“It’s a peculiarity of mine. I don’t try to rationalize it anymore.”

Zach Cregger follows his promising debut Barbarian (2022) with a fulfillment of that promise in Weapons. Remixing the Pied Piper legend of the Middle Ages, Cregger sets up a mystery in which each child in a third-grade class except one (Cary Christopher) wake up one morning at precisely 2:17am and flee into the night, their arms outstretched like they’re playing airplanes as they cruise wraith-like through the small-town suburbs. Doorbell camera footage captures several of these eerie headlong flights, but Cregger manages the nifty trick of concocting a mystery in present times in which smartphones don’t need to be conveniently ignored. Because what good would a smartphone be when your kid ran off into the woods never to be seen again?

If the Pied Piper grew out of a need to cope with the death of children due to disease, Weapons is concerned with abuse—disturbingly timely as I finally got to watch it, after missing its theatrical run, in the wake of the Lindsay Clancy mistrial.

I knew going in that the screenplay was nonlinear and jumped between characters. I was expecting something along the lines of Trick ‘r Treat (2007), simply because it is also a nonlinear horror film that changes characters, but it’s actually more in the vein of Pulp Fiction (1994) or Magnolia (1999), where a good story is rearranged to add layers of intrigue and smartly place its emotional beats. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a single character. We begin with the beleaguered teacher of the third-grade class (Julia Garner) who finds herself at the epicenter of the town’s witch hunt. “You’re either negligent or complicit,” the father of one of the missing children (Josh Brolin) says. He soon gets his own chapter, as do a shady local cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a homeless drug addict (Austin Abrams) who serves as comic relief, and the well-intentioned school principal (Benedict Wong), each chapter fleshing out a character previously introduced in an earlier one. And then what about the lone boy who showed up to school that day?

This timeline trickery works extremely well. Clues are doled out precisely, characters we have gotten to know are suddenly overtaken by evil intent, Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) makes brief appearances in odd locations until taking over the story in the finale. Throughout, Cregger and cinematographer Larkin Seiple (Everything Everywhere All at Once [2022]) use smart but not overtly flashy camerawork to enhance the feeling of dread lingering over the film. For instance, there’s a brilliant static long take of the teacher sleeping in her car in which an unseen intruder with inscrutable intent briefly enters the vehicle. There’s a sense of playfulness about the way it toys with our expectations and often passes up opportunities for more horror blitzes in favor of deepening its sense of weirdness. It recalls the films of Jordan Peele (Get Out [2017], Us [2019]), a fellow comedian turned horror maestro. (Deadline reported that Peele parted ways with his management after failing to secure production rights to Weapons.)

Somehow Weapons manages, in its final act, to turn its horror toward the supernatural but to retain the sense of real-world gravity suggested by its imagery of empty classrooms, grieving parents, handmade memorials, reused syringes, dead-eyed trances. I think it pulls this off because it so brilliantly turns the tables in the wild climax, which sees the missing children snapped out of their supernatural fog and unleashed upon the villain in a triumphant act of gleeful, violent comeuppance. If only real life delivered such catharsis this side of the veil.