When the Pied Piper lured those children from the town of Hamelin, did they run with their arms spread downward at their sides, like airplanes about to take flight?
The Pied Piper was on my mind throughout Weapons, an anxiously chilling horror film in which every child in a third-grade glass—save one—runs from their homes at 2:17 a.m. the same morning. Home-security cameras capture them fleeing with arms outstretched, disappearing into the darkness, never to return. The Pied Piper legend—in which a ratcatcher whisks away a town’s youngsters after the adults refuse to pay for his services—may have been a narrative that medieval communities used to process the mass deaths of children, due to natural disaster or disease. Similarly, Weapons attempts to wrap its mind around an instance of inexplicable evil falling upon children.
“I see something that doesn’t make any sense at all.” So says Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), father of one of the missing children, at a community meeting in the aftermath of the disappearances. The police have come up empty, so parents have focused their distress on third-grade teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). “You’re either negligent or complicit,” Archer accuses. Later that night, someone paints WITCH on the side of Justine’s car.
Written and directed by Zach Cregger (Barbarian), Weapons is divided into character chapters, with overlapping timelines. (Cregger takes care of the inciting incident with an eerie, pre-title montage of small figures flitting along suburban streets.) Justine and Archer each get a section, as does Benedict Wong’s principal and Alden Ehrenreich’s local cop. (There are others, but that gets us into spoiler territory.) The structure cleverly plays with narrative perspective (as Barbarian did), while also inventively, excruciatingly doling out pieces of the increasingly terrifying puzzle. Justine has a nightmare involving a clown-like figure. Archer, a home developer, begins to plot out a map of the children’s trajectories. The principal … well, I won’t say more except to note he’s key to a moment that made my heart skip a beat, then slowly attempt to crawl out of my throat.
There are plenty of scares in Weapons, including a sinister single take in which Justine, while asleep in her car, proves particularly vulnerable. (I dare not say more, except to note that Cregger’s use of camera movement, blocking, and sound design conjures up an almost unbearable experience of dread.) He and cinematographer Larkin Seiple (Everything Everywhere All at Once) occasionally employ shots positioned at the level of an adult character’s waist, as if we’re seeing things from the perspective of one of the missing kids.
Weapons eventually offers an answer to its central mystery, one rooted in madness of the metaphysical variety. Yet like the tale of the Pied Piper, I wonder if this story might also stand in for real-world horror. Some of what we see in the movie is bitterly familiar: an empty classroom; grieving parents gathered together; sidewalk memorials with flowers and candles. In the United States, these are all-too-familiar markers of a school shooting. Weapons also features a strange image in one character’s dream that supports such a connection.
You might say that it’s inappropriate for a gory horror movie about missing children to nod toward such real-life tragedy. And I’d tend to agree. Yet I must admit that during Weapons’ bonkers climax—a darkly comic, insanely sustained sequence of violent comeuppance—I felt something closer to catharsis. Weapons taps into the fearful, impotent rage so many of us feel whenever there is news of more children being sacrificed at the idol of firearms. It’s something that doesn’t make any sense at all, yet it keeps happening. As a society, we’re both negligent and complicit.
(8/7/2025)
