The horror movie of the summer… and perhaps also the best comedy

On a starless night, a crowd of children leave their homes, running until they disappear into the darkness, while the comforting voice of George Harrison sings Beware of darknessThis is the disturbing starting point of Weapons, the film with which Zach Cregger continues the surprise success of Barbarian, and which expands and refines the taste for surprise and the grotesque that his solo debut exhibited, which meant a (unreliable) turning point in a career until then linked to comedy with the group The Whitest Kids U' Know. If that film was structured in two stories connected by an underground corridor of horrors, Weapons atomizes the points of view to give a choral structure to the story of a small community traumatized by the inexplicable escape of its children.

While Cregger has fun dosing the information that must connect the dots between this situation and the "weapons" referred to in the title of the film, the images weave an aesthetic discourse that indirectly vindicates Stephen King as the architect of an imaginary that can insert terror as a Campbell's soup trunk element that Andy Warhol painted. But the ingenuity of Weapons lies in how the tension of its first section organically opens up to wild comedy as the narrative shows its cards, unashamedly savoring the playful-disturbing flavor of fear, and giving evil a bizarre incarnation through Amy Madigan characterized with John's colorism. Finally, when the climax abjectly channels the most iconic sequence of the Seven times Buster Keaton's work, we understand that, deep down, Zach Cregger hasn't changed that much since he was designing sketches with his millennial friends.