Film Review of the Week

Comedy

Freakier Friday (PG)

Review: More than 20 years after Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis walked in each other’s shoes in a rambunctious remake of the wholesome 1976 family comedy, three generations experience an identity crisis in a rip-roaring sequel directed by Nisha Ganatra. By turns hilarious and heartfelt, Freakier Friday makes merry, as promised in the title, by magically transporting grandmother, daughter, granddaughter and high school frenemy into each other’s bodies during preparations for a wedding.

Oscar winner Curtis has a blast poking fun at herself as she pretends a fashion-forward, self-obsessed sardonic Gen Z – essentially Cher from Clueless – is trapped inside her character’s “decomposing” Baby Boomer body and is suddenly confronted with knees that pop, deep crevices in her face and an unreliable bladder. She snags the best one-liners – a sassy quip about Facebook is priceless – in an effervescent script written by Jordan Weiss that fully embraces the outlandishness of the four-way body swap but still manages to find moments of teary-eyed reconciliation.

Younger co-stars Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons confidently perform the heavy-lifting in these emotion-saturated heart-to-hearts. Lead cast of the 2003 iteration of Freaky Friday reprise their roles – older and slightly wiser in the face of fantastical disaster – including Rosalind Chao as Chinese restaurant manager Pei-Pei and Stephen Tobolowsky as dry-witted high school teacher Mr Bates.

Therapist Dr Tess Coleman (Curtis) juggles recording her fledgling podcast, playing pickleball with husband Ryan (Mark Harmon) and supporting her record company executive daughter, Anna (Lindsay Lohan), who is about to marry widowed chef Eric (Manny Jacinto). The nuptials will blend their two families, intensifying friction between Anna’s daughter Harper (Julia Butters) and Eric’s snobby daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons), who resents being dragged away from her old life in London. Lightning strikes twice after an impromptu palm reading from kooky fortune teller Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer): “Change the hearts you know are wrong to reach the place where you belong!” On the Friday before the wedding, Anna and Tess swap bodies with Harper and Lily respectively and chaos ensues.

Freakier Friday recaptures the carefully choreographed lunacy of Curtis and Lohan’s first out-of-body experience with a barrage of belly laughs and winning performances from the central quartet, supported by key female creatives behind the camera including editor Eleanor Infante, composer Amie Doherty, production designer Kay Lee and costume designer Natalie O’Brien.

Curtis was the standout of the 2003 picture and she’s even more delightfully unhinged in the sequel, playing up a wider age divide between her internal and external heroines. Weiss’s script trades lightly in nostalgia, including a reunion for Anna’s band Pink Slip and an updated version of their song, Take Me Away. Rock on!

Horror

Weapons (18)

Review: Zach Cregger, writer-director of the twisted 2022 home rental horror Barbarian, masterminds a tricky psychological thriller that should send a bead of cold sweat trickling down the spine of every parent. Ignorance is bliss in Weapons. This fiendishly constructed puzzle invites the audience to piece together evidence in real-time with beleaguered characters and is most skin-prickling when you have no idea what the finished picture should resemble.

Cregger’s elaborate design is a modern riff on the Brothers Grimm divided into six tantalising chapters, each told from the perspective of a protagonist embroiled in the mystery: a teacher, parent, child, school principal, police officer and petty criminal (though not necessarily in that order, to protect the film’s grand reveal). An insidious threat comes into focus in the final half hour with the formal introduction of a Machiavellian resident hidden in plain sight, accompanied by a powerhouse performance of unspoken anguish from nine-year-old Cary Christopher that builds in discomfiting intensity.

Strong bloody violence is par for the course in fairy tales: in Cinderella, the ugly stepsisters chop off parts of their feet to make the glass slipper fit. Weapons obliges with impeccably timed explosions of gloopy gore including a shocking three-hander in a sunlit kitchen that will test the stomach of anyone tucking into a concessions stand hot dog.

At 2.17am on a normal Wednesday, 17 children from the class of Maybrook Elementary School teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) get out of bed, go downstairs without waking their parents, open the front doors of their family homes and run into the night. Ring camera footage shows tykes sprinting merrily across front lawns and through their slumbering neighbourhoods, arms outstretched, never to be seen again. The only student from Ms Gandy’s class who remains safely in bed is Alex Lilly (Christopher).

Distraught parent Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew is among the missing, joins the local community in pointing the finger of blame at Ms Gandy, demanding she confess her role in the unfolding tragedy. Justine pleads innocence and we gradually learn the truth through her eyes and from the intersecting points of view of her ex-boyfriend and local cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) and drug addict James (Austin Abrams) who overdoses on ghoulish misfortune.

Weapons is a stylish companion piece to Barbarian, expanding Cregger’s fascination with the darkness and depravity that fester unchecked behind the neatly mowed front yards of contemporary American suburbia. Overlapping chronologies deliciously tease the macabre storytelling of the final two chapters, which feel closely aligned to the hard-fought battles between good and evil that Stephen King regularly plays out in his fictional Maine communities. Suffer the little children, most grievously.