Film reviews: Materialists | Weapons

Weapons (18) ★★★★

If you’ve seen the trailer for Materialists you might mistake Celine Song’s follow-up to her Oscar-nominated debut Past Lives for the sort of formulaic rom-com studios used to churn out every other month.

​There’s Dakota Johnson’s professional matchmaker on a meet-cute with a rich and handsome potential client (Pedro Pascal) while her hunky cash-strapped ex (Chris Evans) pines for her in the wings. Wind the clock back 20 years and it could have been a vehicle for Jennifer Lopez, Kate Hudson or Sarah Jessica Parker, with Matthew McConaughey no doubt popping up shirtless somewhere in the mix.

This is deliberate of course, but also a bit of a ruse. Within minutes of the film opening with a Kubrick-style wild-swing prologue (it involves early human hunter-gatherers), it’s clear that while Song is working within the framework of a more obviously commercial movie, she’s adapting the genre to her tastes, not letting it subsume her voice.

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Set in the brutally frank world of the New York dating scene, the film revolves around Johnson’s character, Anna, as she starts to question her own proven track-record of helping successful singles find romantic partners that check enough of their boxes to convince them that happiness is possible.

The catalyst for her encroaching existential crisis is Pascal’s Harry, whose earnings, height and attractiveness make him a “unicorn” in her industry, the sort of too-good-to-be true man every straight woman is apparently desperate to marry. Harry, however, only has eyes for her, but she’s also got unresolved feelings for her ex-boyfriend John (Evans), a struggling actor who re-enters her life the same night she meets Harry.

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That in itself feels pretty clichéd, especially for a filmmaker who’s already deftly explored the complexities of a love triangle in Past Lives. But there’s something about the way she lays bare the transactional nature of the New York dating scene that gives it a pleasingly sharp edge; even when she’s embracing the pleasures of the genre – paying homage to When Harry Met Sally, say, or revelling in the film's upscale New York locations – she's simultaneously stripping away the gloss to present a more finely textured portrait of modern romance. Materialists may end up in a predictable place, but it doesn’t get there in a predictable way.

Weapons finds writer/director Zach Cregger following up his outré debut Barbarian with a horror film that subverts expectations on an even grander scale. It’s built around a creepy premise: one night, all but one of the kids in the class of a new primary school teacher mysteriously disappear, leaving the town in shock, the parents angry and the teacher, Justine (played by Julia Garner), the focus of everyone’s suspicions and confusion. Intriguingly, though, Cregger doesn’t then turn it into an anguished missing children movie. Instead, starting with Justine, he decides to zero in on a handful of characters, incrementally exploring the mystery from overlapping perspectives and immediately wrong-footing those looking for a straight-up supernatural chiller.

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Owing more to Tarantino’s novelistic storytelling style, this is a film that takes its time establishing characters, using jump scares and creeping moments of dread sparingly to punctuate the sprawling tale, before going all out with a crazy ending. Whether it has anything more to offer than this is up for debate. In the context of a film about children disappearing en masse, the title and some of the imagery hint at some larger reality involving school shootings. Yet this turns out to be more of a red herring, which is perhaps no bad thing. So-called elevated horror too often feels like a thesis in search of a movie. Cregger’s more like an old-fashioned carnival barker, confident in his ability to deliver something entertainingly freaky.

Materialists is in cinemas from 13 August, Weapons is out now