2 out of 5

Directed by: Zach Cregger

Uh… but why, though?

Not necessarily the symbolism in the movie – though some Why to that also, since director Zach Cregger expressed in interviews that he wasn’t always clear on the reason for the imagery, even though… yeah bro, you were – but more just down to the way Cregger decided to tell and visualize this particular tale: Why?

I enjoyed Cregger’s previous film, Barbarian, and dug the oddity of Weapons’ poster design enough to withhold from spoilers on the movie, understood this wasn’t really a horror film, and so set my expectations at an appropriately even keel. Now, in retrospect, the things I didn’t think held up from Barbarian are exacerbated here, but there’s no need to compare and contrast: while I bet Weapons played well in theaters, as there are some definite winning moments – Cregger is a solid visualist, with a good grasp of creepy scares – it is a very flawed movie.

The opening narration, and a somewhat passively voyeuristic camera, set up the movie’s pitch and tone: in a small town in Pennsylvania, 17 children disappeared at exactly the same time – 2:17 am – captured on ring cameras and the like, Naruto running out of their homes to an unknown destination. Adding to this oddity: all of the children were from the same third grade class, taught by Ms. Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), and excepting one child who remained – Alex (Cary Christopher). The police investigated to no avail; this children are just gone.

A title card tells us we’re going to be alongside Justine for part of the story, which picks up during a parent-teacher meeting, post the incident. Crimes from the crowd blame Justine, who tries to stammer out an apology but maintains she’s done nothing; she’s chased out to her car, and eventually suggested to take some time off by the school principal. Justine is quite reticent to do this, though, alternating nights of drinking with seeing how the investigation is going – maybe her cop ex-boyfriend, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) knows, or maybe he wants to hook up? – and also trying to talk with Alex, who shut himself up in a newspaper-over-the-windows home each day after returning from school.

When we cut to the next title card, Archer (Josh Brolin), one of the grieving parents, and see some crossover from Justine’s story, the precedent is set that Cregger will step through Weapons’ mysteries in this manner – from POV to POV, filling in the timeline and slowly moving it forward. Details from the previous vignette connect well, and Justine’s various addictive habits (to drinking; to calling up her ex) are mirrored in Archer’s obsessiveness with finding his son, and the conspiracy-tinged leads he pursues. In a dream sequence, Cregger takes a big stab at being Lynchian with an image Archer sees… but fails to connect that with the overall approach of the film. It is just an image, and one that reads rather plainly.

I’ll step away from the beat-by-beat summary because this moment is when the movie kind of sealed its deal for me. The initial fairy-tale like narration and drifting camera were great, and I’d maintain that Cregger is consistent with framing scenes effectively for creepiness, and knowing conceptually what’s scary, but once Justine’s story started, I kept having that niggling question with which I started: Why? Why are we going on particular diversions, and why in this sequence? There is such a thing as character building, of course, which I’m in favor of, and movies / shows can definitely spend time on “flavor” which isn’t necessarily adding to the story, but almost every aspect of the presentation kept buzzing that question, even the shot setups I’m more approving of. It’s all just very… performative, something I’ve found true of a lot of modern horror. (Setting aside that this is more like fantasy/horror than strict horror.)

Cregger gets good performances out of his leads, but… does he? Neither Garner nor Brolin are very transformative from their defaults in their roles; Christopher proves to have some solid chops but key scenes with his parents it felt like there was more to milk, emotionally, that felt un-milked due to Cregger’s style over the actor’s limitation. And that style wraps back around to the image in Archer’s dream: the performative aspect I mention is, in my mind, a kind of AI-built way of making movies. That is a lot meaner than I mean it, as Cregger is in no way lacking creativity, but I’m choosing a current buzzworthy way (it’s 2026) of describing this to make it more salient: take a template for a horror movie, prompt it with “I think it should be about X, Y, and Z and have these specific visuals…”, and then take the response and map it to an outline you wrote that has clear descriptions like “Character A is an alcoholic,” “Character B is a toxic male,” and so on, and you will absolutely approximate the movie you want. …From a somewhat particular design.

Now, of course, is that actually different from how a movie should be made? Setting aside the AI bit, couldn’t you extrapolate rough drafts and storyboards to what I’m talking about? Shouldn’t this stuff be planned with outlines and the like? Yes, but there’s a weird, somewhat stiff feeling to the “elevated” horror version of that that comes across as piecing together the movies in a way they “should” be done as opposed to what’s actually organic for the film. And because we’re several generation of so-and-so-inspired-so-and-so into film, I don’t really know how easy it is to get out of that pattern. (Though I’d guess some folks would argue that elevated horror is the out.)

Anyhow.

After Archer’s sequence, every character’s vignette after that drifts us further and further away from the story, except for some forced tangential events to put us back on track. The final scene has a great punchline, on the of Barbarian’s midway exclamation point. Its lead-in goes on a bit too long, I think, but I’m positive it had people going bananas in the theater, and that would’ve been fun.