‘Weapons’ is a fright-night delight from a promising director

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Even greater than the pleasure that accompanies the emergence of a new talent is the pleasure of seeing that talent confirmed. With “Weapons,” an almost absurdly enjoyable nerve-shredding night at the movies, the writer-director Zach Cregger vaults into the esteemed company of modern horror maestros like Ari Aster (“Hereditary,” “Midsommar”), Robert Eggers (“The Lighthouse,” “Nosferatu”) and Jordan Peele (“Get Out,” “Nope”).

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Where those directors can have ambitions and/or pretensions toward art, Cregger simply (and not so simply) prefers to toy with audiences in ways that keep them off guard while letting them play along. Hitchcock did the same, and none better, but Cregger is an apt pupil. So where the director’s 2022 breakthrough “Barbarian” appeared to be telling one story before taking a hard left turn into something far darker and weirder, “Weapons” slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

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The movie opens with a skin-prickling hush: 17 children have mysteriously vanished from the (fictional) town of Maybrook, all running out their doors and disappearing into the dark at 2:17 a.m., and Cregger scores their flight through the nighttime streets to George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” – a spectral melding of music and image. Because the children came from one third-grade classroom at the local school, the good people of Maybrook turn as a mob on the class teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), certain that she must had have something to do with the disappearances. She didn’t and doesn’t, but she’s an interestingly imperfect heroine all the same, with weaknesses for vodka and a married policeman lover, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), that paint her as a high-strung impulsive. But you’d be on edge, too, if you were getting anonymous death threats and someone had painted “WITCH” on your car in big red letters.

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That last is a clue, although possibly pointing in the wrong direction. “Weapons” unfolds in chapters, each told from the vantage of a different character: First Justine, then an anguished and angry parent named Archer (Josh Brolin), then Paul the cop, then a local sad-sack drug addict (Austin Abrams), all the way down to little Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the only one of Miss Gandy’s students who didn’t disappear. Each chapter reveals more of the story; each introduces a smidge more freakishness and grue and sheer what-the-hell.

Beyond that, I can’t say more, since “Weapons” is nothing if not predicated on surprise. Cregger has a knack for images that linger on a moviegoer’s retina, though: the children diving into the dark with arms outstretched like tiny airplanes; the school’s principal (Benedict Wong) coming out of nowhere with a face full of blood and his arms outstretched; a front door opening onto a darkness within; a mother and father seated immobilized at a kitchen table.

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At a certain point, as Justine and Archer join forces to piece together bits of the puzzle, “Weapons” introduces its wild card, and it is a marvelously wild one indeed. Among its many dark felicities, the movie serves as a reintroduction to an under-recognized (and almost unrecognizable) actress, Amy Madigan, who may be best known for playing Kevin Costner’s supportive wife in “Field of Dreams” (1989) and who here plays a nightmare from our collective unconscious. Madigan gives a startling and unforgettable performance that’s the closest “Weapons” comes to outright comedy while still remaining profoundly unsettling. But funny. And scary.

For that reason, “Weapons” is a movie that begs to be seen in a theatre, where a moviegoer can ride the communal waves of horrified delight. Cregger understands how close screaming is to laughter, and he pitches his movie into the uncanny valley between, where the two fuse into the heightened state reserved for the best roller-coaster rides and scariest ghost stories. He modulates the pace with skill, drawing out suspense, using offscreen sound in novel ways, utilizing the camera frame for maximum heebie-jeebies and building to sequences that can reduce an audience to primal howls. (You may never look at a potato peeler the same way again.) The preview audience with whom I saw “Weapons” was happily wrung dry by the end, and I have to imagine the movie would play very differently in the relative quiet of home media room.

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Cregger is two for two as a writer-director now, and it’s disappointing to hear that his next project will be a sequel to a reboot of the “Resident Evil” zombie-horror series. This kind of confident originality with character and story structure and audience manipulation should be encouraged, not stuffed into the straitjacket of intellectual property. That said, I’m withholding a half-star from my critic’s rating for “Weapons” in part because of a few plot holes that might have been closed with some forethought – the investigating detectives are required to be extra-clueless in this movie – but more because I’m expecting even greater things from Zach Cregger in the future. So should you.

Three and one-half stars. Rated R. At theatres. Strong bloody violence and grisly images, language throughout, some sexual content and drug use. 128 minutes.

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