<em>Weapons</em> Firmly Establishes Zach Cregger as a Modern Master of Horror

You can predict the breakdown of a community by how it treats the children. Cut off funding for after-school programs, take away lunches, pay teachers poverty wages, and expect a dwindling number of them to perform miracles. Yet we're baffled that one in five kids between three and seventeen years old are diagnosed with mental or emotional disorders. We proclaim guns are a God-given right in front of children whose friends were eviscerated by an AR-15 before gym class. Based on the way we guide younger generations, we're already in hell.

The collapse of a child's well-being and our inability as adults to understand how it happened is explored inn Weapons, a stunning and startling new work of horror from writer/director Zach Cregger. Shifting gears from his previous effort, the 2022 sensation Barbarian—a grotesque creature-feature mired in millennial malaise and #MeToo—Cregger's latest plunges into the underworld of suburban America, where manicured lawns obscure the secrets locked in the basement.

Like so many horror masters before him, the 44-year-old Cregger comfortably wields all the typical genre conventions with ease. He uses spooky houses, well-timed jump scares, and the intrusion of the otherworldly in our mundanity, to meditate on deeper societal ills we know solutions to—but hand off responsibility to higher powers that may not exist. (Or worse, aren't benevolent to begin with.) Cregger's efforts culminate in an intelligent study on youth not in revolt, but pawns subject to ancient and predatory forces. And yeah, it's scary as hell.

Julia Garner (right) stars in Weapons, playing a teacher whose entire classroom, save for one student, suddenly goes missing.

If there's a final girl in Weapons, it's grade school teacher Justine Gandy, played by a sharpened Julia Garner. Ms. Gandy's knit sweaters and blonde pixie bob betray her interior as a messy soul with jagged edges. Prone to sleeping with vodka and her married exes (Alden Ehrenreich), Gandy's serious dedication to her children bleeds into toxic territory, which raises flags with the school faculty—like Principal Marcus, played by a rock-solid Benedict Wong—and the community of parents, chiefly represented by gruff and grieving father of a missing son, Archer (Josh Brolin).

The nightmare haunting this sleepy town is a freak phenomenon involving Gandy's classroom. One month prior to the start of the story, everyone save for one student (child actor Cary Christopher, as wide-eyed Alex) walked out of their homes at 2:17 a.m., arms sloped straight down as they bolted towards a single direction. "They were never seen again," reads the tagline from the movie's poster.

The parents demand answers. The police are incapable of giving it to them. With pitchforks pointed at Ms. Gandy, who acts as if she's always holding car keys between her fingers out of frame, Cregger applies a Rashomon-esque story structure to this suburban sprawl of wi-fi doorbells and lite beer. Every major character has a perspective; none can see what troubles the children. It's only when we adopt the waist-high eyesight of a child, the aforementioned Alex, can we comprehend the horrors at work. Even then, what we see is downright impossible to believe.

Cregger's movie effortlessly see-saws between grown-up suspense and outrageous (and often hilarious) splatterpunk violence, fostering a cinematic experience that feels a touch more evolved than the shock-reliant Barbarian. This is not to say Weapons shows restraint. The bloodletting in Weapons is abundant, enough to make one curious how much its meager budget was allocated for mops and buckets. (It's also heavily loaded in the backend, when the movie has finished dancing around its central evil.) But compared to Barbarian, Weapons feels organically whole while the flash bang of Barbarian's abrupt plot twists does more for its appeal than its crafted storytelling.

Weapons is the buzzy follow-up to writer/director Zach Cregger’s previous movie, Barbarian.

As a professional critic, I'm in the rare position of being uncertain of the boundaries between giving spoilers and simple context. There's plenty I want to talk about, from the performances of certain actors to the eldritch horrors that are the root of the movie's terror. But to a fault, the lore of Weapons and its mysterious marketing campaign almost eclipses the payoff of Cregger's work. Almost. Weapons enters theaters with more buzz than a wasp nest; it was central to a fierce bidding war that has spawned its own urban legend. So the story goes, Jordan Peele reportedly fired his management after losing the rights to New Line. The validity of this feels less grave than the implications surrounding it: If one of the greatest living horror directors blew a gasket over it, then it must be that good. Turns out Weapons is that good, and good enough to make talking about art like ESPN talking heads feel gauche.

The spectacle of Weapons isn't which studio paid what amount of money for it, nor should it be. It's Cregger's masterful, yet graceful direction, along with calculated performances from its principal cast—including Austin Abrams, as a thief and junkie who comically steals most of act 2—that oughta give Weapons its rep as a killing machine that livens up an otherwise bummer summer for horror. Its thoughtful and metaphor-heavy exploration of toxic family relationships, domestic abuse, and our appalling ineptitude over caring for our children only compliment its gooey, gory fillings. The children are not all right, after all. Weapons supposes that what's scarier than fixing them is knowing we never will.