Yesterday, I went to the Alamo Drafthouse in Manhattan with a friend to see Weapons, a 2025 horror/mystery film written and directed by Zach Cregger, who also directed Barbarian (2022) and was a part of the Canadian comedy troupe The Whitest Kids You Know. The film is told in vignettes from different characters' perspective in a nonlinear narrative, allowing the audience to get pieces of the story from different angles and to uncover the mystery with the final narrative.
The story is initially narrated by an unnamed child, talking about an incident two years prior in the town of Maybrook, PA, where seventeen children from Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)'s elementary school classroom all inexplicably ran away from their homes at the same time at 2:17 AM, and went missing, and only one student, Alex (Cary Christopher) remained in her classroom the next day.
The missing kids cause panic with their distraught parents, as a month has passed by with no sign of the kids, and though a police investigation cleared Justine of any foul play, the parents, led by Archer (Josh Brolin) as their representative, blame her, thinking she's withholding information and wondering why it was only her class that disappeared. Someone defaces her car with "WITCH" written in red paint, she gets threatening phone calls, and people ring her doorbell or pound on the door to scare her. Justine is a vulnerable person with a messy personal life, like a history of alcoholism, seduces her ex-boyfriend Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), and is chastised by her principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) about her past history with getting too close to students and crossing boundaries, urging her to stay away from Alex and not to bother him about the trauma they're going through.
Justine keeps investigating on her own, sneaking around Alex's house, which has newspapers covering the windows, and knows that something weird is happening there, but can't get anyone to take her seriously. Then, when the narrative shifts, it goes to Archer, who has been sleeping in his son Matthew's bed, having nightmares about him being missing, and is obsessed with analyzing the Ring camera video of Matthew running away, and pressing another couple of a missing classmate to see their Ring camera video, and trying to connect the dots of where the children were running to. The narrative shifts to Paul and his complicated personal life, as well as starting out like a nice guy but being an awful cop with a short temper, who clearly has a history of bad behavior according to the police chief (Toby Huss), and to James (Austin Abrams), a homeless drug addict and burglar who is a scummy person, but also figures out the potential whereabouts of the children but can't get anyone to take him seriously because of his criminal background.
The story switches through narratives until the final one focuses on Alex, and unveils the mystery, and I didn't like that the story, which had been an interesting mystery and character study of several people, with illusions to real-life tragedies like the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting (the missing children, PTSD of the parents, and trauma of the suburban town reflected a lot of the feelings and experiences after the tragedy), it went more into a cliche of a villain that felt based in sexist and ageist stereotypes. It felt like trying to be "scary" in a stereotypical way, and the reveal felt like it came from a fairy-tale setting that didn't really fit in with the realism of the rest of the story, and I didn't get why the villain was the way they were, aside from saying "they're just evil." The performer as the character was very good, but I didn't really like the direction that felt more like the movie was trying to put in a more typical horror third act that didn't really work for me. Although the finale did some hilarious moments of slapstick violence that did make me laugh, and culminates in some really insane imagery.
One of my favorite elements of the movie were POV shots that would track a character's path in a one take shot, like when Justine goes to the liquor store early on and the film follows her path from the parking lot through the store. Those scenes worked well in an immersive way that I really liked.
Julia Garner was great in this, in playing a schoolteacher with a complex history that made her relatable, and I especially liked Austin Abrams' performance as James, a guy who would be on the phone trying to get money out of his sister while talking about his new job, while trying car doors to see which one is open to rob. He took a dirtbag character and made him more sympathetic as a guy who figures out what may have happened to the children, and I thought he was a standout in the film.
This was a pretty good movie to watch, and I liked that the pre-show reel at Alamo Drafthouse had clips like a skit about the signature run from Naruto (as the children's running mimics that run with airplane arms), skits from The Whitest Kids You Know, old trailers of Children of the Damned, and offbeat clips of children performing in choirs and bands, like dressed in red while dancing to DMX's "Ruff Ryders Anthem" or singing about poop and butts and farts in Spanish. I'm glad that my friend and I saw it together, as we both like horror films, and discussed the film more afterwards.
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