Updated Sept. 9 at 10:34 a.m.
In Zach Creggar’s “Weapons,” 17 children in the same class disappear simultaneously one night. All run out of their homes at 2:17 a.m. for no apparent reason.
Only one student does not.
This intriguing premise is the beginning of Creggar’s second feature film, a well-crafted blend of a small-town mystery twisted into high-stakes horror.
In the opening sequence, narrated by an unnamed child in the style of a fairy tale, a montage of the children fleeing their homes set to George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” sets a melancholic tone.
The lyrics, a harbinger of things to come, read: “Beware of soft shoe shufflers / Dancing down the sidewalks / As each unconscious sufferer wanders aimlessly.”
As the children run down suburban sidewalks in the darkness, the “unconscious sufferer” lyric is prescient as the fear of the unknown and of a lack of control is at the heart of how “Weapons” evokes its slow-burn horror.
By switching between the subjective perspectives of various characters witnessing the same overlapping events Creggar puts us in positions of relative ignorance, puzzling out a solution to the plot’s riddles filtered through their eyes.
Through analyzing doorbell footage, one character discovers that all of the children fled from their distant homes in the same direction, converging at a single point like “homing missiles.”
Like the children, the paths of these diverging characters intertwine.
At the locus of these characters’ intersecting paths looms the threat of disappearing themselves. The more they come together to uncover the truth, the less safe they become.
Each of the protagonists is connected to the missing children in some way.
Of these, Justine is their teacher plagued by survivor’s guilt, Archer is the parent of a missing child obsessed with pinpointing his son’s location, and Alex is the last remaining student in Justine’s class.
As we inhabit these points of view, we gather more evidence and the fear of what’s hidden in the darkness transforms into terror as the fate of the children begins to come into focus.
Each character gathers several disjointed clues for us to piece together: a peculiar triangular arm pose struck by the missing children as they fled, a house with windows sheathed in newspapers, and a clownishly made-up old woman.
The visual language of “Weapons” likewise withholds information from the audience in tandem with the protagonists to leave the viewer active but disarmed.
The episodes of Justine, Archer, and Alex all begin with a shot of the back of each character’s head, a direct connection with the opening title sequence in which we see a match cut of the missing children framed similarly.
This reverse shot strips the characters of their identity but centers them, as if the camera itself is stalking and directing them. The use of people as tools in this way, stripped of their knowledge and autonomy, unsettles as the film asks the audience to contemplate what unknown force is in control.
“Weapons” is a must-see horror flick that you won’t want to miss while it’s still in theaters.
