Writer-director Zach Cregger’s Weapons opens with a mysterious and unsettling event: At 2:17 in the morning on an ordinary Wednesday, 17 of the 18 students in Justine Gandy’s suburban Pennsylvania third-grade class run away from home. While we witness the disappearance in flashback, an unseen child narrator assures us that this is a true story, that we’re about to see a lot of people die in “a lot of really weird ways,” and that we’ll never find any mention of it in the official record. The incident has been erased from history, the narrator tells us, because the powers-that-be were “like, so embarrassed” by their inability to solve the case that they covered it all up. “Embarrassed” is a curious word to use in relation to the abrupt disappearance of seventeen eight-year-olds and multiple related strange deaths, and it’s our first clue that the film’s true horror might lie somewhere beyond its jump scares. I walked into Weapons expecting some spooky, paranormal fun; I walked out with a warning about what happens to the children of a society too preoccupied with its imagined enemies to recognize the real threat operating in plain sight.

The film’s central riddle isn’t about what happened. The kids’ eerie departure was captured by multiple families’ alarm systems and outdoor security cameras. We (and the parents, and the authorities) know from the start that each child left home at the exact same time, in the exact same way, seemingly of their own accord. We’re shown the departures at the outset: Each child opens their own front door and runs out into the night, arms pitched down and out to the sides like little airplanes, alone and ostensibly free. The question is why these children have vanished, and whether there’s anything anyone can do about it.

Weapons circles this question via six overlapping points of view, each from the vantage of a different community member whose respective distance from the disappearance varies. We start with Justine Gandy, the headstrong young teacher whose students vanished; followed by Asher, a middle-aged, hypermasculine construction boss who can barely contain his rage and despair over his missing son, Matthew; Paul, a cowardly and unscrupulous local cop; James, an affable unhoused twenty-something who lives in the woods somewhere downtown; Marcus, the school’s well-meaning, rule-bound principal; and lastly, Alex Lilly, the only child in Ms. Gandy’s third-grade class who didn’t disappear. Each perspective contributes to a mosaic-like reveal of what’s really going on, and the literal fragmentation of the storytelling reflects the fragmentation of the community, offering a close-up view of the various forms of bias and blinkered-ness that both emanate from and are directed toward each character’s particular identity. As this intertwining narrative structure winds toward the film’s shockingly gory conclusion, it spins out a portrait of 21^st-century suburban U.S. life more akin to ambitious character-driven opuses like Magnolia and Pulp Fiction (both of which Cregger has cited as influences) than anything in the existing horror canon. 

The physical and social isolation built into this suburban milieu is crucial to the plot: The film’s mystery could not hold in a community less marked by separation. Maybrook, Pennsylvania, is itself a fiction, but it’s the kind of indistinct, distinctly American suburb you can find plunked down in metro areas from coast to coast. At pick-up time, the parking lot of its low brick elementary school is filled with top-selling neutral-colored SUVs. The school’s students and administrators live on quiet cul-de-sacs in stately single-family homes with two-car garages and neat green lawns, while its teachers and cops live on shabbier, more densely residential blocks. Its downtown core, presumably once a bustling center of commerce and community, is now home to boarded-up buildings, a pawn shop, and the police station. Meanwhile, the liquor store and the gas station, both situated on busy multi-lane roads, are the closest things to a town square—everyone drives everywhere here, and these two businesses are the only places we see Weapons’ characters casually cross paths. 

In the families of the lost children, we see how spectacularly the antiquated 20th-century promise of the suburban good life has failed. Their affluence cannot ease their grief. They’ve bought into a security apparatus that not only failed to prevent their greatest fears, but has in fact hindered the search for the eight-year-olds’ return; because their departures were observably uncoerced, the authorities chalk the disappearances up to voluntary “abandonment” and have little appetite for further investigation. In reality, the children are in desperate need of the adults’ help. They’ve been abducted by an evil old witch named Gladys, who cast a spell that drew them out of their homes and into her enchanted army without ever having to lay a finger on them. 

Gladys is the great aunt of Alex Lilly, the only child who didn’t disappear from Ms. Gandy’s class. With her bright orange Emo Phillips-esque hairdo, candy-colored clothing, clown-like makeup, and off-kilter affect, she comes across more like an eccentric buffoon than an agent of terror. But this bumbling persona comes off with her wig: Behind the darkened windows of the Lilly house, she’s barefaced and bald, a shrewd and merciless tyrant whose only interest is accruing strength. Every person she enchants increases her power, and every body becomes a “weapon” in her quest for even more. Once in her thrall, those she bewitches become instruments of her will; she can turn them against their loved ones, and even themselves, with a snap. She starts by mesmerizing Alex’s parents, but their energy isn’t potent enough. So she presses her undersized, bullied great-nephew into her service, demanding his assistance in spellbinding his third-grade classmates.

Gladys’s garish looks and bizarre rhetoric are so allusive (who’s the first person that comes to your mind when you hear the phrase “orange clown”?) that it’s hard not to see her mystical takeover of this ordinary suburb as an analogue to the current administration’s almost-supernatural sway over a sizeable chunk of the American electorate; and her metaphysical method of capture as a potent metaphor for the insidious effects of algorithm-driven indoctrination. The children’s decision to leave home might appear to have been undertaken freely, but their minds were not their own. The physical and social isolation baked into their (and so many of our) lives are fertile conditions for psychological exploitation, and young people are especially vulnerable to workaday witchcraft of the internet, which can infiltrate even the sturdiest fortress without any outward signs of attack. Indeed, when we’re first shown the moment of “abandonment,” it’s underscored by the film’s most notable needle drop, George Harrison’s 1970 “Beware of Darkness.” Alongside the song’s wistful melody and heartfelt vocals, the surreal, dreamlike image of the children vanishing into the night elicits something closer to melancholy than terror, and the spiritual warnings in its lyrics (“Take care, beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go”) would give the whole game away in advance if only we knew where to look.

Gladys leverages her understanding of Maybrook’s social norms to evade the community’s defenses. She babbles her way past investigators and weasels into the homes of some of her targets by performing the part of a harmless, doddering old white lady. By-the-book bureaucracy is inadequate in the face of such a slippery menace, and much like the machinations underway on Pennsylvania Avenue, her greatest advantage lies in the fact that her aims are simply unimaginable to ordinary, reasonable people. Even those who do notice something is off—like school principal Marcus—aren’t able to apprehend the full scope of the peril she poses, and their reliance on norms of due process and decorum leaves them quickly outmaneuvered. As such, the peril she poses remains unrecognized for too long by those outside her immediate sphere.

And yet, there are signs that the community has some sort of inchoate awareness of the nature of the danger in their midst. Although we don’t meet the evil Gladys head-on until principal Marcus’s penultimate segment, she appears as a disorienting, lightning-quick jump-scare in every other POV (except self-serving policeman Paul’s, which is telling given his occupational proximity to the type of institutional authority she represents, since a despot’s fiendishness becomes palpable to the vulnerable long before it becomes tangible to those closer to power). Grieving father Asher even crazily, but correctly, points to witchcraft as an explanation for his son’s disappearance, although at first he points his accusation at the wrong target.

The vacuum left behind by officials’ inertia leaves Maybrook to find somewhere to lay the blame for what’s gone wrong in their community. The parents find an all-too-easy target for their suspicions in Justine Gandy, the young, single, childless, unruly spitfire of a woman teaching who-knows-what to their kids. Law enforcement focuses their energy on quashing the type of “threat” they can see by relentlessly harassing unhoused meth user James. Meanwhile, administrators like Marcus fall into the self-soothing rituals of procedure and paperwork.

Despite being cast out by the community (or perhaps because she already has nothing left to lose), Justine is the only person who refuses to stop searching for her students. She has a hunch that Alex Lilly holds a clue the authorities have missed, and she won’t stop speaking up about it. But her voice can’t penetrate the wall of misogyny and respectability politics that surrounds her. The men who lead Maybrook—many of whom purport to care about her—are constitutionally unable to take her concerns seriously. Their disregard for her perspective isn’t personal; they’re simply products of a system that has taught them since birth that women are more emotional, less credible, and less competent than men. They believe that their responsibility as leaders is to uphold hierarchical order while keeping rogue elements like Justine in check. When Justine prods pusillanimous policeman Paul for information about the investigation, he scolds her for straying out of her lane. When she finds proof that something strange is indeed going on at Alex Lilly’s house and rushes to Marcus for help, he bats her evidence aside and gives her a lecture on obeying the chain of command. 

Unhoused meth user James takes Justine’s proof a step further when he discovers the missing kids in the Lillys’ basement mid-petty-theft. James’s history of harassment and abuse at the hands of the cops makes him reluctant to reach out, but he swallows his fears and reports what he saw. Instead of leading to a rescue, though, his attempt to collaborate with law enforcement gets him chased, beaten (yet again), and dragged straight back into Gladys’s clutches by the authorities themselves—another gesture that speaks to the disjunct between the priorities of law enforcement and the concerns of the communities they’re supposedly sworn to serve. 

Devastated father Asher turns out to be the bridge between the entrenched worldview of the men running the show and the messier, riskier, more interdependent approach that Justine and James instinctively understand is required to save the children. In public, he’s tough and angry—accusing Justine of somehow brainwashing his son and demanding answers from the authorities—but at home, we see him huddled, hollow-eyed, in his missing son’s twin bed, highlighting the disjunct between Asher’s inner anguish and the narrow band of emotions he’s culturally permitted to express. Asher’s turmoil sets him apart from the other men in Maybrook (the powerful ones, at least). Although skilled in his performance of rugged individualism and conventional masculine values, these myths are no balm for the loss of his eight-year-old son. His refusal to rationalize the children’s disappearance as a matter of personal agency—to compartmentalize and move on—creates an aperture for change. When a nightmare leads him to articulate his own guilt, fears, vulnerabilities, and the magnitude of his love for his missing son, Asher becomes able to move from recrimination to productive action. He activates his community, reaching out to other parents, and eventually to Justine. Only when Justine and Asher recognize that they’re fighting against the same set of obstacles in pursuit of a common cause and begin to pool their knowledge are they finally able to pinpoint the monster in their midst. 

The film’s climax brings a kind of catharsis, but one that comes at incredible cost. In a moment that feels unnervingly close to the one our democracy is facing now, Justine and Asher are confronted by how difficult it is to combat Gladys now that she’s consolidated so much power. Alex, having witnessed Gladys’s method of enchantment, recognizes that their best chance to defeat her is to mimic her own actions and redeploy the weaponized children against her. They scream wildly as they hunt Gladys down, cannonballing through their neighbors’ windows and smashing through sliding glass doors in hive-minded pursuit. We get a peek into the interiors the children are destroying as they tear through the once-quiet cul-de-sac; the reactions of the occupants (some terrified, some exasperated by their home’s sudden implication in the chaos) remind us that many of the town’s residents’ domestic lives have retained their normalcy until this moment, when the reality of what has been taking place in their community comes (literally) crashing in on them. It’s almost comical—until it reaches its staggeringly brutal end. When Asher catches up to the children, they’re no longer enchanted, yet they’re still standing the same way they did in the basement: stock still, silent, awaiting new instructions. 

Ultimately, the film’s greatest horror is that Gladys was able to get as far as she did with the help of Maybrook’s social division and structural complacency. The unthinkable traumas these people have endured could have been prevented if the community had been less fractured, cooperated more, listened better, acted faster. Instead, their children have to carry the memory of living under Gladys’s spell for the rest of their lives, and their elders will reckon forever with the horrors that were allowed to blossom in their blind spots. To heal, they’ll have to confront that reality together. The film’s final line, delivered in voiceover as Asher carries his blank-faced boy home, offers a fragile filament of hope in that regard—the child narrator tells us that after two years, some of the missing kids have finally started to remember how to speak. One can only hope that once they regain the full power of their voices, they’ll never be rendered mute under another’s spell again.