Weapons (2025) review

Elementary school teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) comes into work one morning only to discover that seventeen of her eighteen students are missing - the night before, at 2:17 A.M., the children left their houses and did not return - so the entire town, including deeply concerned father Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), call her a witch and blame her for their disappearance; eventually, her and Archer partner up to piece together what might have happened.  This horror film is quite a step up from Cregger's previous feature Barbarian as it takes a non-linear approach to the story, introducing a variety of other characters such as police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), crackhead James (Austin Abrams) and Justine's boss Principal Miller (Benedict Wong) to, in roundabout manner, show their own experiences during this time period.  It slips up in the last act when it introduces Gladys (Amy Madigan) - a practitioner of black magic who looks like a clown and seems like she dropped in from a different movie altogether - and the tone shifts, but up until that point it's a mostly tense mystery.  While doing press for it, the cast refused to elaborate on the plot and encouraged people to just watch it ... and that strategy worked out nicely.