A horror movie that proves that there’s still original storytelling left at our multiplexes, Weapons begins with voiceover narration by a little girl (Scarlett Sher) who tells us about the string of murders that terrorized her Pennsylvania town two years ago. At precisely 2:17 on a Wednesday morning, 17 3rd-grade students woke up, walked out of their homes, and vanished into the night. Like Eddington, it’s about how one unexpected event can make civilized people willing to kill each other in the street. However, it’s better than Ari Aster’s Western because it’s less specific, allowing it to take on the disquieting power of a finely honed urban legend.
Each of the film’s six chapters takes the viewpoint of one character: Justine (Julia Garner), the schoolteacher who taught all of the missing kids; Alex (Cary Christopher), the only student in her class who didn’t disappear; Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of a missing student who’s determined to prove Justine guilty of something; Marcus (Benedict Wong), the principal who gives Justine a leave of absence; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a married beat cop whom Justine is having an affair with; and James (Austin Abrams), a homeless meth addict who accidentally finds the children and pays steeply for it.
This is the second film by writer-director Zach Cregger, whose 2022 debut Barbarian began so promisingly and ended so badly. His cleverness is evident from the start here, as the children’s journey is glimpsed by their parents’ Ring security cameras. The title comes from people becoming lethal when their worst instincts are played on — when Justine tries to defend herself at a town hall, only a flying wedge of police keeps the parents from lynching her. Not that the cops are immune, because when Paul arrests James, he gives the handcuffed speed freak a serious beating in full view of his patrol car’s dashcam. There is witchcraft afoot, but the story scarcely needs it when these people much like you and me are so ready to turn on one another. It all plays like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s similarly disconnected Cure, and you won’t soon forget Justine and Archer’s angry confrontation at a gas station, when one of the other main characters, inexplicably covered in blood, runs up and tries to strangle both of them.
Cregger is a former comedian whose first movie was supposed to be a comedy with his troupe The Whitest Kids U’Know, but those plans were scuppered by the accidental death of fellow troupe member Trevor Moore. That real-life event shadows the deaths in this movie, and somehow so does Cregger’s comedy background. James’ segment is a series of set pieces as the drug addict frantically invents jobs and situations to get money for his habit, and while he’s robbing Alex’s house, he stops to marvel at a DVD copy of Ron Howard’s Willow. The climactic sequence has Archer repeatedly punching a sky-high James only for the crankhead to just as repeatedly get back up and attack him again. Archer finds it all exasperating, just like the terrifying nightmares he has about his son, and the humor happily coexists with the horror.
Abrams makes his addict’s desperation funny, and Ehrenreich scores some laughs by playing the brutal cop as a pathetic case whose wife (June Diane Raphael) immediately sees through his weak attempts to lie about his whereabouts. Balancing that is Garner’s praiseworthy turn as a woman who’s already a high-strung alcoholic before any of this happens, and whose need to get to the bottom of the disappearances overrides her fear of being assaulted in public. It leads her to pass out drunk while staking out Alex’s home, and then a female figure emerges from the house and slowly approaches her car with an unnatural gait while holding a pair of scissors.
Weapons reaches a grimly funny conclusion when the missing children finally deliver justice to the person most responsible for their plight, but our voiceover narrator’s storytelling strongly implies that the damage to the community will roll on for generations to come. Aggrieved individuals will lash out at others and create more victims until the entire town is engulfed in a giant trauma bond. Most slasher movies set in small towns don’t think to cut that deep. Because this one does, it gives us a big-picture view of our fragmented society that will chill you to the core.
Weapons
Starring Julia Garner and Josh Brolin. Written and directed by Zach Cregger. Rated R.
