Weapons review - suffer the children

Weapons’ enigmatic title, as with Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, reveals little of what follows. The smalltown Pied Piper premise is sufficiently alluring: at 2.17 am, all bar one of a primary school class leave their beds and sprint through night streets, arms flung back like fighter jets, before vanishing utterly.

This mystery at first seems secondary to its effect on six protagonists, whose points of view provide pieces of the puzzle. Alongside artfully creepy imagery and gorehound excess, Cregger relies on structure and characters to reel you in, till the central enigma is satisfyingly exposed to the light.

Weapons is hip entertainment, from a child narrator’s conspiratorial insistence that it’s all true to scoring the night flight with George Harrison’s ominously rocking “Beware of Darkness”. Teacher Justine Gandy (Ozark’s Julia Garner, pictured below) begins as our persecuted heroine, blamed by neighbours led by grieving dad Archer (Josh Brolin, pictured bottom) for her class’s vanishing, so leaning on her old friend the vodka bottle and a one-night stand with a married cop ex. Roundly ignoring the orders of headmaster Andrew (Benedict Wong) to lie low, she instead stalks class survivor Alex (Cary Christopher) for a disturbing home visit.Justine’s headstrong imperfections trash Hollywood female norms, helped by Garner’s brittle, ballsy performance. Subsequent protagonists are similarly flawed: Archer letting his business go to hell while hunting clues to his child’s loss, a henpecked policeman with a violent short fuse, a junkie slacker. Cregger peels back these private lives in his upscale version of a supernaturally traumatised Stephen King smalltown. He also briefly reflects recent King stories’ interest in Hitchcockian, harried innocents. The latter element doesn’t really interest Cregger the dramatist – the townspeople soon forget about Justine. The former comedian instead satirises human foibles and horror’s capacity to shove them to breaking point.

Weapons’ scares peak when an out of focus, blade-wielding woman moves with jerky, bad dream wrongness towards dozing Justine in her car. The woman darkens the driver’s window then we hear the passenger door open, and the seat creak. This scene and its payoff relish horror’s laughing, lurching rollercoaster, and Cregger’s comfort on fear and humour’s jagged edge and gleefully outrageous tone keep his film fizzing.The elaborate structure which provides much of its pleasure requires spoiler-free surprise, but refreshes a highly traditional horror story. It’s a modern fairy tale with hints of Hansel and Gretel as well as the Pied Piper, suggesting a sort of cannibalism alongside parental guilt. There are faint echoes of Sam Raimi’s red-blooded Drag Me to Hell (2009), and clear sympathy between Cregger’s two horror films and the grotesque and blackly comic sensibility of Longlegs’ Osgood Perkins.

Gonzo smalltown portraits, guffaw-choking menace and cathartic thrills give the studio-backed, mid-budget horror film a good name. Aim steadied by a gamely capable cast, Weapons hits its target.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk