"Weapons"

 ☆☆☆½ 

It would be hard to conceive of a better set-up for a movie than the one Zach Cregger has dreamed up for his new thriller Weapons: 17 of the 18 children in one elementary school classroom get up out of bed at 2:17 a.m., leave their homes and run, arms trailing behind them like airplane, into the night.

They vanish.

Why?

Who's responsible?

Has some terrifying force, some evil spirit, taken possession of all of these children? And why is one boy left in the classroom where Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) teaches?

It's a story filled with tension, with deep uncertainty, a paranoia that goes far, far deeper than any ordinary tragedy — say, a school shooting, which the movie wants to evoke — would have generated. As a directer, Cregger has an amazing gift for milking that tension, both visually and through montage. This is a finely crafted movie, and though it utilizes many of the tropes of horror films, it plays much more like a disturbing, anxious update of the paranoid thrillers that were popular in the 1970s.

There is so much tension, that just the sight of a woman walking toward a car can get an audience screaming and fidgeting. The audience I saw it with seemed to regard this movie with a genuinely rare sense of dread, and Weapons leaves no doubt — particularly coupled with his previous horror film Barbarian — that Cregger is an incredible filmmaking talent.

It's in the fulfillment of the promise of those first 30 minutes that Cregger falters. Weapons bears more than a passing resemblance to the films of M. Night Shyamalan, even down to the rural Pennsylvania setting (though the film was shot in Georgia). The comparison extends to a fascination with creating a twisty, unpredictable plot that never quite connects all of its various threads.

Strangely, perhaps, there's another movie that came to mind while watching Weapons, one that I learned Cregger acknowledged served as sort of storytelling inspiration: Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 masterpiece of anxiety, Magnolia. Thematically, the movies couldn't be more different, but certain elements — an overwound cop, a constant rain, a cascade of interrelated stories, an oppressive sense of foreboding — combine to make Weapons ambitious and impressive. But still ...

Like Magnolia, Weapons begins with an omniscient narrator who establishes the mood and then disappears. What the narration and the first third of Weapons never hints at (just as Magnolia didn't) is the out-of-nowhere event that will change the course of the story. In the case of Weapons, it's impossible to describe this event without spoiling things — and this is a movie that, despite my reservations, shouldn't be spoiled. In Magnolia, the event (frogs raining from the sky) needed no explanation; its randomness, its weirdness, its lack of any greater meaning was the point.

In Weapons, the event and the character who embodies it also get no explanation, and that proves to be the movie's undoing. Without a sense of motivation, without crucial details about what this person wants, exactly, and why, the story begins to fall apart. Weapons is a movie best enjoyed in the moment, and the good news it can be enjoyed in the moment, quite a lot. But if you're like me, and you begin to try to answer any of the many questions Weapons leaves wide open, the car ride home after watching this movie is going to be a long one. And frustrating.

Weapons needs, earns and demands a sense of mystery. But ultimately even David Lynch needed to offer contextual explanations for a lot of his weirdness. Weapons not only doesn't offer the explanations, the movie left me wondering if it even cared that people might wonder. It's a puzzle, all right — a moody, tense, sometimes frightening puzzle, but every puzzle needs to have a solution. I'm not sure there is one for Weapons.

Viewed August 10, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

1240