Zach Cregger’s Eerie and Funny Horror Mystery

Focusing on the aftermath of the mysterious disappearance of 17 children from the same third-grade class, comic turned horror auteur Zach Cregger’s Weapons has the same blend of horror and comedy that made the filmmaker’s Barbarian such a breakout success. Here, Cregger mines even more frightful suspense out of dark spaces and the supernaturally deteriorating bodies that linger within them. But for every moment of electrifying horror, the Whitest Kids U’ Know alum cleanses the palette with equivalent comic relief.

At times, this balancing act proves volatile: Early on, the film uses one too many fake-out jump scares in which the characters are revealed to be dreaming or hallucinating, and the climax reaches a breaking point where the comedy undercuts any remaining tension. But, by and large, Cregger gets the alchemy right, and the film’s tonal shifts go down easy.

Like Barbarian, Weapons also employs a chaptered structure. We initially follow Julia Garner’s Justine, the teacher of the missing children and prime suspect in their disappearance, before title cards sequentially usher us into five other concerned townsfolks’ perspectives of the events. Most prominent among them are Josh Brolin’s Archer, a mourning father, and Alden Ehrenreich’s Paul, a deputy largely indifferent to the disappearances.

While he’s cited Magnolia as a reference for the film’s ensemble nature (it’s an influence also felt in Ehrenreich’s turn as an incompetent mustachioed cop), Cregger has crafted a tighter and more low-key film, albeit a more disjointed one. Through the separation of chapters, the characters feel siphoned off in their own worlds, suggesting random people who happen to be at the wrong places at the wrong times during the seemingly supernatural goings-on.

Which isn’t to say that Cregger’s character work is lacking, because he presents an array of grounded and flawed characters. We see surface-level but realistic manifestations of Justine’s alcoholism and otherwise troublesome behavior, and only later do we learn that this is only the tip of the iceberg of her personal problems. What we don’t see goes a long way in Weapons. The same less-is-more approach to characterization also applies to Paul, who finds himself in the middle of a marital spat we only witness the basic latticework of. Even Whitmer Thomas, who plays the father of the only student who doesn’t go missing, injects a sobering melancholy into an otherwise chipper character with only a few minutes of screen time.

What’s refreshing about Cregger’s work is the extent to which he invokes social issues like gentrification, sexual assault, and, in the case of Weapons, school shootings without eclipsing his narrative concerns. Against the backdrop of a community mourning the loss of several children in a classroom setting, we get a psychedelic dream sequence in which Archer hallucinates a giant AR-15. If you read the film as reclaiming the lives of children killed in school shootings and rendering them seeking revenge on their aggressor, the climax may be in poor taste, but Cregger knows when to take his foot off the gas. By that point, the fantasy logic becomes too convoluted to ascribe to any real-world analog, and Cregger is happy to steer us toward a gleeful display of limb-ripping and gut-popping carnage.