An enduring image from the new movie Weapons comes early: The sight of elementary school students running out of their homes and onto the suburban grass, moving like flying birds with their arms out, to a song by George Harrison.
Except this is happening at night — at 2:17 a.m., to be precise — and there’s no glee from the kids. Just running. And the Harrison song being played isn’t the cheerful “Here Comes the Sun.” It’s “Beware the Darkness.” Welcome back to another outing by director-writer Zach Cregger, a modern thriller master.
Weapons is his sophomore effort and it’s more ambitious than his first, Barbarian. It’s told in chapters from the perspective of various interweaving characters — like a horror version of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — and explores the ripple effects from a tragic event. But it often lags and slackens on its way to a gruesome end, with a reliance on sorcery that seems like a cop-out.
“This is a true story,” says a child narrator at the start of the movie, only for that technique to disappear shortly afterward. “A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways.” Indeed: There’s some fork stabbings, an assault with a vegetable peeler and one victim takes so many headbutts that his skull caves in.
The event at the movie’s heart is the disappearance of 17 third-graders from a single class in the middle of the night in the leafy town of Maybrook, Illinois. Ring cameras catch them opening their front doors and rushing out, not to be seen again. Only one child from the class showed up the next day at school.
