Weapons: Julia Garner stars in 'hyper-eerie' psychological thriller

"Weapons" is "a top-notch psychological thriller", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but be warned: this follow-up to director Zach Cregger's "electrifyingly tense" debut, the Airbnb-set horror "Barbarian" (2022), is as terrifying as it is "gripping".

Set in a small town in Illinois, the film opens with the disappearance of 17 children from a single elementary class, who all ran happily out of their homes at exactly 2.17am one morning, then vanished.

Suspicion falls first on their bewildered teacher (Julia Garner), who is hounded by "aghast parents and townsfolk"; however, her own hunch is that the fate of the children has something to do with Alex, the one pupil who didn't disappear.

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The story is told in the style of vintage Tarantino, said Kevin Maher in The Times, with the narrative divided into six chapters, each focused on a different character. They include a "corrupt beta-male policeman" (Alden Ehrenreich), the kindly school principal (Benedict Wong), and the "furious" parent of one of the children (Josh Brolin).

Pretty soon, we start to suspect that the children must have fallen victim to a mass school shooting – but it's clear, too, that something ghastly and supernatural is at work.

When "Weapons" pulls it off, it is "a kick", said Danny Leigh in the FT: the grim mystery looms over a "vivid everyday" in the suburbs; there are some jarringly funny moments; and Cregger creates from the start "a hyper-eerie mood" that sometimes bleeds into nightmarish "(my sweating palms can't lie)".

But the longer "Weapons" goes on, the "more the horror turns hokey", and for a story about missing children it has remarkably little emotional pull. Cregger is "seriously talented", but his toweringly ambitious film has "the depth of a puddle".