Deep into the end credits of Weapons, the latest horror movie from Barbarian writer-director Zach Cregger, the filmmakers thank Seven director David Fincher. Whatever connection was forged between Fincher and Cregger feels appropriate to the movie: Though Weapons is entirely fictional, its premise feels like a fairy tale inspired by the unknowable nature of Fincher’s true-crime serial-killer epic Zodiac.
At 2:17 a.m., 17 children from the same third-grade class rise from their beds and run into the night, each with the same eerie arms-out sprint, like they’re all pretending to be airplanes. This is all recapped by an unseen child narrator, who further explains how in the aftermath of this unimaginable, unnerving tragedy, many eyes have turned to Alex (Cary Christopher), the only child in the class who didn’t disappear and especially to Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher who claims to be as baffled and terrified as the kids’ angry parents. Unlike the hauntingly open-ended Zodiac, and perhaps more in line with Fincher’s dark but more conventional Seven (whose screenwriter, Andrew Kevin Walker, is also listed in the special-thanks roll), Cregger does provide a satisfying resolution to this story. That’s the greatest strength and weakness of this horror movie, rolled into one.
In the run up to the film’s release, Cregger cited a non-Fincher film from the ’90s as an influence: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. Comparing this well-populated 128-minute movie to Anderson’s open-hearted three-hour epic might send expectations in the wrong direction, but then, Cregger’s signature move is making horror films that are difficult to pin down to an obvious subgenre. In Barbarian, he executes several ground-shifting directional changes, from uneasy stranger danger to satire to creepy-basement monsters. Weapons builds out its world more traditionally, starting with Justine’s point of view as the story introduces additional characters, like Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the particularly determined and irate father of one of the missing kids; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local cop with a personal connection to Justine; and James (Austin Abrams), a drug-addicted thief who crosses paths with both Paul and Alex. Then Cregger doubles back and revisits these people from their own vantages, revealing more about this eerie mystery.
Anything more about how they link up would spoil Cregger’s deft weaving together of the story threads. Suffice to say that Garner is particularly compelling as a young woman who appears to care deeply about her students and has been left unmoored by their absence, yet has just enough small-scale skeletons in her closet to arouse local suspicion. Like everyone else in the movie, she seems spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with this kind of loss. When Archer angrily demands to know what exactly has been “going on” in Justine’s classroom, the movie taps into a rich vein of 2020s paranoia, and the ways some vengeful parents have become suspicious of any activity they can’t personally approve themselves.
Weapons doesn’t sync too readily into easy-to-track contemporary metaphors, even as the movie’s basic premise of a vanished class of kids obviously evokes the horrors of school shootings. For all the parental anxiety it touches on, most of the major characters do not have children of their own, and they often function more like jigsaw pieces in the movie’s plot than like fully fleshed-out individuals. This means that the resemblance to Magnolia is largely cosmetic. (Almost literally: Ehrenreich sports a mustache reportedly inspired by John C. Reilly’s cop character in that film.) But the actors and Cregger are able to suggest unexplored dimensions of the characters’ lives in these largely on-task scenes that may only seem like tangents.
A little more tangential material might have even been welcome. But it’s also a relief that Cregger is too savvy a genre craftsman to sink into a metaphorror morass. Weapons has eerie imagery, a doomy mood, and mercilessly effective jump scares: The atmosphere incorporates elements from horror movies as blockbuster-familiar as It and niche-appealing as It Follows. Working with the talented cinematographer Larkin Seiple, Cregger does an uncommonly good job at depicting the dead of night, both physically and spiritually, without succumbing to indecipherable grayness. Maybe it’s because his daylight images, while still not sunshine-y bright, have an autumnal clarity, and the more action-oriented sequences are cut so precisely to maintain the film’s momentum.
The questions with an elaborate mystery are always whether that narrative momentum can be sustained, and whether the journey is ultimately worthwhile. On the most elemental level, Weapons pays off big time. Once its grand finale falls into place, it feels both inevitable and delightfully fresh, perfectly timed to refute (or at least drown out) any mutterings of “That’s it?” Yet as the horror-movie high wears off, there are some lingering questions about why, precisely, this story required a multiple-POV ensemble approach.
To be clear, the formal ingenuity this decision introduces is more than enough to justify it. Weapons is masterfully entertaining and far more ambitious than Barbarian, and it feels more personal in the abstract. It more closely resembles a collage of nightmares than the expertly calibrated rollercoaster ride of Cregger’s previous film. But there’s something elusive about Weapons, too, meaning that — to stick with Fincher comparisons — the movie lands somewhere between Seven’s blunt-force didacticism and Zodiac’s sophisticated ghostliness. That unsettled quality often works to the movie’s advantage, expanding its scariness beyond the beginning, middle, and end of the story at hand. The uneasy feelings roiling beneath that crowd-pleasing horror craftsmanship, however, sometimes feel more suppressed than expertly buried.
Weapons opens in theaters on Aug. 8.