Weapons (2025)

****/****
starring Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan
written and directed by Zach Cregger

by Walter Chaw Zach Cregger’s Weapons is joy. It’s nostalgia without an obvious antecedent, capturing the phenomena of “hiraeth” for a sensibility raised on weird pulp and Halloween. If nostalgia is the last deposit with cultural veins still rich enough to mine, this is the way to do it. Weapons is the best Ray Bradbury adaptation there has ever been; while it’s not actually based on any of his stuff, one could argue it shares roots with 1962’s “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”, 1948’s “The October Game”, and 1952’s “April Witch”. There are infernal images here snatched from modern sources as well. In its general (sub)urban chaos scene, it rivals the incomparable opening 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead reboot. In its after-hours-in-familiar-places dread, it mirrors Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot and the indelible midnight classroom set-piece from Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. But the engine driving it, that coalesces these tantalizingly familiar bits and pieces into a toothsome meal, is the same thing that animates Stephen King’s work: a clever and nimble manipulation of the uncanny. Comedians (Cregger co-founded the comedy troupe “The Whitest Kids U’Know”), the good ones, boast that same gift for inserting the absurd into the mundane. The line between horror and laughter is so slight, there almost isn’t one. In Weapons, it’s the clown where your wife should be, dinner guests who don’t ever speak and refuse to leave, the obvious witch showing up for a parent/teacher conference. Terrifying in the moment, but funny…should you survive. Weapons made me feel like I was a seventh grader ripping through It over a long weekend in the fall of 1986 again. As with most things made only for me, I suspect it has delights for everybody.

I felt that way about the first hour of Cregger’s debut feature Barbarian, too: joy, delight. Right up to the point where it stopped being fun and tried to take on an issue–the “Me Too” movement–it wasn’t up to tackling with delicacy and complexity. Weapons, however, never becomes didactic. It opens like a John Wyndham novel with an inexplicable event: 17 elementary-age children from the same class of 18 vanish one night, running off into the woods a few minutes shy of the witching hour (2:17, to be precise), never to be seen again. Since the odd kid out, the quiet and withdrawn Alex (Cary Christopher), has no insight into their disappearance to offer either Principal Miller (Benedict Wong) or Officer Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), blame falls on their teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), whose reputation for caring deeply about her students already invites suspicion in an increasingly unempathetic world. A reasonable person might leave the community that’s turned violently against them, but Justine refuses out of a stubborn sense of righteousness. Garner’s great as a brittle person who’s good with her students, maybe because they’re the only ones she can really relate to. There’s something bitter and arrested about her. I never thought she was guilty and assumed that she owed her apparent alcoholism to proximate events, not true addiction, yet I can see why people don’t like her. The willingness to position an ambiguous character as the hero already sets Weapons apart from most mainstream fare, though Creggar divides the narrative into several chapters that each focus on a different character in the aftermath of the event: Justine; grieving dad Archer (Josh Brolin); Principal Miller; wastoid drifter James (Austin Abrams); and total idiot Officer Morgan.

Although the MacGuffin in Weapons is the enigma of the children’s disappearance, the real mystery the film seeks to resolve is not dissimilar to that of Ari Aster’s open query of a movie, Eddington: How can we come back together now that we’ve been torn apart? The two films see us as destroyed by conspiracy theories and misinformation, by paranoia that comes from the wholesale erosion of shared, solid, objective common ground. We are cut loose, maddened by fear. Lifeguards are trained to wait until we stop thrashing before attempting a rescue, but what if we don’t stop thrashing until we’ve killed each other or drawn the attention of sharks? A town-hall meeting in the school auditorium, all of folding chairs and coffee in paper cups, descends into shouted invective and finger-pointing at the hippie-dippie single woman who sometimes hugs her students if they cry. Archer demands that Justine tell everyone what she was teaching in her class that caused (almost) every one of their kids to run away from home. You can read this as a culture-war metaphor–and in this climate, it’s impossible not to–but rather than merely reflect what is, as Aster’s film does, Weapons (its title a clue as to how our children have become ammunition in political battles) provides a hypothetical: What if, it wonders, the enemy is something other than your neighbour or the doctors or the scientists or the teachers?

The individual episodes could be seen as approaching this notion from different angles. What if the answer isn’t to ignore it or “math the fuck out of it?” What if the answer isn’t traditional institutions–the school board, teachers, counsellors, parents, and especially cops–that repeatedly show their tolerances aren’t the equal of the strain we’re now putting on them? What if the answer is that we don’t know our children and take them for granted, traumatize them until our refusal to keep them safe from the consequences of our greed and surrender has leeched them of any recognizable humanity? Justine’s social isolation reminds me a lot of Melanie Daniels’s ostracization in Hitchcock’s The Birds, where an entire small town turns against the blonde lady for possibly influencing the peculiar behaviour of the title creatures. There are elements of truth in these accusations, I think: Both are strong, idiosyncratic women being punished for forcing themselves into acceptable roles. Officer Morgan’s manic focus on trying to put the town’s one homeless person in jail while children go/remain missing is painfully savage satire, while Archer’s aggressive, do-it-yourself vigilantism goes a long way towards explaining the kind of authoritarian mindset that eschews social safety nets. In other words, Cregger does everything Aster tries to do without being a dick about it. You could read Weapons as the whipsmart social satire it is, or you could simply see it as a product of a time where the only way to save us is to remember that we owe it to our children not to burn the planet to a cinder.

There’s a lot of humour in Weapons, too, most of it stemming from how people like Principal Miller desperately try to behave normally in the face of escalating absurdity. By himself, Miller is the metaphor for our hypernormalization disorder, and the boggle-eyed incomprehension with which he ends his segment is a mirror held up to everyone watching the film. When poor Alex’s dotty aunt Gladys (an unrecognizable Amy Madigan) shows up as the boy’s guardian and Miller treats it like there’s nothing weird about this sideshow of a human being sitting in his office, it’s a brilliant send-up of our current mandate to pretend as though the Joker cult terrorizing our country is just reg’lar folk with ordinary beliefs conducting business as usual. Cregger is also great at mood, and I don’t think that’s unrelated: he seems to see atmosphere as setting up a punchline, a magician doing the long and necessary buildup to the prestige. He loves pans and tracking shots, slow dollies down empty hallways and POVs of people peeping into the windows of houses that are boarded up but shouldn’t be. Look to the midnight-blue opening sequence, where the kids flee their homes to the accompaniment of George Harrison’s lilting, heartbroken, battle-already-lost “Beware of Darkness,” a warning against con men and false prophets that has remained evergreen, for the first hint of what Weapons is all about. Then look to the closing sequence for the bookend and answer to this opening rapture, which reminded me of so many great ’70s exploitation classics that allow for an eruption of meaningful, earned, violent catharsis à la Brian De Palma’s The Fury. Kids should be carefree, not slaughtered in their homes by American munitions or torn to pieces in their classrooms by military arms. Why do we allow it? How do we continue as though everything were sane? What if we stepped aside and agreed to let the children be our Hague? Our judges, juries, and executioners? When they slip that noose around my neck, I won’t protest. I mean, what could I even say?