AND THEY NEVER CAME BACK.
We deal with grief and pain in different ways. One of the best paths to healing, at least for a creative person, is writing. Taking real-life horrors and letting them become part of a story is therapy. When Zach Cregger was working on postproduction of his first horror movie, Barbarian (2022), his best friend Trevor Moore (whom he also had worked closely with on movies and TV shows) died in an accident. A devastated Cregger turned to writing. He came up with a mystery and challenged himself to solve it. He was afraid that the audience wouldn’t want to see another movie that used horror as a metaphor for grief… but, fortunately, he turned out to be very wrong.
17 missing children
The mystery that Cregger created was a scenario where a whole classroom of children, except one, suddenly disappear. What happened to them, and why? The 17 kids got up in the middle of the night and ran out of their homes, arms stretched out as if they were wings. Some of them were caught on security cameras, but there’s no other trace of the children.
A month later, the small Pennsylvania town where this eerie incident happened is still in shock. And shock turns to anger, as some of the parents begin to question why one kid was left behind and what exactly was going on in that classroom prior to the disappearances. Is the teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), to blame?
Switching perspectives
Presented in nonlinear fashion, switching between several characters’ perspective, the film entertains and shocks all the way to its gruesome end. Cregger cleverly builds suspense and dread, but also incorporates a lot of humor into his mystery. Some may complain that its solution becomes apparent a little too soon, but I was too riveted to mind.
The characters (and the cast) are strong enough to carry their own narratives, including Justine and Archer (Josh Brolin), one of the parents, who start investigating on their own and subsequently collaborate as they come closer to figuring it out; Marcus (Benedict Wong), the principal who supports Justine in the crisis; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local cop who makes a few bad decisions that day; and James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict and thief who stumbles into the heart of the mystery. James is in fact a surprisingly lovable (and funny) character… and then there’s aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), an exceptionally strange woman who is related to Alex (Cary Christopher), the only kid in Justine’s class who didn’t disappear that night. Madigan gives one of the most arresting performances of her career, charismatic and intimidating.
The film has its traditional scares and goes for the throat in a wild climax.
When it comes to the horror, the film has its traditional scares and goes for the throat in a wild climax. All of that is effective, but the film also aims higher. There’s an odd dream sequence where Archer gets up in the middle of the night and follows his son as he runs out of the house, only to have a vision of a huge assault weapon floating in the night sky. That’s open for interpretation, of course. Cregger has stated that he isn’t sure himself of its meaning, but it’s hard not to see his own feelings of grief and loss, combined with the theme of anger and sorrow among parents who miss their children, as part of a symbol. There’s no school shooting in the movie, but the emotions surrounding an event like that suffuse the story.
Cregger’s script started a bidding war among studios and Weapons became a box-office hit. There has been talk of a sequel, and Cregger has an idea for it. But it’s nice to see an original story attract audiences at a time when sequels and franchises dominate.
Weapons 2025-U.S. 128 min. Color. Widescreen. Written and directed by Zach Cregger. Cast: Josh Brolin (Archer Graff), Julia Garner (Justine Gandy), Alden Ehrenreich (Paul Morgan), Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, Justin Long.
Trivia: Co-produced by Cregger. Pedro Pascal, Renate Reinsve and Brian Tyree Henry were first cast in the film.
Last word: “I started typing; I had no idea what the story was going to be. I literally went line by line. This is a true story. What is it? This teacher came to school and none of the kids were there. Okay, why? Yeah, they all ran away the night before. Okay, where’d they go? Nobody knows. Stephen King has that amazing metaphor where he’s like, ‘You need to be a paleontologist, and you’re unearthing the dinosaur one bone at a time, but you don’t know what the dinosaur is.’ That’s a beautiful way to create for me. Remove result from the process and just be discovery.” (Cregger, The Hollywood Reporter)