Weapons

Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” works from a simple yet bone-chilling pitch and then goes bonkers with it. The film starts with a chilling image of 17 children who got out of bed at 2:17 a.m. and ran into the night, sparking a tragedy that tears a neighborhood apart, revealing the rage and horror behind the picket fences. Instead of simply investigating the incident, the town weaponizes its hatred towards a teacher, Justine Gandy, labeling her a witch. The narrative is divided into character-driven chapters, allowing competing narratives and hidden secrets to intertwine, amplifying how a divided response to tragedy can lead to greater trauma. The film is both hilarious and chilling, providing a rollercoaster of emotion that captures the anger bubbling under the surface of society in 2025.

It is a masterful balancing of tones, too. This is a serious film, with allusions to school shootings, police brutality, alcoholism, drug addiction and grief, though handled more gently and thoughtfully than Barbarian’s timely themes. It is an effectively scary one when it wants to be, too, including a handful of violent moments that will have you squirming (Weapons sees Evil Dead Rise’s cheese grater and raises it a vegetable peeler). And yet somehow it is also very funny, with flashes of disarming gallows humour (spot the copy of Willow on DVD), an unexpectedly camp antagonist, and an astonishing, cathartic, outrageously well-staged finale, where all the tension of the previous two hours finally boils over, a climax which ought to have audiences standing up and cheering in the aisles. The entire film, in fact, is something that shouldn’t work, but does.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons is joy. It’s nostalgia without an obvious antecedent, capturing the phenomena of “hiraeth” for a sensibility raised on weird pulp and Halloween. If nostalgia is the last deposit with cultural veins still rich enough to mine, this is the way to do it. Weapons is the best Ray Bradbury adaptation there has ever been; while it’s not actually based on any of his stuff, one could argue it shares roots with 1962’s “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”, 1948’s “The October Game”, and 1952’s “April Witch”. There are infernal images here snatched from modern sources as well. In its general (sub)urban chaos scene, it rivals the incomparable opening 10 minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead reboot. In its after-hours-in-familiar-places dread, it mirrors Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot and the indelible midnight classroom set-piece from Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. But the engine driving it, that coalesces these tantalizingly familiar bits and pieces into a toothsome meal, is the same thing that animates Stephen King’s work: a clever and nimble manipulation of the uncanny. Comedians (Cregger co-founded the comedy troupe “The Whitest Kids U’Know”), the good ones, boast that same gift for inserting the absurd into the mundane. The line between horror and laughter is so slight, there almost isn’t one. In Weapons, it’s the clown where your wife should be, dinner guests who don’t ever speak and refuse to leave, the obvious witch showing up for a parent/teacher conference. Terrifying in the moment, but funny…should you survive. Weapons made me feel like I was a seventh grader ripping through It over a long weekend in the fall of 1986 again. As with most things made only for me, I suspect it has delights for everybody.