‘Weapons’ Review: Zach Cregger’s Chiller Asks Scary Questions (Too Bad About the Answers)

It’s difficult to discuss a work of art when you’re not allowed to talk about the parts that don’t work. In the interest of giving audiences an opportunity to see “Weapons” for themselves, without knowing the ending, the review you’re about to read discusses the film as vaguely as possible, because the story is built around a mystery and the issue I have with the film relates to the resolution of that mystery. If you want more detail, check back Friday for a (clearly labeled) spoiler-filled discussion of Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” — as well as the complexities of writing criticism with your hands tied.

If this whole “making movies” thing doesn’t work out Zach Cregger should host a horror-themed game show. The writer and director of “Barbarian” and “Weapons” has an uncanny knack for asking disturbing questions. What if there was a terrifying hidden room in the basement of your Airbnb? What if all the students in an elementary school class went missing all at once? Cregger’s thought experiments get under your skin before his movies even start. I can only imagine what he’d do with a reboot of “Fear Factor.” Or “Where in the Literal Hell is Carmen Sandiego?”

“Weapons,” like “Barbarian” before it, is scariest while it’s setting up its mysteries. Cregger’s characters are fascinating and textured and riddled with serious flaws. They respond to nightmare situations like actual human beings, with decisions that make sense based on their personality, even if they don’t make actual sense. The plausibility of these people and their world makes the irrationality of the premise more jarring. For an hour or so it feels like “Weapons” might be the scariest movie of the year.

But Cregger gets into trouble when he decides to answer his own prompts. It’s not that he doesn’t have the answers. His movies explain their plots pretty thoroughly. It’s just that none of the answers are as frightening as the possibilities. What scares Zach Cregger, or at least what Cregger thinks will scare his audience, isn’t as universal as the fear of the unknown. As he whittles the story down over the course of “Weapons” the film shifts from palpably ominous to merely weird… and eventually to silly.

“Weapons” stars Julia Garner as Justine Gandy, a teacher who comes to work and finds an empty classroom. All her students, and only her students, have vanished. In the middle of the night, at the exact same minute, they all got out of bed and ran outside. Nobody knows where they went, nobody knows why. The police investigate Miss Gandy but she seems innocent, not that that’s any consolation to the families of the missing kids. They want answers and Miss Gandy is right there, looking mighty suspicious.

Cregger’s film follows this well-intentioned woman with a drinking problem and boundary issues as she suffers through a witch hunt. Someone literally paints the word “WITCH” on the side of her car, just in case you didn’t pick up on this. But her investigation only gets so far before “Weapons” shifts focus, telling the same story from the perspective of Archer (Josh Brolin), an obsessed father of one of the missing kids, and one of the many people giving Justine a hard time.

Then “Weapons” shifts again. And then it shifts again. We experience the story through the eyes of various people throughout the town. They all find pieces of the puzzle, but never enough to put it all together by themselves. It’s an unnerving technique that keeps the audience just a few steps ahead of every protagonist for an uncomfortably long time. We wait with bated breath for any of these people to get over their personal bullcrap and work together to solve this mystery and maybe, as a treat, overcome their differences.

The premise of “Weapons” ties into legitimate fears and serious issues. A town in mourning over the sudden absence of its children evokes the awful yet familiar aftermath of school shootings. Our collective anxieties leading to the persecution of innocent people, that hits home as well. Then there’s the paranoid anxiety over what’s really happening in our neighbor’s houses, which is hard to shake when we know, sadly, that some people really are victimized behind closed doors.

Yet many of the tangible, soul-scraping anxieties Cregger weaponizes in “Weapons” are red herrings, and gradually fall by the wayside in favor of what he’s actually getting at. Your mileage might vary but what he’s getting at seems a lot less frightening, and a lot more contrived, than it would have had he not invited us to ponder more powerful possibilities for over an hour before tipping his hand. The terrible things people do to each other because they’re afraid of a monster are, in the end, more frightening than any monster.

Still, the execution of this flawed premise demands celebration. Julia Garner and Josh Brolin are doing difficult, layered work, and their co-stars Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong and Amy Madigan are also completely engaged with this material, no matter how weird it gets. The cinematography, courtesy of Larkin Seiple (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), finds the eeriest camera angle in damn near every scene, whether it’s overtly shocking or insidiously banal. And the conclusion, whether or not it’s thematically satisfying, sure is something else and it’s hard to shake afterwards. Not necessarily for the right reasons, but hey, a memorable ending is a memorable ending. I’ll take it.

I will get into the nuts and bolts of why “Weapons” falters after the film is out and people have an opportunity to see it for themselves beforehand. Until then, get ready to be deeply disturbed by “Weapons.” And then, possibly, annoyed.