Warning: This post contains spoilers for Weapons.
It’s 2:17 a.m. in Maybrook, Penn., and the parents of Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) first grade class do not know where their children are. Neither do the police, nor the Ring cameras affixed to the facades on several neighborhood homes, though at least the latter capture footage of kids bounding through their front doors, arms splayed like wings, into early morning’s opaque embrace. No other evidence, nary a clue or a hint, of the little ones’ whereabouts or motives is left in their wake. One moment, they’re sound asleep in their beds; the next, gone without a trace or a reason.
Weapons, the sophomore film from Barbarian director Zach Cregger, opens amid the fallout of this awful mass disappearance. The community’s response is intense: panicked and bereaved mothers and fathers turn on Justine, indirectly a victim herself; misguided outrage blinds them to the real menace operating unimpeded in their midst. Cregger deliberately opens his audience’s eyes over the movie’s two hours, allowing them an omniscient view of events unfolding as individual characters experience the plot like gameshow contestants sticking their hands into the same mystery box: it’s a mouse; no, it’s a chinchilla; no, it’s a tarantula.
It’s actually not at all what we come to expect. Cregger constructs a monster that shares DNA (and a fashion sense) with Pennywise the Dancing Clown from Andy Muschietti’s two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s It, but a very different modus operandi; around that monster, he spins a tale that fits right into horror cinema’s broader child-centered niche, where kids punish their parents and subsidiary grownups, or are used to punish them, or are otherwise prey for an eldritch predator the adults are nigh helpless to stop.
What compels movies like these varies, but typically is rooted in children’s…
