‘Weapons’ is one of the very best horror movies I’ve seen in years – a film that nods to classics while carving out its own unsettling identity. Amy Madigan is unforgettable as a sinister aunt in clown makeup and a squeaky voice, evoking Ruth Gordon’s unnerving turn in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’. A nine-year-old boy with unspoken secrets drifts through his own haunted reality, recalling Haley Joel Osment in ‘The Sixth Sense’. Josh Brolin, meanwhile, delivers a performance that draws on his turn in the menacing ‘No Country for Old Men’, spending much of the film trying to outwit forces he barely understands.

The premise – children mysteriously disappearing – is a familiar one in horror. But what could have been a simple shock vehicle becomes a sharp, layered character study. The story unfolds through the eyes of half a dozen characters, each rendered with surgical precision. A mystery engulfs the town, suspicions flare, accusations fly, and strange behaviour appears to come from nowhere… until later, when we see events from the other side. It’s ‘Magnolia’ by way of Stephen King – sprawling, intimate, and deeply strange.

The central hook is chilling: one morning, a teacher finds her classroom almost empty, with only a single child present. No one knows where the others are, only that they left their homes at exactly 2:17am, destination unknown. The structure is non-linear, with fragments slotting into place slowly, sometimes in the ‘wrong’ order, so part of the mystery is figuring out what we’re even looking for. The more someone tries to rationalize events, the more sinister they become.

Unlike many horrors that live in their own supernatural bubble, ‘Weapons’ is grounded in the real world, which makes its escalating madness more disturbing. The title hints at something military, but the truth is stranger: ‘weaponization’ here is psychological, emotional, and moral, touching not only the missing children but various adults whose lives intersect with the case.

The teacher, inevitably blamed, has a complicated past, including an inappropriate relationship at a previous school. She is a fascinating contradiction – caring deeply for her students yet crossing professional boundaries, sometimes disastrously. Her decision to follow home the one remaining boy, against her principal’s explicit orders, sets events in motion that blur the lines between compassion, obsession, and recklessness.

The film isn’t afraid to make its characters morally messy, their flaws as compelling as their virtues. Structurally, it recalls ‘Pulp Fiction’: characters disappear, reappear, and sometimes turn up as wild, dangerous figures in someone else’s chapter. There’s even unexpected humour, as moments of absurdity burst through the tension before snapping back into violence.

It’s easy to imagine M. Night Shyamalan or Jordan Peele directing this, though its pacing and character focus give it a texture all its own. There are shades of ‘The Crucible’ in the hysteria and scapegoating, and an ever-present Stephen King-like dread. On a second viewing, I still caught new details, new connections, and fresh shivers. This is horror that demands, and rewards, rewatching.