Title:Â Weapons
Describe This Movie In One Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Quote:
CHILD CATCHER: Come along, my little dears, my little mice. Come to me.
Brief Plot Synopsis: The kids are not alright [sic].
Rating Using Random Objects Relevant To The Film:Â 4 cans of chicken noodle soup out of 5.
Tagline:Â “Last night at 2:17 am every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark …and they never came back.”
Better Tagline:Â “Isn’t that more of a plot synopsis?”
Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: One month ago, a bunch of kids from Maybrook Elementary disappeared in the middle of the night. As classes finally resume, parents and community members understandably still have questions. For example, what — if anything — does their teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) know about it? What’s up with Alex (Cary Christopher), the one kid in her class who didn’t take off? And how soon before Archer (Josh Brolin), dad of missing Matthew, loses his shit?
“Critical” Analysis: Weapons starts things off almost after the fact. A brief voiceover gives us the skinny on how 17 (a Janis dozen?) 3rd graders ghosted their families in the middle of the night. Billed as a “horror-mystery,” the movie wastes no time digging into the aftermath of their disappearance. Though at the risk of outing myself as an insomniac; *none* of hose moms and dads were up at that time of night?
After the incident, things in Maybrook aren’t great. Shocker. As with his first feature, Barbarian, writer/director Zach Cregger uses multiple POVs to spin out the story from different character perspectives. We naturally start with Justine, whose personality was described as “pick-me” by my 16-year old daughter. Fingers are quick to point her way, and the fact she was something of a trainwreck, even before The Event, doesn’t help.
Truth be told, I’d probably just leave town.
Justine’s antagonist-turned-unlikely ally is Brolin’s Archer. Like Justine, he’s plagued by post-vanishing bad dreams involving both his missing son and a woman done up in what appears to be bad clown makeup (that may be redundant). Realizing his grief is having serious effects on his professional livelihood, Archer sets out to solve the mystery of Matthew’s disappearance.
His investigations also give Cregger an excuse to bring back Barbarian alum Justin Long, whose appearance here mercifully amounts to a glorified cameo.
Plot wise, I won’t say much beyond that. Like Barbarian, Cregger still gets a lot of scare mileage out of empty passages and slow pans that suddenly reveal unpleasant details. Weapons, however, is less about the horrors potentially lurking beneath our feet than it is how shared trauma threatens to tear us apart when it fails to unite us.
At the same time, Weapons seems like it wants to say something meaningful about suburban complacency. The further Maybrook’s citizens get from the disappearance, the less any of those not directly involved want to be reminded of it. It explains the disinterested and/or annoyed reactions of bystanders to the escalating weirdness blundering through their backyards like so many demented Ferris Buellers.
Because — again — as with Barbarian, there’s a lot of humor here. Whatever your opinions of his old comedy show, The Whitest Kids You Know, Cregger knows how to balance dread and uneasiness with laugh out loud moments. The catharsis is necessary, but also rather unique. Full disclosure: I wasn’t a fan of Barbarian, but Weapons’ mix of genuine horror with physical and situational comedy is an accomplished one, and sets Cregger apart within the current genre.
A little originality is a welcome thing in this era of horror sequels (Final Fantasy: Bloodlines), reboots (I Know What You Did Last Summer), and the latest in a series built entirely on the bullshit piled up by its main characters (The Conjuring: Last Rites). Weapons is hardly the only unique property out there, but it’s one of the few getting a major summer release, and that’s not insignificant.
Weapons is in theaters today.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
