Reviewed by Alicia Glass 

All the children but one from an elementary school class disappear at the same time in one night, and their community is left questioning who or what is responsible. 

Most people who’ve seen the film come out with the same general impression, especially if they don’t want to spread spoilers – “It’s not what you think.” Which means we have to try very hard to make the review of such a clever refreshing horror flick free from spoilers as well. Make sure your hair-trimming scissors are locked away, and let’s get into this! 

So our narrator with the little-girl voice (we never do find out who she is, voiced by Scarlett Sher) informs us right at the beginning what happened with Miss Gandy’s third-grade class – on the same night, at the exact same time 2:17 a.m., each child woke up, got up, and still in their pjs all ran right out of their houses and just disappeared. All but one, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). 

A month after the initial disappearance, the cops still effectively have nothing and principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), after a disastrous town meeting where the parents almost attack the kids’ teacher, has to place Miss Gandy on leave from the school. The movie is done in a series of titled chapters, and of course the kids’ teacher is first. 

Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is just as baffled as the horrified parents, and she copes with being terrorized by these adults who vandalize “Witch” on her car by drinking rather heavily, sneaking in a romp session with a married cop friend of hers, Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), and fixating on poor remainder Alex. Justine is bright and kind and seems to genuinely care about her kids, a must for any good teacher, but she’s also easily emotional and exciteable, and doing amateur sleuthing for answers by herself is way more likely to get her pert little self beat to a pulp. Plus, it ends up not just the parents of the missing kids who are after Justine, too. 

Next up is Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the frustrated father of missing kid Matthew, furious at the complacency and minimal progress of police captain Ed (Toby Huss), Archer is a construction contractor whose business suffers as he struggles to find his beloved son. Archer himself seems terribly aggrieved from an inability to be demonstrably affectionate with those three important little words to his son, which could be taken as a warning to a whole lot of the world right now – show it, say it, before it’s too late and they’re gone. After piecing together several clues on his own, Archer ends up saving Justine from an attack and accompanying her as she stalks Alex Lilly’s house for answers. 

Police officer Paul Morgan is not having a good week at all. A routine arrest of James (Austin Abrams), a vagrant drug addict for attempted burglary, turns into a whole thing that Paul has to clean up and inform his father-in-law about, on the DL of course. Even as his wife bugs him to go to AA meetings on the reg, Paul meets with Justine in a bar and almost inevitably drowns his sorrows in liquor and fleshy delights. And then of course that jerkwad vagrant that Paul swore he’d sent out of town, shows back up trying to claim the $50,000 reward for knowledge of the whereabouts of the missing kids. So, nothing would do but for Paul to look into that himself and poof, Paul himself is now effectively missing too. 

And what about that riffraff James? Your typical junkie, James has a tent out in the woods, a pawn shop he favors, is in debt to everyone he knows especially family up past his eyeballs, and is only interested in two things – making money, and using it to score his next fix. Breaking into Alex’s house to troll for bankable trinkets to sell instead turns out to be a surprising wealth of information that could be very valuable – if only James can survive to claim the money. 

And finally, we come to Alex Lilly himself. The woman who began showing up as Alex’s current guardian, calling herself his Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), covered in Pennywise-like makeup and a wig like plastic melting, is cheerful and as unhelpful as she can possibly be, to pretty much everyone. Poor little Alex has no choice but to aid Aunt Gladys in her diabolical plots, especially after the wonderfully stabtastic scene where she tortures Alex’s parents in front of him, but people have a tendency to forget how smart almost-double-digit kids can be. How resilient they are, and also, how vicious they could be, given the right opportunity. Little Alex has been done wrong, after everything he’s been through, and we go through it with him during the films last chapter too, so it’s Alex and the rest of the missing kids turn to mete out some well-deserved mindless bloody and violent justice. 

There is already talk of a prequel film starring Gladys in the works, hopefully told in the same sharply witty and joyously violent way. Naming the film Weapons technically only makes any kind of sense in the final chapter, but one supposes naming the movie Food and still trying to market it at least initially as a supernatural thriller-mystery is less eye-catching. The cinematography and camera-work is great, especially for the monster chase and attack scenes. The many comedic bits, with things like slapstick syringes and shriekingly funny “Gotcha!” moments, lend an air of ridiculousness to the clouds of supernatural overlay of the fictional Maybrook, Pennsylvania, town. 

Decide how you would react if the same thing happened in your town, and see Weapons, in theaters and available for streaming purchase, now!