Studio:   New Line Cinema
Director: Zach Cregger
Writer:   Zach Cregger
Producer: Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, J.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules
Stars:    Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, Toby Huss, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, Sara Paxton, Justin Long

Review Score:

Summary:

A macabre mystery unfolds in a quiet town when 17 schoolchildren inexplicably vanish during the night at exactly the same time.

Synopsis:

Schoolteacher Justine Gandy arrives at Maybrook Elementary one morning to find Alex Lilly is the only student present in her classroom. It is soon discovered that Justine’s other 17 students inexplicably ran out of their homes during the night at exactly 2:17am and disappeared into darkness. Police subsequently interview both Alex and Justine, but the case goes cold without any substantive clues, leads, or information.

JUSTINE

One month later, the school hosts a community meeting for concerned parents on the eve of the school reopening. During the contentious gathering, contractor Archer Graff, whose son Matthew is one of the missing children, angrily accuses Justine of not revealing everything she knows about the disappearances.

With the mob of parents growing restless, school administrator Marcus insists that Justine leave for her own safety. In addition to harassing phone calls and knocks at her door, Justine later finds that someone vandalized her car by painting the word “witch” on it, which she reports to the police.

Justine meets her friend Paul Morgan, a police officer, in a bar where the two of them discuss the missing children mystery. Upon learning he is supposedly on a break from his girlfriend Donna, Justine brings Paul home and they sleep together.

Despite Marcus’s insistence that she stay away from her former student, Justine follows Alex home. Justine becomes alarmed when she sees all the windows obscured by newspapers except for a small opening where she spies Alex’s parents sitting in silent darkness. Justine calls Marcus to express her concern over what she saw. Dismissive of Justine’s suspicions, Marcus reluctantly agrees to contact Alex’s parents for a welfare check.

Upset over his affair, Paul’s girlfriend Donna assaults Justine inside a liquor store. That evening, Justine has a nightmare of the missing children that includes a frightening vision of a strange woman later learned to be named Gladys.

Justine tries talking to Alex outside of his house when he walks home from school. Alex tells Justine to stop following him before running inside. Receiving no response to repeated knocks, Justine begins a long night of waiting in her car. After Justine falls asleep, Alex’s entranced mother comes outside and clandestinely cuts off a lock of Justine’s hair.

ARCHER

In a dream about the night his son Matthew disappeared, Archer Graff follows Matthew to a house where an assault rifle bearing a digital display with the number 217 appears in a stormy sky overhead. Archer wakes suddenly at a frightening vision of Gladys, the same woman Justine saw in her separate nightmare.

Inspired by a nearby transmission tower, Archer begins marking the locations of homes where children vanished on a map. From Ring camera footage provided by Gary and Erica Kramer, whose daughter Bailey disappeared, Archer sees a similarity with how his own Ring camera showed Matthew also running away with outstretched arms. The direction Bailey took further narrows down a possible destination.

Despite Captain Ed of the police disputing his suspicion that she is involved somehow, Archer continues hounding Justine by confronting her at a gas station. Archer and Justine are both shocked when her boss Marcus, whose face is bloodied with bulging eyes, suddenly attacks them both in a rage.

PAUL

Paul arrests James, a drug addict and petty thief, for an attempted break-in. Pricked by a syringe while conducting a search, Paul reactively punches James. Realizing his dashcam captured the assault, Paul lets James go with a stern warning.

Paul privately reports what happened to Captain Ed, who is also his girlfriend Donna’s father. Ed warns that the incident could come back to haunt Paul if James files a complaint.

Paul meets Justine at the bar and they go home together to have sex. When Donna learns Paul slept with Justine, she storms out of their house in a rage.

Paul becomes incensed when he sees James arriving at the police station for an unknown purpose. Paul begins chasing James into a nearby forest.

JAMES

After being released from his initial encounter with Paul, James breaks into Alex’s house to steal valuables. In addition to Alex’s entranced parents sitting motionless on their couch, James finds the 17 missing children in similarly entranced states in the basement. James races outside when the parents rise and move toward him.

James takes the items he stole to a pawnshop where he sees a flyer advertising a $50,000 reward for information about the missing children. James tries phoning in his tip, but he is told he needs to come to the police station in person, which triggers his second encounter with Paul.

In the woods, James becomes frightened by a vision of Gladys. Terrified, James instinctively stabs Paul in the face with several needles when the police officer catches up to him. To stop Paul from hastily firing at him with a shotgun, James promises he can show Paul where the missing children are.

With James locked in his patrol car’s backseat, Paul enters Alex’s house for an investigation. Hours later, Paul rushes outside in a maddened state and drags James inside the home.

MARCUS

Fulfilling his promise to Justine, Marcus summons Alex’s parents to the school for a welfare check, but he is instead met by Gladys, who identifies herself as Alex’s aunt while claiming Alex’s parents are too sick to meet with him themselves. Their awkward meeting concludes with Gladys secretly stealing one of Marcus’s academic award ribbons.

Gladys later shows up at Marcus’s house insistent on coming in. Marcus tries to refuse out of caution, but his sympathetic partner Terry welcomes her inside. In the kitchen, Gladys surprises both men by suddenly slicing her hand before cutting off a lock of Terry’s hair. Gladys quickly combines the hair and blood with a twig and Marcus’s ribbon in a water bowl. She then rings a bell that immediately entrances Marcus. Gladys uses the items to force Marcus to spew black bile before violently murdering Terry with head butts. Gladys entwines Justine’s hair with the twig next, which sends Marcus racing in Justine’s direction with outstretched arms.

After Marcus’s gas station attack, Justine manages to drive away with Marcus running after her car. Archer follows in his vehicle and witnesses Marcus getting run over and his head smashed by a passing car in a busy intersection.

Once the situation settles, Justine thanks Archer for defending her at the gas station. Identifying that Marcus was running like the kids in the Ring videos, Archer theorizes that the children were weaponized like heat-seeking missiles directed toward the same target. From Archer’s map, Justine points out Alex’s house as the central location.

ALEX

Alex is disappointed to learn his peculiar Aunt Gladys will be staying with his family while recovering from an illness. Alex’s concern turns to fright when Gladys puts his parents in catatonic trances. Gladys uses her twig to make Alex’s parents repeatedly stab their own faces with forks as a threat to make Alex promise he will not tell anyone about her or what is happening in the house. This begins a routine where Alex must feed his parents canned soup daily.

Alex later finds his aunt physically suffering. Gladys explains she thought Alex’s parents could heal her, but it isn’t working. Gladys promises if Alex can bring her something from each of his classmates at school, that may make her feel better and she will finally go back to her own home.

Alex steals a handmade nametag from each of his 17 classmates. At 2:17am, Gladys completes an occult ritual using the nametags, which causes the possessed kids to run toward Alex’s house.

Claiming Alex’s father Steven had a stroke, Gladys handles interviews with the police and school officials regarding the disappearances. Alex begins regularly feeding soup to the captive children in the basement like he does with his parents.

Alex comes home from school one day to find Paul entranced. Gladys tells Alex to pack his things in preparation for leaving town the next day.

Monitoring the house in secret from a vehicle outside, Justine and Archer see Paul briefly exit the front door before retuning inside in an apparent trance. Justine and Archer follow Paul into the house. When Justine inadvertently steps on a protective salt line, Paul and James suddenly attack them.

Upstairs, Alex disobeys Gladys by also stepping over a salt line. The action puts his parents in a state of rage, forcing Alex to barricade himself against their attack.

Justine eventually manages to pull Paul’s service weapon and shoot him with it. She then shoots James to rescue Archer.

While searching the basement for his missing son, Archer is attacked by Gladys. Gladys pulls off Archer’s necklace, which she then uses to entrance him into capturing Justine.

Alex uses Gladys’s hair in tandem with a twig to trigger the children into attacking his aunt. In enraged states, the children chase Gladys throughout the neighborhood, crashing through windows and creating chaos. The kids eventually swarm Gladys and violently tear apart her body.

As soon as Gladys dies, Archer returns to normal and releases Justine. While Archer follows the path of destruction in search of his son, Justine goes upstairs and finds Alex embracing his catatonic parents. Archer finds the children standing silently around Gladys’s body.

Despite being released from Gladys’s spell, Alex’s parents remain entranced and are institutionalized. Alex goes to live with a different aunt. The children also remain partially entranced, although some of them eventually begin talking again a year later.

Review:

Schoolteacher Justine Gandy thought it was weird when young Alex Lilly was the only one of her 18 students who showed up for class one morning. The situation grew even weirder when authorities soon learned why Alex was alone. At exactly 2:17am the night before, the other 17 children inexplicably left their homes, outstretched their arms, and ran into the darkness where they disappeared without a trace.

One month later, the police aren’t any closer to uncovering any clues. With Maybrook Elementary set to finally reopen, school administrators host a community meeting to calm frustrated parents. Unfortunately for Justine, all the angry mob wants to do is burn her with imaginary torches formed from accusations, suspicions, and demands for Justine to reveal whatever sinister secrets they are certain she must be hiding.

Once this foundation firms up, “Weapons” continues forward as an experiment in storytelling that’s more about the telling than it is about the story. Unfolding in a nonlinear pattern whose chronology comes together gradually, the movie divides itself into dedicated chapters delineated by six unique character arcs: Justine; Archer, Justine’s loudest detractor and the father of a missing child; Paul, a police officer who’s also Justine’s part-time fling; local burnout and petty burglar James; Justine’s boss and school principal Marcus; and finally Alex, the quiet boy who somehow avoided whatever fate befell his classmates.

For having a plot whose pathway is obscured by so many unknowns, “Weapons” isn’t as driven by its mystery as one might presume. The case of the missing kids functions more as an inciting incident for quiet character studies until the focus finally flips into intensified action that ties together these initially separate threads with increasing clarity. As “Weapons” molts the feathers of psychological suspense to become a pseudo-tour through a saddened section of an ordinary neighborhood, a viewer’s thoughts center less on the how and why of what happened and more on the everyday lives that intersect, sometimes tangentially, because of the unsolved tragedy.

It's here where opinions will diverge as some may feel moderately misled by the movie’s apparent promise of chilling suburban horror along the lines of writer/director Zach Cregger’s previous feature, “Barbarian” (review here). “Weapons” has its share of graphic shocks, to be sure. But its broader interest lies in examining the people involved, even if their involvement doesn’t play any critical role in primary proceedings.

During one such sequence that’s heavier on unnecessary development than on delivering drama, Archer’s hunch about where the children might have gone takes him to a neighbor’s house. There, the mother of another missing child declines Archer’s request to review Ring camera footage of her daughter’s disappearance despite Archer being in a similar situation. Undeterred, Archer sits in his car outside until the woman’s husband, Gary, comes home. Archer’s ambush results in Gary almost immediately inviting Archer inside to watch the video while his wife stands in a doorway with her disapproving arms crossed. From the footage, Archer observes similarities between their two missing children’s behavior. Gary and his wife are then never seen again, leaving one to reasonably wonder why the movie needed this many minutes just to point Archer’s armchair investigation toward a new direction.

“Weapons” makes an odd habit out of inessential interactions. Toby Huss is a terrific character actor who can now add “underused” to “overlooked” as a descriptive adjective. Huss plays a police captain whose daughter Donna is dating Paul, the police officer having an affair with Justine. He’s also responsible for routinely dismissing Archer’s demands for updates with boilerplate bureaucracy designed to assure the grieving father that the police are “doing all they can do.”

Looking back on him, however, Huss’s role doesn’t directly impact the main narrative. From what we learn of his connections to Archer, Paul, and Donna, it isn’t even clear if his part plays into possible themes the others come into contact with, such as complacent domestic partnerships, distractions from depression, or lying to loved ones.

Ambiguous or conflicting purposes between various elements stop “Weapons” from being the fully realized, multilayered experience some may misread it to be. During a nightmare sequence where a massive assault rifle bearing the number 217 appears in a lightning-streaked sky, the thought occurs that “Weapons” might be leading into commentary likening Maybrook’s missing children to the uniquely American epidemic of school shootings. With the school seeming at least somewhat concerned with protecting their staff from any culpability and the police depicted as being entirely useless, there are at least hints of systemic failures having a hand in ensuring the current problem won’t be solved soon without genuinely worried rogues like Justine and Archer taking matters into their own hands.

Maybe a moral message along those lines lurks deeper in the details, but academic-minded determination would be required to find a distinct parallel definitively linking “Weapons” to something like the guns-in-schools issue. Because once the movie moves from cerebral dread to tangible explanations, the ultimate reveal and accompanying spikes of tone-tearing comedy can make everything that came before feel like a whole lot of hullaballoo, arguably leading to only a quick trick whose reduced substance makes it retroactively appear like not every minute in the two-hour runtime was entirely purposeful.

Which isn’t to say those two hours aren’t engaging. They are. They just have trouble continuing to feel fulfilling once the complete picture fills in.

At a minimum, “Weapons” takes some turns and makes clever choices that combine for creative cinema. On a technical level, the camera tries a couple of subtle moves that hold a viewer’s attention even in instances when onscreen action might momentarily stall. One prime piece of blocking occurs when Donna angrily struts after Justine in a liquor store, and the camera dizzyingly sways with each turn down an aisle as one woman swings to one side and one swings out of frame toward the other. Equally imaginative in understated simplicity, there’s a great upward-turned shot of Justine trying to talk to Alex that puts the spray-painted word “witch” behind her when she and the camera tilt down to the boy’s lower level.

“Weapons” works its way from a cryptic trail of slowly dropped breadcrumbs into a chaotic climax, though the winding path taken there hits a fork in the road where different tastes will find varying values in the movie. The overall experience should still be satisfying, either as atmospheric immersion, an acting showcase, or for sudden hits of explosive horror. Although if that last item is what one wants most, be advised that the ratio of creeps and cringes to conversations and excisable activities isn’t balanced evenly throughout the course of what can at times be an overdesigned film.

Review Score: 65