‘Weapons’ review: Six characters reveal bloody slices of the truth

The rise of evil is more believable than its defeat. Implausible horror movies ask you to buy that a curse can be broken, a killer bested, nightmares tidied into a neat resolution. But filmmaker Zach Cregger enjoys making a mess. His buzzy breakout, 2022’s “Barbarian,” tangled several narratives in one basement, jolting audiences with a bold tone shift and a conclusion that darted away before we could ask questions. “Weapons” is an even grander statement of disorder-by-design. A compellingly sloppy tale, it splices together a half-dozen protagonists and no heroes — these six spiraling victims never grasp the full story behind the violence.

An unnamed little girl narrator claims this is a true crime kept secret, as the locals are ashamed they can’t explain a thing. Sure, sure. The setup alone seizes our attention. A classroom of third graders has vanished in the middle of the night, each child running headlong into the shadows with their limbs outstretched like paper planes. In an eerie montage, editor Joe Murphy shows us the goodbye sprint of all 17 kids — we understand the scale of the town’s tragedy even though only two of them get names. When the story picks up a month later, none of the lost children have come home.

What’s going on? And why was one child, Alex, played with solemnity by Cary Christopher, left behind? Cregger has said that he started writing the script before he knew the answer, and the plotting shares that sense of discovery. The main characters’ tales aren’t manipulated by forced coincidences — they simply overlap. Each section fills out the fuller picture as though Cregger is layering transparencies on top of an overhead projector.

The first segment follows the children’s teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), who is under harsh scrutiny at an assembly crowded with distraught parents who accuse her of being either negligent or complicit. Her most vocal critic, Archer (Josh Brolin), is the father of the class bully, now missing. Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) tries to protect Justine from the heckles (and her own bad decision-making) but the shouts of “lock her up” chase Justine straight to the liquor store, where cinematographer Larkin Seiple’s steady shot through the booze aisles tells us she’s beelined to the vodka many times before.

Justine’s opening section is the longest, and it showcases the film’s two key fixations: failure and people tip-toeing around peering through cracks. (There’s enough gliding hallway footage to fill several listings on Zillow.) Garner excels at pale, quiet girls like Justine who are all nervous energy and self-destruction. Several of the awful things that happen to her aren’t mystical at all. An aggressive confrontation with her ex-boyfriend’s wife (June Diane Raphael) is her own darned fault, and when she tries to do an ill-conceived stakeout, she gets drunk and falls asleep.

An ordinary script would put Justine at the center of the action so we can have fun watching her make one mistake after another until she magically saves the day. But she’s not up to the challenge, and Cregger has other characters to introduce. Half of them are less preoccupied by the mystery of the missing kids as they are with the drama of their own lives, from tension with their boss to a desperate need for cash.

There’s a police officer named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) and his main obsession, James (Austin Abrams), a junkie who is so caught up in getting his next fix that he lives in his own splinter comedy. It only ever seems to rain in his scenes, and when spooked, James dives into his tent head-first like a cartoon cat. Clownish Gladys (Amy Madigan, meddlesome and needy) rounds out the ensemble, sporting bright ’70s polyester leisure suits while adding a dash of Italian giallo melodramatics. She hints at what “Suspiria” would look like transported to the suburbs. The retro needle-drops by George Harrison and Percy Sledge give the film its own style, as does the fantastic main musical theme (by Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay and Cregger) that’s a harmony of harp, piano and rattling bones.

Horror fans have seen plenty of unlucky cops ring the right doorbell at the wrong time, only to get mercilessly dispatched. Knowing Paul’s name and his own problems doesn’t add that much to the overall storyline, but it does put a fun spin on clichéd beats, even if Cregger is too much of a prankster to want us to feel extra empathy for the guy. Elevating side characters to main characters means there’s too much going on for us to work up much empathy for anyone except Christopher’s abandoned boy. But it does give us a sense of the world as a place where the ordinary is fused to the outrageous, where normal life and normal houses and normal people can be suddenly, brutally destroyed.

Cregger is great with details. He gets a fantastic, audience-wide gasp just from the noise of a door opening off-screen. There’s as much pathos in the production design as there is in the people. One character, for reasons you’ll observe, wordlessly switches from soup cans that require them to use a can opener to ones with a pull tab. Nobody mentions the change, but when you spot it, it breaks your heart.

Here, as in “Barbarian,” Cregger understands the scary hush of a residential street and the perils of not knowing, or trusting, your neighbors. Part of the issue is that kindness has, in the community’s time of crisis, been deemed “inappropriate” — the word Principal Marcus uses when chastising Justine for driving a stranded kid home. (Later, however, his strict boundaries seem smart.) But it’s still a cold statement on inhumanity when Justine flees into a convenience store for safety, only for the clerk to order her back outside. The dialogue’s percussive f-bombs get a laugh and make the point that people in crisis can’t come up with a snappy comeback.

A former sketch comic, Cregger knows how to work a crowd. The combination of his assurance and his characters’ confusion is wonderful in the moment, as though you’re listening to a spiel from someone who sounds crazy but might be making all the sense in the world. (A scene just like that happens in the movie.)

The ending is strong and satisfying and leaves you discontented in all the right ways, even as “Weapons’” spell lifts after you leave the theater. Some of the ideas that felt significant in the darkness don’t stand up to daylight: the dream sequences, an image of a floating gun, the film’s own title — which doesn’t seem to go much further than Archer’s description of the children running like “heat-seeking missiles.” It’s particularly annoying that the end credits insist that the shape of a triangle is, for whatever reason, symbolically significant. Still, I like the idea that terrible questions don’t always get answers — and I hope Cregger keeps asking them.