Weapons is writer-director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his breakout success Barbarian (2022), and it confirms his gifts for nifty high-concept horror and sure-handed follow-up scares. The premise for this one is the disappearance of seventeen third-graders at precisely 2:17 a.m. one fateful night in the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania — the kids all simply got out of bed and ran off into the night. Even stranger, all of the children are members of the same class. Their teacher, Miss Gandy (Julia Garner), arrives in the morning to find one lone student, a quiet, bullied boy named Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), sitting at his desk in an otherwise empty classroom.
Nice! But a hooky premise wouldn’t amount to anything like the juggernaut box office hit this movie has become if Cregger didn’t also have a talent for genuinely strange imagery that sticks in the mind. On the night of their flight from their homes, many of the children are captured on doorbell cams and black-and-white home security footage. It’s haunting, the way they come flitting out, leaving front doors open behind them. They run lightly with their arms held out in a wide downward-facing V, like swallows in flight. And though they all dash away as if drawn by some compelling force, there’s an exhilaration in looking at the dark silent neighborhoods suddenly coming alive with fleet-footed children escaping their homes.
It reminded me immediately of W. B. Yeats’s great 1886 poem, “The Stolen Child,” which takes on the narrating voice of the faeries, a powerful race of deities from Irish folklore that you should never, ever mess with. It has a repeated stanza that goes like this:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The poem’s melancholic tone of abduction, combined with a disturbing logic of liberating children from the grievous horrors of the human world,…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
