julia garner

Weapons (2025)

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When preparing my review for Eddington, I couldn’t remember the bizarrely specific Pokémon-themed name that was going to be given to the AI data center being built outside of the titular town. In searching for a script for it online in order to get this name, I stumbled across a Reddit post that contained the screenplay for both that film and Weapons, and I inadvertently read a spoiler about Weapons in the beginning of the post before I could click away. To be honest, I didn’t believe it when I read it. It seemed like too much of a departure from what the advertising had presented, and I couldn’t reconcile the images that were already rattling around in my head from the trailers with the spoiler, let alone with the discourse already surrounding the film, all of which had firmly already centered itself around (pre)reading the “disappeared kids” narrative as being a school shooting metaphor. The spoiler didn’t ruin the overall experience for me, but it did mean that I knew what the motivation was behind the film’s events before the film revealed itself, and I wish that I could have experienced this for the first time without that foreknowledge. 

The film’s poster tagline is also part of its opening narration: “[One] night, at 2:17 am, [almost] every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark … and never came back.” We see this first school day with most of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)’s class having failed to show up, all except for timid Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). A month later, there are still no clues as to the children’s location, and the community is still in a state of perpetual outcry, with particularly outspoken local contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) calling for Justine’s arrest until she can explain what happened, a conflict that Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) attempts to prevent from escalating. We learn that Justine has had previous trouble with alcoholism and that this event has led her to drowning her sorrows once again, which leads her to have a one-night stand with an old ex, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Based on the pre-release information we had, one would assume that Justine would be our sole main character as we follow her along her investigation into the disappearance of her students (or that perhaps she is responsible and that the film will focus on Archer’s discovery of the extent of her involvement), but the film takes a different narrative approach, instead breaking its story into multiple sections that each focus on one character. 

Justine’s is first, of course, so that we can watch her struggle with facing the community of Maybrook while having no more answers to the children’s disappearance than they do, up to the point when she’s attacked by an apparently possessed friend, at which point the film then switches points of view to follow Archer. We see him waking up in the bed of his missing son, apparently regretting all the love he failed to show the boy when he had the chance (as we see later in Alex’s point of view section, Archer’s son Matthew is an outright bully, perhaps because of this lack of affection). He’s losing track of things at work, placing wrong orders and forgetting others entirely, and this scattered thinking can only refocus on one target: Justine. He’s frustrated with what he feels is insufficient investigation on the part of police captain Ed (Toby Huss), so he begins to follow Justine and vandalizes her car, but he comes to see that she’s just as lost in all of this as he is. I don’t want to get into all of the ins and outs of what we learn from each of these intersections between the character-focused sections because they’re much more interesting to see play out non-linearly, almost Magnolia style (which director Zach Cregger has admitted is an inspiration), before they weave into one another. It makes the whole thing feel grounded, filling in little realistic details through naturalistic dialogue — conversations about the excitement of coming home early from a business trip because it means that you’ll be home when you’re ovulating, Archer’s wife’s exasperated “I’m going to work” when she finds him asleep in missing Matthew’s room yet again, and the way that homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) spins a threadbare web of transparent but plausible lies to try and extort tiny bits of cash from friends still willing to take a call from him. There are large swathes of the film where you’ll completely forget that there’s a potentially supernatural mystery at play here because you’ll be more invested in the lives of the characters. That’s good filmmaking, baby. 

Weapons is doing pretty well on the discourse circuit. The film’s barely been out for a couple of days as I write this (on the Monday after the film’s release, having seen it in a packed theater Friday evening), and there are already many different takes on the film’s themes. I barely looked at social media today and saw more than a dozen memes about the meal that Marcus and his husband have prepared for their TV time (it includes seven hot dogs, ruffled potato chips, baby carrots, an ungodly amount of what I presume is ranch dressing, and chocolate chip cookies — iconic), and YouTuber Ryan Hollinger has already put out a video in which he claims that the film’s overall thesis is about alcoholism (even though I don’t completely agree with his analysis). Although alcoholism and addiction in general are running themes through the film, I think that the presence of these diseases is more about showing character through the ways that addiction can compel people to be the worst version of themselves. That compulsion isn’t limited to drinking or shooting up, though, as we see with Archer and how his vandalism and lack of focus are the result of his grief. If anything, the film is about parasitism and the way that parasites can compel their hosts, with addictive compulsion (i.e. the proverbial monkey on one’s back), sexual impulsivity, and grief themselves acting as metaphors for having a parasite that controls you, as the film’s villainous force does. I won’t say more than that to save you from being spoiled the way that I was. 

In discussion about the film over the weekend, a friend brought up that one critic’s complaint was that Cregger will always opt to go for a joke rather than a scare, and while I think that’s an oversimplification of the director’s style, I also don’t think it’s inaccurate, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. This is a movie about children disappearing, parents bereft of answers, communities in mourning, leaders navigating grief and expectations, and finding solace in feeding one’s diseases while also being very, very funny. Sometimes, Cregger will just throw in a little piece of weirdness just for the hell of it (the giant floating AR-15 with 2:17 shining out of it in LED alarm clock letters being the most obvious example), and that’s also a delight. It’s a rich vein for evaluation and re-evaluation, and I could possibly be enticed to see this one a second time while it’s in theaters. Recapitulating the jokes would be just as bad as giving away the ending (which is itself very cathartic and bloodily hilarious), so I’ll just give this one a whole-hearted recommendation and send you on your way, dear reader. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Royal Hotel (2023)

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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the barebones, few-frills thriller The Royal Hotel is my favorite film of the year so far, given that I bought in early on director Kitty Green (Casting JonBenet) & actor Julia Garner (Electrick Children) back when stock prices were low.  Still, it clicked with me as both collaborators’ finest work to date, following their much more muted workplace chiller The Assistant in 2020.  The Royal Hotel explodes The Assistant‘s post-#MeToo themes of misogynist microaggressions & mundane labor exploitations into a much more immediate, visceral chokehold thriller – channeling 1990s psych thrillers like Dead Calm instead of the low-hum, methodical terror of Jeanne Dielman.  If it were even slightly dumber or trashier, it could pull off a sensationalist title like You In Danger, Girl: The Movie or The Male Gaze: A Horror Story, while The Assistant was much more careful to not be boxed in by expectations of genre.  It’s wildly entertaining as a result, while never losing sight of the political target in its crosshairs (a tactic also adopted by this year’s fellow sun-drenched indie drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline).

Garner costars besides Jessica Henwick as a pair of American tourists who find themselves flat broke while backpacking in Australia.  In an act of financial desperation (or, depending on the character, an act of self-immolation), the 20-somethings take a government-assigned temp job working as barmaids in the Australian Outback, serving beers to the roughneck workers of a remote mining town.  From there, the plot plays out like a slightly more grounded version of Alex Garland’s Men, with each of the blackout drunk brutes on the other side of the bar attempting slightly different angles on manufacturing sexual consent from the “fresh meat” working the register, whether with charm or with the threat of violence.  Like in Men, the customers are all essentially the same threat disguised in slightly different presentations, except this time they swarm their victims like George Romero zombie hordes, overwhelming the humble little pub in waves of drunken chaos.  The women are constantly told to smile & “take a joke” while struggling to interpret the thin line between flirting and bullying, like the difference between an Australian calling you “a cunt” vs. an Australian calling you “a sour cunt.”  Meanwhile, every social signal from every direction is telling them to get so drunk they don’t care what happens to them, since they’re powerless to stop it anyway – whether as self-protection or as willful self-destruction, depending on who’s drinking.

The premise of two outsider tourists being shipped off to an isolated mining-town bar specifically to serve as eye-candy for the sexually frustrated workers sounds like a screenplay contrivance looking to justify a metaphor, but Green & co-writer Oscar Redding were inspired to write The Royal Hotel by real life events, relying on the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie as shockingly direct source material.  The young tourists profiled in Hotel Coolgardie may be Finnish instead of American, but their stories are followed closely in The Royal Hotel to the point of exact images & phrases of dialogue being photocopied in direct adaptation.  Hotel Coolgardie is just as horrifying as Green’s movie, except it’s shot & presented more like a TLC reality show than a psychological thriller, which almost makes the women’s story more unnerving.  In either case, the premise makes for wickedly effective Service Industry Horror that’s deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a chaotic front-of-house job with rowdy, drunken customers, the same way The Assistant is relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a soul-draining office job for an evil corporate overlord (speaking as someone who’s done both).  They’re not just single-use metaphors about the horrors of “male attention” (a phrase used in both the doc and the narrative feature), since the generalized exploitations of modern labor and the women’s personal levels of desire to survive the ordeal complicate the central theme at every turn.

The Royal Hotel is a great film about misogyny, labor, social pressure, and alcoholic stupor.  And that’s not even getting into the racist power imbalance between the mostly white miners and the Indigenous workers who make up most of the service class (give or take a couple misplaced tourists).  Its Australian-set psych thriller credentials are cemented both by the appearances of a majestic kangaroo and the appearance of a menacing Hugo Weaving, near unrecognizable behind thick layers of sunburn and beard hairs.  It feels more immediate than nostalgic, though, distinctly a movie of its time.  Conceptually, it’s presented as Kitty Green’s simplest, most widely accessible work to date, but the nuances beyond its surface tensions & metaphors get remarkably complex the second you start to scratch at them – which is exactly what makes it her best.

-Brandon Ledet

The Assistant (2020)

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Although it was released earlier this year, The Assistant feels like it’s from an entirely different cultural era. I missed its brief run in New Orleans theaters (despite being a big fan of Kitty Green’s previous film, Casting JonBenét) because it arrived during Mardi Gras season and looked like too much of a bummer to squeeze in between parties and parades. Looking back on that time now, the idea of attending parties and parades is an outlandish, alien concept, as I’ve spent the past eight months (almost immediately following Mardi Gras) avoiding crowds like the plague – literally. As a cultural moment, 2020 has defined almost entirely by the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything from the presidential election to simple grocery store trips has been shaped by COVID in some way, to the point where I no longer recognize the cultural moment that birthed The Assistant. While we are currently living in the COVID era at the tail end of 2020, The Assistant is a film firmly rooted in the #MeToo era that was still very much at the forefront of public discourse at the start of this year. The entertainment industry and workplace culture at large have been violently disrupted by coronavirus outbreaks & safety protocols to the point where The Assistant feels like it’s a retro dispatch from a prehistoric world with its own distinct horrors & abuses. That world is not dead, though; it’s just quietly dormant, soon to return the minute we’re back to “Business As Usual.”

The Assistant is deliberately self-contextualized as a #MeToo era film. Julia Garner (who’s been due for a rise-to-fame breakout at least as far back as 2013’s Electrick Children) stars as a young, low-level assistant to A Harvey Weinstein Type. Her movie producer boss is a faceless, malevolent presence in the office, referenced only by “he/him” pronouns as if speaking his name would be blasphemous to his status as the office God. He is a well-known abuser of vulnerable young women looking to break into the movie industry, an “open secret” in the office that no one does anything about (beyond making jokes under their breath or strongly discouraging official HR complaints). New to the office, the extent to which her boss’s sexual abuses are known, tolerated, and enabled becomes starkly apparent to the disillusioned protagonist over the course of one spectacularly shitty workday. While the sexual abuse of these women is perpetrated by one clear villain at the top of the office hierarchy, he is largely absent from the screen; The Assistant is mostly concerned with the culture that fosters & enables the abuse rather than the physical act itself. It’s a cold, miserable examination of bystander complicity, implicating even its babyfaced protagonist for her own inaction in the face of a system designed to protect its own (as they exploit everyone else for sport).

While The Assistant is rooted specifically in #MeToo abuses within the entertainment industry, it also hits home as a generalized depiction of how demeaning & exploitative all office culture labor is even under the most mundane circumstances. Watching Garner clean up after her boss’s paper jams, children, half-eaten trash, and mysterious couch stains (*shudder*) is relatably grim to anyone who’s ever worked an 8-5 office job in any context. She’s a powerless twenty-something child who’s pressured from all sides to prop up an evil system with meaningless tasks that eat up her time & labor. It’s brutal to watch, even for just a quiet 78-minute stretch. It’s even relatable to the labor exploitations of the COVID era, which has dragged me back to performing mundane day-to-day work in an enclosed office environment despite an ongoing, worsening pandemic – just to maintain the pageantry of “Normalcy.” I don’t mean to imply that The Assistant is no longer relevant to the post-COVID world just because the #MeToo hashtag is no longer the #1 political issue currently at the top of our cultural priority list. It’s more that it now registers as a horrific reminder of what “Back to Normal” will look like once we get past this COVID lockdown disruption; it looks fucking grim.

-Brandon Ledet

Grandma (2015)

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EPSON MFP image

three star

Director Paul Weitz has a confusing list of credits. The only connection I can draw between his works (which include American Pie, About a Boy, Down to Earth, Little Fockers, and Being Flynn) is that they tend to be underwhelming films with phenomenal casts. There’s nothing particularly distinct about Weitz’s aesthetic or choice in projects, but he has had the good fortune of working with such diverse talents as Robert DeNiro, Chris Rock, Tina Fey, Scarlett Johansson, Willem Dafoe, John C. Reilly, Dustin Hoffman, Barbara Streisand, Paul Dano, Julianne Moore, and the list goes on. Too bad few (if any) of his films have been worthy of the talent involved. It’s no surprise, then, that I was drawn to the theater for Weitz’s latest picture, Grandma, based on the strength of its two leads alone. It’s also no surprise that the film was okay at best & survived solely on the strength of its lead performances & long list of cameos. If Weitz has a shtick or a calling card as a director, that reaction was pretty much par for the course.

Always dependable comedian Lily Tomlin plays Grandma‘s titular matriarch, a misanthropic lesbian poet who was “marginally well known 40 years ago”, but now suffers an over-the-hump slump of nonproductive self-deprecation in the wake of her longtime partner’s death. Saddled with the lingering debt of her deceased partner’s medical bills, Tomlin’s poet protagonist barely gets by on one-off gigs as a guest lecturer on college campuses. This perilous financial situation is strained even more by the unexpected appearance of her teenage granddaughter Sage (Electrick Children‘s Julia Garner), who only has a few hours to raise over 600 dollars for an appointment to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. What results is a sort of Day in the Life roadtrip comedy-drama as Sage tags along on her miserly grandma’s attempts to hit up ghosts from her past for spare cash. Grandma not quite as funny or as transgressive as the multi-generational roadtrip debauchery-fest Tammy or the frank abortion comedy Obvious Child, but it is a mildly enjoyable picture that leaves room for welcome extended cameos from folks like Laverne Cox, Judy Greer, John Cho, and Sam Elliott, not to mention the killer lead performances from Tomlin & Garner.

When I say that the cast is what drew me to the theater for Grandma, what I really meant is that I wanted to see more from Julia Garner, who was absolutely stellar in Electrick Children, a film I loved enough at first sight to be the first title included in The Swampflix Canon. She’s honestly just as effective here, even if the quality of the material is far from comparable. Grandma is, of course, also a rare treat as a star-vehicle for Lily Tomlin, who hasn’t headlined a film in nearly three decades. Tomlin is funny enough in the titular role, but her character is a bit much to handle for long stretches of time, given her tendency to slip into curmudgeony rants about Kids These Days with their Googles & their Ebays & whatnots. In a telling exchange, Tomlin’s flower child poet is annoyed that her granddaughter has never heard of The Feminine Mystique, while Sage is equally annoyed that her grandma doesn’t know that Mystique is also an X-Men character. It’s not too hard to see who the film sides with there.

Worse yet are casual platitudes like, “I like being old. Young people are stupid,” “Where can you get a reasonably priced abortion these days?”, and the biting, career-specific insult, “You’re a footnote.” Tomlin’s protagonist is the first to admit that she’s “a horrible person”, but her constant attempts to be seen as a hip grandma (including her dragonfly tattoo, her old Dodge hotrod, casual marijuana use, and incongruous affinity for rap music), all downplay the heft of those statements. Although they’re given a lot less to do, most of the film’s pathos is conveyed through turns from Julia Garner, Sam Elliott, and Judy Greer, who help balance out Tomlin’s more jaded notes of emotional detachment, age-specific bitterness, and outdated feminism. Grandma is an enjoyable, modest film with its own interesting visual language (poetic in the dragonfly imagery, subtly funny in visual gags that include a polar bear painting & a toy Jeep) as well as an admirably casual/balanced approach to its themes of abortion & sexual autonomy. If you’re looking for a calm, pleasant picture with a rarely-seen featured performance from either Tomlin or Garner, Grandma is serviceable. As with everything else I’ve seen from Weitz, it’s a decent enough film with a stacked cast of actors that could probably do much better. I’m not sure that the film would pass The Gene Siskel Test (“Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?”), but at the very least it’s a close call.

-Brandon Ledet