Weapons is like a bedtime story told by a demented improviser. It starts with a simple idea and then spins out in unexpected directions. It’s a wacky, gory suburban gothic that mines childhood fears, small-town paranoia and the sick thrill of watching polite society rocket off the rails.
This is the second feature from writer-director Zach Cregger, best known for sketch comedy until his 2022 horror hit Barbarian. His comedy instincts drive both movies. Barbarian was set up like a joke: You show up to your Airbnb and someone else is already there. Weapons is a much more unruly contraption, and yet its scares have the timing and catharsis of comedy. You scream, then you laugh — but you don’t feel like you’re just being jerked around.
The plot sounds like a campfire tale, and it’s narrated in its opening and closing passages by a child who claims to have witnessed these strange events. It starts like this. On a random night in a random American town, a bunch of small children get out of bed at the same time and run out into the night. There’s no trace of them. Turns out they’re all from the same grade school class, and only one boy in the class, a sullen social outcast, has stayed behind.
This kid story is hijacked by the town’s adult characters, who are all affected by this event in different ways: The teacher (Julia Garner), who’s blamed for it; the parent (Josh Brolin), who’s radicalized by it; the petty thief (Austin Abrams), who exploits it; the cop (Alden Ehrenreich), who sinks back into his own worst instincts. And then there’s the lone boy (Cary Christopher), who lives in a house where the windows are covered over with newspaper and where people go in but don’t come out.
Each of these characters gets their own chapter, and the movie makes dramatic shifts in time and tone whenever it jumps from one perspective to another. We get a jolt, too, because there’s a real pleasure in realizing you have no idea where a movie is headed.
But that structure has its limitations. This small town has been rocked by this strange event, and yet we never get a feeling for the inner workings of the town itself. Compare this to The Sweet Hereafter, another unsettling allegory about a small town reeling from the loss of children, or any of David Lynch’s studies of moral rot behind white picket fences; those films let us see the fabric of the places in which they’re set, and it makes their themes of corrupted innocence that much stronger.
The screenplay is more concerned with the why behind the disappearance. The explanation isn’t really worth the wait, but it at least affords us a delightfully unhinged performance by Amy Madigan as an old lady right out of a Grimm’s fairy tale, and an ending that explodes in hilarious, absurd violence.
There’s a genuine eccentricity at the heart of Cregger’s work, and because he’s obviously seen and been bored by as many horror movies as we have, we get the sense that he’s working overtime to surprise and shock us. His plots may be a tad overworked but his horrors are elemental: the darkness that lurks behind an open door, the creepy neighbor up the street, the long basement stairs that you absolutely, positively don’t want to go down.