Weapons

Weapons fires its starting shot almost immediately. An opening prologue, told by an unseen child narrator, explains what it claims is a “true story” in which “a lot of people die in a lot of really weird ways”. Then we witness the inciting incident: one night, at 2.17am, 17 school kids from the fictional town of Maybrook wake up, walk out of their homes and run off into the night, arms eerily outstretched, destination unknown — soundtracked, ominously and strangely sweetly, to George Harrison’s ‘Beware Of Darkness’.

So begins Zach Cregger’s second feature film as a solo director (not counting his co-directing credit on the much-maligned 2009 Playboy mansion sex-comedy Miss March). This is a story on a much grander canvas than 2022’s superb Barbarian, and even more narratively playful than that film’s midway rug-pull: unravelling the mystery of the missing children across six chapters, each focusing on a different character across a roughly concurrent Rashomon-ish timeline.

Cregger’s script is remarkably well-structured, but he takes a careful, crafted approach.

It begins almost like a thriller, gripping and jittery, the palpable anger and grief over the absent kids seizing the town. Blame initially falls on the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner, excellent), whose entire class disappears save for one hapless boy, and it’s her perspective we join first, followed by Archer (Josh Brolin), a parent of one of the missing, whose obsessive hunt for his son leads down some dark paths.

Playing episodically, with a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter, the intrigue builds exponentially, as seeming side characters get their own focus, in a move that might have seemed indulgent, were they not skilfully weaved back into the main plot. Cregger’s script is remarkably well-structured, but he takes a careful, crafted approach, clearly conscious not to obscure the characters with any nonlinear gimmickry.

It is a masterful balancing of tones, too. This is a serious film, with allusions to school shootings, police brutality, alcoholism, drug addiction and grief, though handled more gently and thoughtfully than Barbarian’s timely themes. It is an effectively scary one when it wants to be, too, including a handful of violent moments that will have you squirming (Weapons sees Evil Dead Rise’s cheese grater and raises it a vegetable peeler).

And yet somehow it is also very funny, with flashes of disarming gallows humour (spot the copy of Willow on DVD), an unexpectedly camp antagonist, and an astonishing, cathartic, outrageously well-staged finale, where all the tension of the previous two hours finally boils over, a climax which ought to have audiences standing up and cheering in the aisles. The entire film, in fact, is something that shouldn’t work, but does. Can a film about missing children and grief be called a crowd-pleaser? In Zach Cregger’s hands, it feels almost effortless.