The most memorable, most frequently memed, and probably most iconic image from Zach Cregger’s horror hit Weapons is that shot of Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys done up in ghoulishly, borderline clownishly heavy makeup – a true hag for our parent-paranoia times. But the mysterious Gladys is not the initial entry point for Weapons, which arrives on VOD this week as it winds up a stunningly successful theatrical run. The movie never feels more focused than when, early on, it zooms in on Justine Gandy, the third-grader teacher played by Julia Garner, whose entire class (minus one kid) disappears on the same night, piquing parental suspicion and fear. It caps off a major year in Garner’s ongoing chronicle of women who are Going Through It.
Weapons didn’t look like Garner’s best bet for a hit movie back in January, when the movie didn’t yet have a clear premise, let alone a trailer. It didn’t even seem like a lot for her biggest horror movie of the year, given that she was about to star in Wolf Man, director Leigh Whannell’s unofficial follow-up to his hit Invisible Man reimagining from 2020. And yes, technically this summer’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, wherein Garner plays a lady version of the Silver Surfer, is a bigger global moneymaker than Weapons, with half a billion dollars in worldwide grosses. But it seems pretty clear which success story relies on Garner’s tenacity.
For the first chunk of Weapons, we follow Justine as she deals with vague but menacing accusations that something must have gone wrong. Something clearly is wrong, whether or not it’s actually a problem in her classroom; Justine drinks heavily, and if it initially seems like a reaction to the community ostracization she’s experiencing, an encounter with her (married) ex Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) clearly implies a history of problem drinking, maybe outright alcoholism. The film is structured to move on to other points of view, which keeps Weapons expansive and unpredictable. But it never feels quite so incisive as when Garner holds center stage as a woman who clearly cares about her job while refusing to let things alone, whether it’s the ex she shouldn’t call, the boss she shouldn’t press about her job, or the drink she shouldn’t take.
That quality does eventually spur Justine into action, investigating the mass disappearance with more vigor than the authorities seem to have mustered – maybe because she has no reputation left to lose. It’s a cathartic development for anyone who saw Garner in The Assistant, probably her best previous movie role. In Kitty Green’s workplace drama/thriller, Garner’s character watches in frustrated horror as an attempt to report her monstrous movie-exec boss crumbles in the face of an ineffectual, enabling HR rep. She further explores the frustrating expectations of womanhood and male power in The Royal Hotel, her reunion with Green, where she plays a backpacker working a temporary job at an Australian and enduring laddish workplace hostility that grows increasingly menacing. The movie directly engages with the idea of young women as compliant, accommodating figures best advised to let men be boys.
It’s a bold strategy for a potential movie star; young women are still supposed to be plucky and likable on the big screen, and whether or not she’s facing gender issues, Garner specializes in characters who seem profoundly unhappy. She seems especially attracted to female anger – not righteous rage, necessarily, although The Royal Hotel certainly prods her character in that direction, but the frustrations that don’t always have a natural, audience-friendly outlet. In Weapons and Wolf Man, she channels this frustration into a particularly compelling variation on the modern scream queen, an outgrowth of how her movies with Kitty Green often play like horror despite the lack of traditional genre trappings. Wolf Man is the closest she’s played to a traditional movie role, as the Wolf Man’s Worried Wife, and there, too, she summons so much more than fear as her husband transforms into a creature who can no longer communicate on human terms.
And though it probably won’t do as much for her career as Weapons, Garner is also a highlight of the new Fantastic Four, bringing a kind of beatific mournfulness to the Silver Surfer that a male performer might well play as generically stoic. Because Garner brings these emotions to genre movies, she probably won’t receive much awards attention. (At least not as much as Aunt Gladys herself.) That’s also what deepens her work in them: She’s plumbing serious depths without the obvious expectation of prestige. Her characters are their own pointed lack of a reward.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.