folk horror to deliver shocks that aren’t sensational but intellectual.

The village seems a harmonious place. Its land is farmed communally, and its lord, Master Kent (Harry Melling), is a benevolent soul who prefers coaxing and rewarding to ordering and punishing. When his barn mysteriously burns, the villagers exert themselves, at great risk, to put out the fire. In voice-over, one of them explains that there won’t be an investigation; there’s no constable anywhere nearby, and treating the disaster as an act of God at least maintains unity. The speaker is Walt Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), who serves as Kent’s unofficial foreman. The son of a wet nurse who nourished the infant Kent, Walt was brought up and educated alongside him, destined for a similar life of privilege until he married a village woman. The men remain friends, a bond tightened by their both being widowed, and their warm rapport is of a piece with a prevalent feeling of good cheer. The villagers sing while threshing, gossip as they shear Kent’s sheep, and make merry by dark.

Tsangari intensifies the rustic idyll with rapturous attention to natural beauty: there are extreme closeups of flowers and insects and beatific wide shots of verdant coastal landscape. Much of this attention is filtered through Walt’s consciousness: he’s the brains of the town, as he wryly declares, and his learning makes him of use to a mysterious visitor named Earle (Arinzé Kene), who’s first seen on a nearby hillside, standing before an easel and painting the scene. Earle—whom the villagers nickname Quill, after the implement he uses—turns out to be a surveyor brought in by Kent, and his painting is actually a map. Further light is shed on Quill’s presence when three more outsiders arrive—two men (Gary Maitland and Noor Dillan-Night) and a woman (Thalissa Teixeira), whom Walt refers to, collectively, as the Beldams. The villagers, hostile to outsiders, suspect the trio of burning the barn and turn on them. These outsiders aren’t marauders, however; they are avatars of the near future. Their village has been taken from them, just as this one is now being targeted by yet another outsider (Frank Dillane), whose designs are both predatory and entirely legal. (The scheme resembles the historical British process known as enclosure.) What’s planned is something like the shifting of the agrarian village to an organized industry—producing wool for garments to be sold for the benefit of an absentee owner.

“Harvest” is fundamentally a work of political cinema, a social archeology of the emergence of capitalism—of the depravities of modern economics and the inherent injustices of its legal premises. Tsangari, who’s Greek, makes use of the medieval setting much as many American filmmakers have made use of Wild West ones, to dramatize abstract forces of society and government. In the conflict between Hobbes and Rousseau, between visions of primordial humankind as inherently brutal or inherently peaceful, Tsangari stacks the dramatic deck in favor of benign and placid human nature. The residents are aggressive only toward outsiders, and this attitude is at least partly justified, given the role of Quill’s work in imposing legal order on the inchoate village. What’s more, in Rousseauian fashion, Walt’s own gifts of learning and insightful observation prove to be of dubious value, inhibiting actions that might save the village.

The fervor of Tsangari’s large-scale historical vision gives the movie heft, but the philosophical ambitions of “Harvest” aren’t matched by its dramatic specifics. Tsangari doles out information cagily, turning over narrative cards with calculated delay, a bare sufficiency that undercuts her world-building in favor of point-making; the just-enough story is also a just-so story. To heighten the placid charm of the remote village, she soft-pedals its physicality: the place is sanitized, full of clean people and clean places, untroubled by human or animal waste, by disease, by weather. (Even the largely handheld camerawork, by the innovative Sean Price Williams, seems becalmed.) The insistent images of nature are merely pretty, devoid of wonder or menace. Tsangari’s pre-modernity is an abstracted fantasy of innocence; the villagers live childlike lives with no culture besides song and dance, no desire beyond lust, no will beyond subsistence, no restlessness, no curiosity, no speculative inclinations, no untoward energies. Tsangari’s view of her world is blocked by her ideas; she is so concerned with what she has to say that she doesn’t see what she’s not showing. For Tsangari and Cregger alike, visions of horror get in the way of mere seeing. ♦