Gore and scares anchor this domestic horror

"HOME" and "comfort" are often used interchangeably across cultures. Ideally, hospitality or food should make you feel at home. What could be scarier than that very place turning into hell, leaving you deserted with nowhere to run to safety?

- AKSHAY KUMAR

Zach Cregger's Weapons deals with this unnerving proposition, thereby being an apt follow-up to his Barbarian, which portrayed a stranger inhabiting someone else's home.

Set in the fictional town of Maybrook, Weapons begins with schoolteacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), who was just looking to have another working day, making a shocking discovery that 17 of the 18 students in her classroom are missing. Except for Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). The children, due to an unexplained phenomenon, walk out of their homes at 2:17 AM. It is clear that the sporadic absences are somehow related to Alex. "Is this mystery tied to Alex, or is he in bigger danger?" sums up the story of Weapons.

Weapons could have been a classic example of a movie about the redemption of an unreliable person, who is not bad but is still held in the hurricane's hush. Then this would have become a heroic tale of an imperfect person clearing up all their past mistakes and compensating for them with a noble act. The film both gains and loses by not telling us whose story we should follow and whose story ties everyone else's story together till the very last moment.

It is only appropriate that everyone looks meek and powerless in a story with an overpowering evil, potent enough to wreak havoc on every person it encounters.