In writer-director Zach Cregger’s (Barbarian) first horror film in three years, Weapons, the town of Middlebrook, Pennsylvania falls under an impenetrable cloud of guilt, loss, and grief after the seemingly inexplicable disappearance of 17 children, all from the same elementary school class, all gone on the same night and the same time, 2:17 a.m., from their presumably safe suburban homes. Only one boy, unharmed, unaffected, and oddly unfazed by the previous night’s events, returns to school the next morning.
The disappearance of the children functions as a narrative pivot point: Every story element, every character beat, every line of dialogue leads from and to the overriding central mystery. After an efficiently compressed prologue delivered by an offscreen narrator, a young girl whose identity the film doesn’t address and thus remains ultimately unknowable, Cregger splits and fractures the narrative between six different townspeople, each one impacted by the disappearance of the children to varying degrees, some personally, some tangentially. Their individual stories, however, eventually converge in a gleefully transgressive finale that counters the slow-burn, dread-filled buildup of the first and second acts with increasingly frenetic bursts of grisly, gruesome violence in the third.
Haunted by the missing children, their schoolteacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), crippled by guilt and despair, turns to self-destructive behavior, self-medicating through alcohol. As a relative newcomer to the town and their teacher, she immediately falls under suspicion. That suspicion reflects unspoken, deep-seated cultural fears (e.g., Satanic Panic, QAnon, right-wing adjacent conspiracy theories) and real-world ones (e.g., school shootings, natural disasters). Almost immediately, the townspeople begin to accuse Justine of involvement in the disappearance of their children. An obsessed, obsessive Justine embarks on a dangerous path that eventually leads her to the heart of the supernatural mystery and beyond.
Subsequent chapters follow Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the working-class father of one of the missing children, Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), a bumbling, self-obsessed law enforcement officer, recovering alcoholic, and Justine’s ex-boyfriend, Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong), the school principal, less concerned about the return of the children than the school’s potential liability, James (Austin Abrams), a drug addict and petty thief who inadvertently stumbles into the central mystery, and Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the only boy who didn’t disappear that fateful night.
While each new chapter unfolds onscreen sequentially, they also overlap spatially and temporally. The character-specific chapters offer differing perspectives on key events as they unfold, fill in key background information and the characters’ complex, often contradictory relationships with each other, and advance the central mystery (and its solution). As questions are answered, new ones are asked. Creating that sense of suspension, tension, and suspense, of stories wrenchingly halted in media res, then begun again from a different character’s point of view, can prove a challenge even the most experienced of filmmakers, but Cregger proves himself an incredibly adept, nimble storyteller, balancing tone, atmosphere, and mood with a sly, deft, often darkly comic touch.
Barbarian, Cregger’s last film, set primarily in — and more importantly, under — an out-of-the-way rental in a gentrifying Detroit, literalized intersectional horrors, specifically a deeply misogynistic, patriarchal system that objectified and violated women without consequence or fear of consequence. Here, the horrors are just as clear, fixated on fears both cultural (children, schools, indoctrination) and primal (a parent’s concerns for their children’s everyday safety). Cregger’s genius lies in subtly inserting those fears into the fractured, first-hand experiences of Justine, Archer, and the unintended ripple effects that reach the other characters.
Weapons was once set to co-star Pedro Pascal (Fantastic Four: First Steps, Eddington, Materialists) and Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World) in the Archer and Justine roles. Scheduling conflicts, largely created by the 2023 Hollywood labor strikes, led, along with several other performers (e.g., Brian Tyree Henry, Tom Burke), to the initial cast’s departure from the film. Talented actors all, but it’s hard to imagine Weapons without Brolin, Garner, and the supporting cast in their specific roles, both the result of their skillful replacements and their respective abilities to fully embody their characters caught in the undertow of malevolent, possibly supernatural forces.
As with Barbarian and its subversive, transgressive premise, the key revelations in Weapons (e.g., the who, what, when, where, and how behind the children’s disappearance and their eventual fate) require a healthy suspension of disbelief, but once audiences push past the disbelief barrier, Weapons never fails to deliver the dread, shocks, and cathartic violence promised by its inescapably compelling premise and Cregger’s precise control over the final onscreen results.
Weapons opens theatrically on Friday, August 8th, via Warner Bros. Pictures.
