Weapons (2025)

Plot of Weapons: When Justine Gandy enters her classroom in the school of Maybrook she finds there is only one child, Alex, sitting at his desk. All the other children have disappeared, CTV determining that at 2.17 in the morning they all left their houses and ran off into the darkness. The film is presented from various points of view, starting with Justine the teacher. She is hounded by the parents who believe that she had something to do with the disappearance. One morning she finds the word, WITCH, painted on the side of her car in gloss paint. She is attacked by a woman in the booze shop. She is suspended from her job by the head teacher, Marcus, and while staking out Alex’s house has a lock of hair cut by an unknown woman. Then We have the view of Archer a building consultant and parent of a missing child. It is he who has painted the word onto the side of Justine’s car. He used a town plan to plot the direction the kids ran in. Then Paul a policeman is in focus. He has sex with Justine, but is found out by his wife and later chases a vagrant, James, who he attacks for jabbing him with a needle.  James has been in Alex’s house thinking it is deserted. It is not. You can see how this is going!

Content: There is sex between Justine and Paul, noisy but not graphic. Justine drinks a lot of vodka and has booze poured over her by a woman, who turns out to be Paul’s wife. We see Alex walking steadily home every day after school, but his house windows are papered over and James, the burglar, sees shadowy unmoving figures sitting, and then, in the basement, the children standing there. When James goes to the pawn shop to sell what he has stolen he sees a poster offering a reward for the discovery of the children. A strange woman claiming to be Alex’s aunt meets with Marcus the head teacher. Marcus says he wants to meet the parents, who the aunt says are ill. Later the woman visits Marcus’s house, where he and his husband live, and initiate a ritual resulting in terrible violence.

A View: I had seen ‘Barbarian’ so I had a bit of an idea of what to expect. The screen in which my wife and I watched it was quite full, although we thought that this might be people keeping cool during the heatwave. How could a class of children all disappear at the same time? The viewpoint of each of the participants is presented, gradually revealing what happened. Surely it involves a witch, but the witch is not Justine. The last viewpoint is that of Alex, which reveals all. It is well worth the price of admission.

Fun Fact: There was out loud laughter in the screen where we watched it.