'Weapons' Is a Generational Warfare Tale of Terror

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.