The mystery at the center of Weapons is not based on true events, but the narration that opens Zach Cregger’s latest film does have the capacity to fool you. Weapons is every bit the kind of story you’d hear as a child from another kid determined to creep you out — if not around a campfire, then in some quiet corner on a playground. Cregger’s young narrator insists that the story she’s about to tell is totally true, that it happened randomly in her sleepy Southern town of Maybrook, that a bunch of people perished in weird and crazy ways, and that authorities tried to cover it up after the fact.
It’s an almost glib introduction to a story determined to explore the emptiness of grief — the loss of control, the abyss that stares back when you’re searching for real answers — and one just as brutally disturbing as Cregger’s horror debut, Barbarian. But the latter was also, at turns, laugh-out-loud funny. Its visual gags were designed to disarm, a kind of interlude before exploring the nightmare around the corner. And it’s no different in Weapons. Cregger’s follow-up is as haunting and cerebral as it is almost cartoonishly funny, producing a cocktail of emotions nearly as disarming as the film itself.
