\n\tSPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers.<\/p>\n
\n\tAt 2:17 a.m. on a school night, 17 children go missing all at once. They get up out of bed, open their front doors and run out into the night, arms outstretched, like stealthy little airplanes flying low across the lawns of their sleepy suburban community. The kids have one thing in common: They are all students in Justine Gandy\u2019s third-grade class, which now sits empty, save for a shy boy named Alex, who\u2019s as bewildered as the town\u2019s angry parents that he was spared such a peculiar fate.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s an intriguing place to start a horror movie, made all the more unconventional by \u201cWeapons<\/a>\u201d writer-director Zach Cregger<\/a>\u2019s choice to let a local girl describe the movie\u2019s ostensibly supernatural premise. Just how much of the shocking and surprisingly gory events that follow could she have been privy to? No matter. As the anonymous young narrator says of her peers\u2019 disappearance, \u201cThe police and the top people in this town \u2026 were not able to solve it,\u201d a claim that primes us for a mystery that will remain at least partially unexplained \u2014 which has lately emerged as a successful horror subgenre, as films like \u201cHereditary\u201d and \u201cLonglegs\u201d embrace the ambiguity once reserved for oddities like \u201cPicnic at Hanging Rock.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSignificantly expanding the scope and potency of his own sinister powers of suggestion, Cregger comes to this latest nightmare off 2022\u2019s brilliantly deranged \u201cBarbarian,\u201d in which a hellacious vacation rental was but a front, beneath which all kinds of evil had been allowed to fester. The man has a mind uniquely skilled at revealing the threats lurking behind seemingly innocuous environments \u2014 in this case, a Pennsylvania town called Maybrook, where the mass disappearance turns mild-mannered parents into an angry mob.<\/p>\n \n\tThe close-to-home setting and imperfect collection of characters (composed of people whose flaws make them all the more relatable) suggest the best Stephen King movie that Stephen King never wrote. So long as the kids are unaccounted for, our minds are free to make whatever associations might arise. Some may gravitate to QAnon-style conspiracies, whereby murky child predators target the nation\u2019s youth (tonally, the film resembles Denis Villeneuve\u2019s pitch-black \u201cPrisoners\u201d). For me, the community\u2019s reaction suggested the painful aftermath of a school shooting, as parents look for answers, consolation and someone to blame, in roughly that order.<\/p>\n \n\tChanneling the hot-tempered sort of guy who surely bullied his peers back in school, Josh Brolin<\/a> plays a father named Archer Graff, whose son Matt has gone missing. He stands up at a school meeting and implicates Justine (Julia Garner<\/a>), demanding to know what the teacher did to their kids. That charge hits hard as real-world parents band together to confront school personnel and policies they fear may be brainwashing their kids \u2014\u00a0one of several resonant phobias vibrating just below the film\u2019s surface, which lend \u201cWeapons\u201d its power.<\/p>\n \n\tInstead of picking a single character to follow for the duration of the film, Cregger splinters the mystery among six people, separated into distinct chapters, beginning with Justine. As seen through a glass darkly, each prismatic shard provides fresh insights, as the story rewinds with each new section so key scenes can be replayed from a different person\u2019s perspective: There\u2019s the teacher (Garner), the parent (Brolin), the cop (Alden Ehrenreich), the school administrator (Benedict Wong) and two others whose identities are better left undisclosed.<\/p>\n \n\tThe pieces fit together like an expertly designed puzzle, eliciting pings of satisfaction as certain details click into place, from the identity of the person who scrawled \u201cWITCH\u201d on Justine\u2019s car to the reason the scuzzy junkie (Austin Abrams) assaulted by law enforcement risks approaching the police station. Through it all, Cregger flashes glimpses of a face in smeared clown-like makeup. In some scenes, this interloper is played by Amy Madigan, all but unrecognizable behind her sloppy lipstick and uneven eyeballs (one is disconcertingly smaller than the other). Like Mary Poppins\u2019 satanic stand-in, Madigan\u2019s Aunt Gladys arrives more than halfway through the film, blending humor and repulsion to create a character distinctive enough to be this Halloween\u2019s hottest costume (cut from the same cloth as Nicolas Cage\u2019s kooky \u201cLonglegs\u201d turn).<\/p>\n \n\tFor more than an hour, the movie strikes a grimly self-serious tone, reinforced by Larkin Seiple\u2019s steady-handed camerawork and a score that makes your bones vibrate, but once Gladys appears, \u201cWeapons\u201d takes an unexpectedly campy turn. By this point, Cregger has upped the ante, introducing an adult turned homicidal by the same suggestive force that compelled the kids to flee their homes. But as we start to understand why this is all happening, the runaway ideas Cregger\u2019s concept unleashed in our own heads start to narrow to a single, inevitably limiting explanation.<\/p>\n \n\tAs in \u201cBarbarian,\u201d the violence escalates in the home stretch, during which the title becomes clear and we realize that the community is made up of two kinds of people \u2014 targets and weapons \u2014 and practically anything, from an impressionable child to a vegetable peeler, can be rendered dangerous in the wrong hands.<\/p>\n \n\tFor three-quarters of the movie, Cregger\u2019s artfully oblique approach lets our imaginations go wild. It\u2019s only when the answer emerges that \u201cWeapons\u201d starts to lose its edge. Regardless of how you feel about the ending (and many will happily embrace the movie\u2019s darkly comic finale), Cregger has achieved something remarkable here, crafting a cruel and twisted bedtime story of the sort the Brothers Grimm might have spun \u2014\u00a0not the kid-friendly Disney version, mind you, but the kind where characters kill on command and audiences find it difficult to sleep afterward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers. 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