Contrary to what the opening narration tells us, Barbarian director Zach Cregger’s latest feature, Weapons, is not actually based on a true story. However, the effectiveness of this movie lies in the fact that it feels like it could happen in your neighborhood. This is not a jump-out-of-your-seat, eyes covered scary movie. But when I walked into my suburban home afterwards and took a quick glance up and down the street, it was all too familiar. Weapons feels like it could happen in any town to any community of unsuspecting people.

It's no surprise that a movie about the disappearance of a classroom full of schoolchildren would resonate with anyone who has attended school themselves or had a child attend school in this century. From the day the first trailer released, audiences speculated on whether the films events may be a metaphor or commentary on gun violence in schools, with the images of empty classrooms and school exteriors decorated with memorials for those who have been lost. This is certainly not untrue, and is even made explicit in certain scenes (such as the striking nightmare sequence of grieving father Archer Graff — played by Josh Brolin). But Cregger seems interested in something broader, which is how children often become collateral damage in the warpaths of adults — particularly the adults who are supposed to be looking out for them.

It's striking, then, how truly absent the children are from this movie. There's nothing telling us that the children are dead, but for the parents who have lived the past month with no answers and no sign of their children ever returning, there's a big empty spot in their lives that their kids usually occupy. For Archer Graff, that loss consumes him, and we can multiply that grief across the parents of 16 other children who may never return.

As revealed in the trailer, the film's opening narration is a secondhand account of the story’s events as told by another child well after the fact. And that's exactly what it's framed as: a story. A true story, yes, but still a tale. There's something very familiar about being told a story of something scary that happened in your town by your classmate, or your neighbor, or even your own kid who heard it from a friend at school. And while likely not as extreme as this particular series of events, almost every town has a story that they tell over and over and over again as the big thing that once happened there. As recipients of these stories, we want to comfort ourselves by saying “that happened so long ago” or “that would never happen in my neighborhood.” The chilling fact that Cregger posits is, of course, that tragedy can strike anywhere at anytime — and to anyone.

The film’s title, Weapons, refers less to actual weapons and more to the characters themselves. The movie is divided into chapters, each focusing in on a different character as they collide and cross each other's paths. Barbarian employs a similar technique of jumping between stories, but to nowhere near the level of effectiveness that Weapons does. The central characters of the film move like missiles, endlessly trained on one another through their misplacement of their grief and personal struggles. The parents of the missing children direct their furious blame at the kids’ teacher, Justine Gandy (played by Julia Garner). Justine, meanwhile, is grieving the children in her own way, and her obsession with finding answers leads her down her own dark path. They're not unique in their day-to-day struggles of being emotionally closed off or a frequent shopper at the liquor store. They're ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, likely asking themselves, “Why me?”

What's crucial about all of the characters we focus in on is that none of them are evil people (that classification will be saved for the movie’s later revealed antagonist). They're all human beings in various strained situations that push and push them until they snap. And in this case, they snap in the direction of other people.

The film compares these characters’ frantic pursuits with the extremely focused control exercised by its primary antagonist, who — without giving to much away — is able to direct their weapons with unbreakable precision. This contrasts with the spiraling behaviors and paths of the film’s protagonists, but both are dangerous in their own ways. A person fueled by their own hurt and unleashed to do what they will with it can be a dangerous thing, even if they don't set out intending to hurt anyone.

But what is the catalyst for this kind of disarray? What happens when you introduce a parasite into the tenuously balanced ecosystem of your average suburb? When someone (or something) comes to town that is not quite right, things can unravel very quickly. Sure, maybe not everyone in your metropolitan area has got a sinister secret hiding in their basement, but just about everyone has something under the surface. In the world of Cregger’s Weapons, that can mean anything from a father who can't tell his son he loves him, to an overzealous cop in a failing relationship, to a teacher who drinks a little too much. But when the parasite comes to town, those things get dredged up and become a problem outside the confines of any one person’s private life at home

Julia Garner and Josh Brolin are the film's emotional tethers, as they are our closest link to the missing children, and their grief is palpable through every nuance of their performances. Also brilliant in this movie is Alden Ehrenreich, who plays a police officer named Paul Morgan who is a total loose canon in a way that at first seems amusing but very quickly devolves into scary. Ehrenreich’s ability to play comedic in a way that jumps from vaguely off-putting to urgently alarming from one moment to the next takes what could easily be the story's lull and elevates it, and similar praise can be given to Austin Abram’s portrayal of street criminal James. These two characters who should seemingly fall outside the blast radius of the recent tragedy become somewhat randomly swept into it through their own encounters and misadventures.

Without giving too much away, the film’s conclusion leaves its audience walking away with just the right amount of unease that allows the feeling to linger for days after. Again, it's not outright terror. There's no gory, horrifying final image. Because while that would scare people, maybe have them closing their eyes and clutching their armrests in the theater, it wouldn't stick. It wouldn't have me picking up my pace while walking to my front door. But the uneasiness, and the feeling that things are a little bit off in a way that might never go back to normal, is harder to shake. That's a specific terror that Cregger has levelled at his audience with a precision that you don't immediately detect through the criss crossing narratives and comedic elements that seem scattershot until they align with stunning accuracy. Simply put, Cregger doesn't miss.

Weapons further establishes what we'll now think of as the hallmarks of a Zach Cregger movie, combining tried and true horror tricks with moments of comic levity, all working around a focused thematic throughline. Whereas Barbarian takes a sharp left turn into a heavily comedic tone midway through, Weapons oscilates more rapidly between tones, and to greater effect. The laughs never undercut the screams, and the scare factor doesn't stop the audience from being amused mere moments later. On paper, Weapons should have too many moving parts to be so cohesive, but Cregger is smart in how he has constructed this screenplay to be structurally repetitive and yet with a compelling mystery at its core that the audience can’t unravel without the next pieces. While the individual stories crisscross and fall in and out of alignment in seemingly disordered chaos, it's never as random as it may feel. This is how Cregger is able to wrap everything back around in the film’s finale, throwing everyone into a final confrontation in which, although a singular antagonist has nowbbeen pinpointed, the characters are still all facing in different directions. With this movie’s villain, it's hard to hit her head on without using her own weapons against her, and even harder to avoid ending up in her line of fire. And once you're there, it won't stop until someone is dead.