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At a contentious meeting in a normally placid suburb, parents erupt in anger, demanding to know just what their children's teacher has been telling them. The teacher looks shellshocked, young and tiny among a surging crowd of middle-aged concerned citizens, choking out a few tentative sentences before being overpowered by the outraged roar, as her principal makes an ineffectual stab at restoring order. As the teacher makes her way back to her car, she has to push her way through a throng of cameras and smartphones, while people keep screaming at her: What did you do?
In Zach Cregger's Weapons, the parents have good reason to be upset. Seventeen children have gone missing, rising as one in the dead of night and running out into the streets, and every one of them came from the same classroom, leaving only their teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), and one remaining boy, Alex (Cary Christopher). But we've seen this scene a lot lately, as schools have become the sites of culture-war skirmishes and mass casualty events. And now it's spilling into the movies, where worries too vague or terrifying to be named take on solid form, safely contained within the boundaries of an evening's entertainment.
Like Cregger's Barbarian, which drew strength from the cultural tensions of gentrification and the #MeToo movement without settling on any particular stance, Weapons isn't a movie about contemporary anxieties so much as it is around them. Split into chapters named for (although not always faithful to) a single point of view, Cregger's screenplay hopscotches from one character to the next: first Justine, then the father of one of the missing children (Josh Brolin), later the school's principal (Benedict Wong), and the local cop, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), with whom Justine is having a periodic affair. It's also bookended by narration from an unidentified girl (Scarlett Sher), who warns the audience that in the story we're about to see, "A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways."
They do, in fact, die. Quite gruesomely. But it takes a while to get to that part. Like the obligatory flash-forward at the beginning of a streaming show, the little girl's narration serves not just as a warning but as a promise: Stick around, and things are gonna get good.
Cregger takes his time getting to the good, gory stuff because he wants to chart how an inexplicable calamity can disrupt an entire community, even those not directly touched by it. Under pressure at work and harassed at home, Justine starts drinking heavily. That leads to a lapse of judgement with Paul, which leads him to chase down a local meth addict (Austin Abrams) he might have otherwise been inclined to let be. In a less preoccupied time, perhaps someone might have noticed that Alex is suddenly walking home from school rather than having his parents pick him up, or people might have conferred about the strange dreams they've been having lately, visions of ghostly assault rifles and a grinning figure in smeared-on makeup.
Instead, the people of Maybrook, like the citizens of Eddington, are on their own. Tragedy might bring a community together, but uncertainty, at least in this case, does not. If there was any sense of common cause, it must have evaporated in the month after the children's disappearance, which Cregger skips over so he can start his story at the point of maximum desperation. Anything resembling a rational explanation has already been ruled out, the promising leads exhausted, and whatever patience the townspeople might have had with Justine's claims that she wants those children back just as much as they do have been worn to the bone. The police, led by Paul's soon-to-be father-in-law (Toby Huss) assure everyone that the investigation is ongoing. But Brolin's anguished parent, a building contractor who's consumed by the feeling that he'll never be able to mend his relationship with his vanished son, can't rest in the knowledge that the authorities have it under control. He's going, as he tells the chief of police, to look into it himself.
The cops are rarely much use in horror movies. They either get killed too early or stumble in too late, the distant approach of red-and-blue lights signifying that the threat has already been vanquished, the world returned to normalcy. If Weapons' cops aren't, like Eddington's Sheriff Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), actively part of the problem, they're definitely not part of the solution, because the tools at their disposal aren't up to the task. They can chase down clues and interrogate suspects, review the footage from every doorbell camera and alarm system, but no amount of blurry black-and-white video is going to crack this case. The answers are out there, but even doing your own research is not enough. You have to fundamentally reshape your grasp not only of what is true, but what can be true, to understand there are things in the world worse than you can even imagine.
Weapons is at its best when it conjures the feeling of sickening certainty that congeals in your gut as your reasons to doubt something you need not to be true are slowly stripped away. Cregger delays his big revelation for more than half the movie's length, building each section to a provocative climax and then backpedaling as he changes point of view. It's his favorite screenwriting gimmick, the mid-film switcheroo of Barbarian repeated over and over again, but it also underlines the movie's central tragedy, which is not just the disappearance of Maybrook's children but what happened to Maybrook after that. Rather than banding together, the town has atomized, each family retreating into its own private grief, and so the pieces of the puzzle that each character gathers remain too far apart for anyone to see the connections between them. It's only when they start to compare notes that the picture starts to come into focus.
But that isolation also undermines Weapons' resonance. Cregger stages so many of his scenes with just two or three characters that we never see what's happening to Maybrook as a whole. The crowd at the parents' meeting remains a shapeless mass, and we never get a sense of how the other still-full classrooms are reckoning with the absence of their fellow students. The isolation is spooky, but it feels artificial. Weapons lacks the wildness of Eddington or George Romero's The Crazies, the feeling that not just the world but the movie itself has gone nuts, and it might be driving us mad, too.
Cregger says Weapons' script was inspired by the death of his friend Trevor Moore, a fellow member of the sketch comedy group the Whitest Kids U'Know, and the movie is defined by its characters' attempts to process a sudden loss by any means they can. (Instead of proper names, you could probably label each section with one of the five stages of grief.) But he doesn't take into account how collective devastation -- whether it's a mass shooting, a deadly pandemic, or the death of something more abstract, like democracy or faith -- differs from individual loss, how it can spread trauma to those with no direct connection to the event, and therefore no clear-cut way to articulate or deal with it. The movie feels disconnected from the world it means to reflect, adrift in both space and time. (The narrator, speaking from an unspecified point in the future, says it's only been two years since the children disappeared, but when the meth-head breaks into an abandoned house and starts frantically hunting for valuables, he shuffles through a dusty stack of DVDs.)
That's also why Weapons' big revelation, when it finally comes, feels a little bit disastrous. (Spoilers follow.) Although the mysterious precision of the children's departure -- each left their house at precisely 2:17 a.m. -- and the movie's title hint at some sort of orchestrated conspiracy, the source turns out to be not governmental but supernatural. When an angry parent paints "WITCH" on Justine's car, they're not wrong -- they've just got the wrong vehicle. Notwithstanding the sly menace of Amy Madigan's Aunt Gladys, she doesn't connect to anything in the real world, a more deep-seated evil that might still haunt us after she gets what's coming to her.
Gladys' dismemberment at the hands of the very children she's ensorcelled is a fitting punishment, and its over-the-top gore turns white-knuckle dread into convulsive laughter. But that bravura capper also cements the movie's turn from something more intuitive and unsettling to a simple boogeyman story. That creepy old lady is just as bad as she seemed to be, and tight-knit communities really should beware of unfamiliar outsiders. Zach Cregger has made a Pied Piper story, but he's gotten it backward. The suspicious townspeople were right all along.