Weapons (2025) (USA)

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Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, who continues to be a standout in anything she does) arrives at the grade school she teaches at to find all of her third grade students absent except for one lone boy. The same cannot be said for any of the other classes and Gandy being new to the small town gets many a concerned parents ready to point a finger her way. At 2:17 that morning all of the missing kids got out of bed and ran away into the dark, never returning to their homes. A month later the town is being asked to start healing but that’s not easy at all for the parents of the vanished children. And here, creator Zach Cregger (the man behind the great Barbarian but better known to me from the unmatched The Whitest Kids You Know which points to why the level of dark comedy in this bad boy works so damn well) begins his spiral into chaos. Angry and scared parents are ready to boil over into mob violence but something else is also at play and it’s the kind of maliciousness you can’t just dismiss as humans being the awful beings prone to selfish outbursts that we are. The sympathetic but increasingly frustrated school principal (man, Benedict Wong is great isn’t he?) thinks it best that his teacher take some time away from the school and is further concerned about how emotionally attached she is with her students, especially the one that remained behind when his classmates heeded whatever unknown call they did. Her frustration leads to her inevitable attempt to figure out just what the hell is going on and starting her own investigation. Josh Brolin (this fucking cast) is a grieving father who changes his angry tune once the realization of things being beyond normal finally hits like a hammer to the skull, Alden Ehrenreich (I swear, everyone of these stellar actors are bringing their best) is Justine’s police officer ex flame who offers some minor reprieve from the shit show Justine’s life has become and a perfect Amy fuckin’ Madigan crafts something beautifully off-putting in whatever desperate Hell Gladys crawled out of. There’s a bunch of other familiar faces (Toby Huss, Sara Paxton, Justin Long, June Diane Raphael) getting some screen time and plenty of gruesomeness waiting in the futures of several folks. Every character feels completely human and all the real life flaws make it so much worse when chaos comes calling and people start dying. That’s all you’ll get from me and that was actually more than I expected to be able to write so that’s good at least.