Words Adam Matulewicz

Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin carry the emotional scars of their collaboration in Weapons, tapping into similarly deep trauma as father and son in this moving adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel.

Jay and his tough-loving father, Mitt, share a strained bond held together by their devotion to deep-sea diving. When Mitt becomes terminally ill, he chooses to say goodbye on his own terms – a decision that unwittingly plunges Jay into a fight for his own life.

Diving into the cold waters off California’s central coast to recover his father’s body, Jay must soon rely on every tough lesson his father ever taught him. As he’s pulled deeper in the murky depths, one thing becomes clear: he’s not alone.

A traumatising tangle with a giant squid who mistakes him for dinner spirals into something far worse in an ocean with bigger mouths to feed. An eighty-foot sperm whale rises from the dark and swallows them both whole. Injured, trapped, and alone inside the belly of the beast with only an hour of oxygen left, Jay’s battle for survival begins.

In the suffocating dark, he wrestles the physical and mental toll of his escape as well as his grief for a father who haunts him in this nerve-shredding, deeply emotional descent that’s sure to leave you breathless.

A BIG Appetite

Director Brian Duffield wants to create an intense cinema experience which traps the audience in Jay’s mega fight for survival. To really convince the audience of the danger in front of their eyes, he recruited Wētā FX – the practical effect masterminds behind The Lord Of The Rings and Avatar – to construct the whale interior from its mouth all the way to its stomach. The majority of the film relies on the physical battle between Jay and handmade animatronics, from the tongue that swallows him whole to the moving muscles and organs which trap him inside. It’s this level of detail which grounds the film and sucks in the audience for a thrilling and terrifying journey.