Weapons

If that chilling bit of narration (delivered by a child, no less) doesn’t immediately pique your interest, the premise surely will: 17 children go missing when they run out their front doors at exactly 2:17 a.m. and disappear into the night. We see all of this happen, some of it via doorbell-camera footage, meaning the mystery of Weapons lies in why and how rather than what. The grade-schoolers look oddly liberated as they vanish into the suburban darkness, arms outstretched like heat-seeking cherubs, with the immediate aftermath summarized by that same unidentified narrator rather than shown. The real story begins a month later, which is when things start to get weird.

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Writer/director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his 2022 sleeper hit Barbarian is a remarkably ambitious horror odyssey that manages to be creepy, laugh-out-loud funny, gory, and even crowd-pleasing by the time the credits roll, sometimes in the span of a single extended sequence. Some viewers drawn in by the almost desolate sense of shared trauma may be disappointed by its more bizarre developments, but while some of its narrative contrivances require more suspension of disbelief than others, Cregger makes it easy to go along with his various flights of fancy.

He doesn’t do it alone. Told from six different perspectives — the teacher whose students go missing (Julia Garner), the father of one of those children (Josh Brolin), a police officer working on the case (Alden Ehrenreich), an unhoused drug addict who gets swept up in it (Austin Abrams), the school principal (Benedict Wong), and the one child who remains (Cary Christopher) — Weapons offers an overlapping view of an increasingly off-kilter environment and the people who inhabit it. Justine Gandy (Garner) can’t escape suspicion due to all 17 of the missing kiddos being in her class, just as the solitary child left behind can’t possibly understand why any of this is happening.

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After being yelled at and accused of knowing more than she’s letting on at a community-wide meeting, Justine receives threatening phone calls and discovers that the word “witch” has been written on her car in red paint. There may be a kind of witchcraft going on in Maybrook, but there’s little reason to think she’s the one making potions or chanting incantations. Weapons draws on influences as far-ranging as It and The Sweet Hereafter as it builds this world into something both believable and fantastical, but is ultimately its own strange beast — the kind that seems likely to inspire other movies in the future.

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Despite being just one of six primary characters, Garner’s elementary-school teacher remains our center of gravity throughout. There’s always been a kind of wispy strength to her performances, and the way she embodies Maybrook’s collective grief helps ground Cregger’s increasingly oddball plotting. Ditto Brolin, whose character initially leads the charge against Justine before finding a kind of ally in her as he realizes she’s the least of his worries. Mourning makes strange bedfellows, as do movies featuring evocative dream sequences, houses that are easier to enter than they are to exit, and lipstick-smeared smiles in the forest.

Cregger makes it easy to go along with his various flights of fancy.

Viewed from a certain angle, Weapons might even be thought of as a surprisingly poignant metaphor for school shootings: a classroom full of children disappearing, the grief-stricken community reeling from their trauma, and, of course, the title itself, which is made literal when an apparition of a giant assault rifle hovers above a suburban house in one of those dreams. “You’re a teacher, not a parent,” Justine is told, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t share their grief. Elephant this is not, but there are more ideas at work here than the genre thrills betray.

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In what’s already been a banner year for horror thanks to movies like Presence, The Ugly Stepsister, and Together, Weapons stands out as being legitimately scary in a way that none of its peers can lay claim to. Its many twists and turns are genuinely unexpected yet make sense in hindsight, with the script’s creepiness matched only by its originality. And while it’s true that people die in weird ways in this story, what ultimately elevates Weapons is that it’s more interested in how the living persist than it is in how the dead met their fate.