‘Weapons’ is a terrifying, melancholy, cathartic romp

The small town saga of 17 elementary school classmates, who all mysteriously leave their homes at 2:17 a.m. on the same day, Weapons follows the frayed societal fabric in the aftermath of this rapture-like disappearance. It yields, in the process, a story of vicious anger and flailing paranoia, practically drawn from the political neuroses affecting contemporary United States. Modern horror is rife with ghouls and shadows that stand in awkwardly for grief—the often tired, supposedly “elevated” metaphorror subgenre—but in Cregger’s sophomore effort, grief is the active ingredient, raw and unfiltered. This results not only in a tale of characters trying to find meaning in impossible tragedies, but a film that feels like the product of exactly this sort of desperation to connect every possible dot.

When the story begins, a little girl’s voiceover gets us up to speed on events that have already unfolded. Of the 18 children in a third-grade class at Maybrook Elementary School, 17 of them suddenly left their beds at the same time early one morning, with no explanation. Various home alarm systems and front door cameras all tell police the exact same thing, but nothing more: at 2:17 a.m., the children went downstairs, opened their front doors, and ran—arms spread eagle—into the dead of night. The Naruto run has never seemed more eerie.

Weapons picks up about a month later, as the one remaining child, Alex (Cary Christopher), is questioned by police, and the kids’ homeroom teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) draws the ire of suspicious parents, who believe she knows more than she’s letting on. The film switches narrative points of view a number of times, each in separate chapters named for its primary subjects. Justine gradually becomes fearful of the people around her, who threaten and harass her unless she confesses to…something. Neither she, nor her accusers, seem to know what. Everyone, including Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of a missing boy, is so desperate for answers that their grief takes furious form, causing them to lash out. All the while, the school’s conscientious principal Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong) tries to mediate these concerns—until he too becomes the mysterious victim of some inexplicable loss of control, widening his eyes in terrifying fashion, and infecting his mind like a virus.

The loss of autonomy, whether thanks to the supernatural or some overarching conspiracy, is never far from the movie’s mind. But the more that Weapons provides answers, the more it leads to further questions. You can almost picture a version of the film that grants no closure or explanation whatsoever, but even the revelations and implications it does provide feel winding and mysterious—as if drawn from some collective American subconscious.

The characters are all afraid, whether they’re awake or asleep. This results in strange encounters, and even stranger dreams, of everything ranging from sinister clowns—a distinctly American fear, likely exacerbated by the cultural omnipresence of serial killer John Wayne Gacy—to enormous AR-15s looming over the skyline. These symbols are, on one hand, obvious, given the young ages of Gacy’s victims, and the association between mass shootings and American schools. But on the other hand, they come no closer to providing closure. They exist among a collection of larger fears extracted from within the country’s very soul. These include hints of addiction and wanton neglect when Justine tries to check up on Alex at home, and other afflictions that don’t seem entirely connected at first. However, they form a surprisingly lucid political tapestry, as though Cregger were connecting events with criss-crossing red threads on a sprawling bulletin board.

Justine, for instance, has an ongoing affair with a short-tempered police officer, Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrhenreich), whose trigger-happy nature—and whose amusing fears of infection, reflecting the panic surrounding everything from fentanyl to HIV—become a surprisingly major part of the story. It feels, at first, like one of Cregger’s Whitest Kids U’Know sketches, a show known to take premises and twist and contort them past logical extremes, until their escalations become absurd. And yet, the specters of drug abuse and police violence materialize not as metaphors, but as all-but-explicit confrontations in the climax, when seemingly unrelated characters are yanked into the disappearance plot against their will—as though the town’s sorrow had engulfed them too. The only way the world makes sense anymore is if every paranoid instinct in Weapons is proven true, and while its title is explained in literal terms, it may as well refer to the weaponization of anguish that drives everything from personal gripes to political populism. 

Along the way, characters like Archer try to find patterns and meaning in every possible clue, à la Jim Carrey in The Number 23. The film even indulges their QAnon-esque ravings, if it means coming a step closer to finding some kind of deliverance. In fact, that Weapons has any explanations at all feels like something of a fantasy, and a means for Cregger to find some wider, all-encompassing meaning within madness—a pattern within societal chaos—if only to momentarily make sense of tragic events.

The “2:17” time can be seen on various digital clockfaces throughout the marketing, leading to rampant speculation about its meaning (including possible Bible verses and references to Stephen King’s novel The Shining). Even before the film’s release, audiences have been on exactly the kind of fact-finding missions that drive the movie’s characters (its first screenings were even at 2:17 p.m.). However, the meaning behind these numbers is likely much simpler and much more tragic all at once, in a way that lays bare the movie’s spiritual purpose.

Cregger has spoken about the death of a friend driving him to write the screenplay, in reference to Whitest Kids U’Know frontman Trevor Moore. He was an impeccably talented comedian who died tragically in 2021, after accidentally falling from his upstairs balcony. Alcohol may have been a contributing factor, but it’s the kind of sudden, senseless event that leaves both a gaping emotional hole, and a search for answers in order to cope. “2:17” is likely just a random, meaningless number, but since the police were called to Moore’s residence around 2:30 a.m., it’s hard not to see why Cregger would write a story about people dealing with an inexplicable tragedy that happens around that time, when the world ought to be calm and peaceful. That the film’s release date was Thursday, the anniversary of Moore’s death, only deepens this connection.

The plot is often scattered, throwing every idea at the wall to see what sticks. And yet, it all makes perfect sense as a senseless trip down a rabbit hole from which few can escape. In a Warner Bros. Q&A provided to the press, Cregger had this to say about his process in the wake of Moore’s death: “I was in such a severe, painful place that I was able to write just out of pure need, without any idea of what it was going to be…And I’m thinking as I’m writing, ‘This is cool. I hope I figure this out.’ And I didn’t really figure it out until it was time in the script to answer that question.”

In finding his story as it unfolds, Cregger displays whip-smart craftsmanship and tonal control. This marks an evolution from the more straightforwardly shot Barbarian. Accompanied by a jolting score and sound design, cinematographer Larkin Seiple builds anticipation through voyeuristic long lenses, snaking unbroken takes that follow vulnerable people through unfamiliar spaces, and eerie zooms and frenetic push-ins deployed at just the right moments, maintaining razor-wire tension and creating a remarkable aesthetic bridge between moments that ought to feel narratively at odds. On paper, there are about five or six different movies brewing within Weapons, from a melancholy tale of one father’s survivor’s guilt, to an amusingly unnerving saga of a teacher whose anxieties propel her to cross personal boundaries. These stories are connected by lonely pursuits of meaning in a nihilistic world, and editor Joe Murphy cuts between them during crescendos of action and emotion, creating momentum at every turn.

At a time when it feels like every wall is closing in around us—economically, politically, technologically, and so on—tumbling down a conspiratorial void to explain it feels all too tempting. None of us will ever be able to fully wrap our minds around grief, and for a fleeting moment, Weapons becomes a madcap reflection of that frustrating gridlock. But just when it seems like the film might tip its hand too far towards the literal, or the prescriptive, it off-sets any potential disappointment with one of the most rip-roaring, delightfully violent, and laugh-out-loud hilarious climaxes in recent memory, on par with anything in the new Naked Gun in terms of sheer exuberance.

What’s more, each of these moments is entirely earned. That Weapons provides even hints of meaningful catharsis feels like a fantasy fulfilled, affording cinema its full potential as a therapeutic medium for artists and audiences alike—all while providing some of the most nerve-wracking, white-knuckle thrills in any studio film this year.