Weapons? Zach Cregger’s got ‘em, if you’re talking purely in the cinematic sense. The writer-director’s weapons were readily on display in his urban planning horror movie Barbarian, which got lips flapping for its audacious subject matter and the fine technique that underpinned it. And having gotten a taste of that, he wants more.

We get another fine example of these weapons in Cregger’s new film, which is called – you guessed it – Weapons. Specifically the opening scene, which establishes a mystery that takes this movie far … until it must inevitably reveal itself, and lose some steam in the process.

The premise here is chilling. One night at 2:17 a.m. in the small town of Maybrook, 17 children from the same third grade class inexplicably awaken from their beds, run down the stairs, throw open the front door, and disappear into the night at a full run, their arms held aloft like airplane wings. No one might know that’s exactly what happened, except it was caught on the security cameras of multiple homes.

No trace of them is found, no sense of their connection to each other understood, until their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), arrives at school the next morning to find a classroom empty of all but one student, Alex (Cary Christopher), who has no better explanation than anyone else for why he’s the only one who turned up. Focus of the town’s rage quickly turns on this teacher and this student, who must know more than they’re letting on.

This opening scene, a montage of all 17 children individually running through the empty streets backed by an ethereal song on the soundtrack, is a tone setter if ever there was one. Of course we know from Barbarian that Cregger is going to upend that tone, similar to how he launched a new narrative thread we could scarcely have predicted halfway through that film. Cregger likes the squicky and he likes the funny, and both will have ample time to shine in Weapons.

The other characters of note here are the principal, played by Benedict Wong; a police officer and Justine’s ex, played by Alden Ehrenreich; and the most aggressive parent in terms of actually doing something about investigating his son’s disappearance, who’s played by Josh Brolin. And then some others whose very identity might tip you off in ways Cregger would prefer you don’t know just yet.

Both Barbarian and Weapons, though, have a sense of being half-baked. They’re both highly susceptible to nit picking. In fact, when the issues are as glaring as these arguably are, it isn’t fair to nit picking to call this nit picking. This is more like pointing out gaping flaws.

If you want to know what I’m talking about, and don’t mind a few Barbarian spoilers (spoiler alert), let’s take the inbred monster that’s been dwelling under that Detroit area Air BnB. You have to ask yourself how old the actual monster in that movie, the man who was kidnapping these women and impregnating or killing them, would have to be, for this many generations of inbred mutation to manifest in a creature that is now itself fully grown – even though the man himself is still alive. It doesn’t add up, but supporters of Barbarian will argue that it doesn’t need to. And everyone should be a supporter of Barbarian on some level.

Such flaws might be smaller and matter even less in Weapons, but they’re there. We won’t get into them, but they’re there. Whether you’ll go with them under the spell of Cregger’s contagious zeal, or begin every sentence with “what about the part where” with your viewing companion afterward, dictates whether you like Weapons a lot or just a little.

One thing we can tell you without spoiling the fun is that Cregger has a good time with structure in this film, just as he did with Barbarian. Weapons is constructed as a series of chapters from the perspective of one of the characters, each with their own title, and these cover the same periods of time, meaning we’re looping back and seeing events we’ve already seen from a slightly different point of view. While this “gimmick,” if we want to belittle it, is a bit hackneyed by this point, it does work well in revealing more information that contextualises previous occurrences.

It’s really the reveal that this is working towards that is, perhaps, not as great as one might hope. In a way, though, this is because Cregger is a victim of his own success. The image of these hypnotised children, running at a sprint at all hours of the night, is so captivating, so tantalising, so tailor made to appear on the poster and make you buy tickets, that literally any explanation for what happened to them is going to disappoint on some level. Cregger’s direction for the story is reasonable enough, and has its share of the sort of palpable blood and gore that attracts some of us to horror movies. But that can’t hold a candle to the mystery he first presented us.

There are worse things than being victim of your own success, because it means you had to be successful in the first place. There’s no doubt Weapons is successful. There’s no doubt Cregger has secured his spot among upcoming horror directors whose next project we’re dying to see. For some of us, though, that only makes us more critical. It only makes us more demanding of a perfection that’s within his grasp, just not this time out.

 

Weapons is currently playing in cinemas.