WEAPONS: A Very Strange Film by Zach Cregger [REVIEW]

They say we fear the most what we don’t know. When we’re kids, every other night is spent perched at the edge of the bed, clutching the blanket, wondering what the monster that’s going to jump out of the closet in a few hours will look like. Imagination plays tricks on us, making us see things that aren’t there—and never were. I remember all too well how, when I was seven or eight, I was afraid to go to the bathroom at night, convinced that the shadow cast by a piece of furniture was actually the shadow of a murderous dwarf lurking in the living room with a knife (true story). But the truth is, we’re just as afraid—if not more afraid—of things that seem familiar at first glance. There’s something wrong with them—some detail or odd circumstance stirs our unease.

Zach Cregger, in Weapons, preys on exactly this kind of fear. He creates one of the most chilling portraits in modern horror in a deceptively simple way. Because really, what’s there to be afraid of? After all, it’s just children running down the street with their arms outstretched.

The premise of Weapons is, frankly, perfect. At 2:17 a.m., 17 children, all from the same class, vanish under mysterious circumstances. Home surveillance footage makes one thing clear: no one kidnapped them, no one forced them to run away. The children simply got out of bed, opened the front door, and ran into the dark night. The main action begins roughly 30 days after the titular disappearances.

The unsolved mystery hangs over the small town, as if pulled straight from the pages of Stephen King. The police are baffled, and so is the FBI. The disappearance casts a long shadow over the lives of the locals: a teacher (Julia Garner) who looked after the missing children becomes the community’s scapegoat; the father of one of the boys (Josh Brolin) launches his own investigation, driven by anger and a growing sense of helplessness; a local lawman (Alden Ehrenreich) tries to carry on as if nothing happened, convincing himself there’s nothing he can do.

In his now-classic The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll argued that the structure of horror cinema—more than any other genre—rests on a system of questions and answers. Horror protagonists, much like detectives or police officers, often face mysteries, though not always explicitly stated ones. The pleasure of engaging with horror comes not only from the immediate jolt of fear, but also from the slow process of uncovering the story’s meaning—posing questions, forming hypotheses, and learning the answers. If Carroll were writing The Philosophy of Horror today, Weapons could easily serve as a prime example of his theory. The questions Cregger poses at the film’s opening are as obvious as they are intriguing: Where are the missing children? What drove them to run into the night and never come back? The director and screenwriter reveals his hand very slowly, using a mosaic-style narrative that has already earned comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.

He divides the film into chapters, each corresponding to the perspective of a key character in the mystery. By jumping between viewpoints, Cregger casually slips us new pieces of the puzzle. He tests our patience, misleads us, and only offers the full explanation in the film’s final act.

Every so often, Cregger’s comedic past surfaces. He’s taken a path strikingly similar to Jordan Peele’s—from popular comedian (in his case, a member of the satirical group The Whitest Kids U’ Know) to skilled horror filmmaker. Elements of dark comedy were present in his previous, somewhat uneven film Barbarian, but here they are far more pronounced.

The balance between humor and horror is one aspect that may divide audiences. Cregger often turns to comedy to break the tension, sometimes in moments when maintaining that tension might have been preferable. The grand finale plays out in a mood of carefree grotesque—at my screening, instead of trembling in fear or perching on the edge of their seats, the audience burst into loud laughter. Personally, I have no problem with that—in fact, I think that’s exactly the effect Cregger and his team were going for—but the most orthodox horror fans, who go to the cinema for scares alone, may not appreciate such reactions.

Weapons is, in essence, a very strange film—but by no means is that a flaw. On one hand, it works perfectly well as meticulously crafted, brilliantly written, and skillfully directed entertainment. On the other, there’s enough here to read the story as a veiled allegory of a school shooting, especially considering the title, the American context, and the massive machine gun looming over a house in one of the dream sequences. Cregger doesn’t seem to favor one interpretation over the other. His film is flexible—it bends to the viewer. Comedy, horror, thriller, psychological drama, even fairy tale—many genres walk hand in hand here. The director handles them all, though naturally he’s more comfortable in some than in others.

Despite a few minor stumbles—I’m still not convinced by the final resolution of the mystery, though that might be because the starting point was so promising—Weapons is undeniably a success, both artistically and commercially. For Cregger, it will undoubtedly be a ticket into the ranks of the most interesting voices in modern horror cinema. Soon enough, we’ll be saying his name in the same breath as Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, or Oz Perkins—and deservedly so.