Weapons

Released 2025. Director: Zach Cregger

YOU'D THINK THAT THE SAFEST PLACE FOR CHILDREN is their own home. Lock the door and any harm outside won’t get them. Not in this typical American town, where seventeen third-graders from the same class disappear one night, as if spirited from their sleep. At precisely the same time, all of them simply get out of bed and left their home, running silently across lawns and down the road with arms outstretched like the wings of a plane and disappear into the darkness.

The devastated parents point their anger and anguish at schoolteacher Justine. The vanished kids have all come from her class. She must have something to do with the disappearance, right? Bring out the pitchforks.

Julia Garner plays Justine, rattled, hounded and just as bewildered as anyone as she becomes public enemy number one. Her weakness for alcohol and intimacy with a cop engaged to the daughter of the chief police doesn’t help her case. Yet Justine is not the kind of woman who would give up easily just because someone paints her car with the word Witch in red paint. You could see in Justine shades of the various roles Garner has played of diminutive women going up against adversaries twice as big and powerful in The Assistant, The Royal Hotel and TV's Ozark.

The cast in Weapons includes Josh Brolin as a distressed and furious father, Alden Ehrenreich as a rule-breaking cop, Benedict Wong as an unfortunate principal and an unrecognisable Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys who’s destined to become a Halloween fixture.

Fans of the horror genre would be pleased to know Weapons hits all the chilling notes with disquieting reverberations to spare. It is consistently creepy and absorbing, with rising suspense and flashes of gore that are impactful rather than gratuitous.

At its core is a mystery that director Zach Cregger uses to its full potential in stacking his overlapping narrative. The story unfolds in several directions, divided into criss-crossing chapters as each vantage is shaped by the experience of different characters, including Alex, the only kid in the class who did not go missing. What does he know?

The pervading fear and paranoia seeps from one chapter to the next. Each character’s experience – Justine peeping through a window of Alex’s house, the cop chasing a junkie and their fateful rematch, the junkie’s hair-raising encounter as he loots a home, the principal’s sudden transformation into a rampaging zombie – reinforces the central mystery and tightens the tension, building up to a frenzied final act that is heart-pounding, horrifying and satisfying at the same time.

Besides a couple of jump-scare moments early on that serve more as genre signifiers to be done with, the movie creeps along with a sense of dread, picks up its pace with some alarming moments and sprints ahead with a supernatural ferocity. Cregger, whose last movie Barbarian would make you think twice about booking on AirBnB, once again turns an ordinary house into a black hole of pure terror. There’s a static shot of a front entrance framed by porch lights that makes you hold your breath in anticipation of what might emerge from the shadow behind that door left ominously ajar.

Horror movies have always been a mirror on the times. Night of the Living Dead is a metaphor on societal decay. Invasion of the Body Snatchers can be read as a political allegory against Communism or a cry against the danger of conformity. Get Out makes nightmares out of cultural identity and race relations. There's enough ambiguity in Weapons for different interpretations. To me, the movie is a timely allegory on a growing threat that has gone from insidious to mainstream.

It’s about brainwashing. Misinformation and unsubstantiated views engender fear and mistrust, turning people against each other, infecting a community, people we trust, including teachers and the police, even our families. Trust in reason and facts is eroded with the proliferation of baseless assumptions and conspiracy theories whipped into a frenzy, making enemies of people around you. Those who stoke the fear and spread untruth feed on the collapse of trust and reason to enrich themselves and advance their nefarious agenda. Some people in power want to see the world burn, as they foment the conditions for ordinary citizens to become weaponised.

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