I did my level best to avoid information about Zach Cregger’s Weapons before sitting in a theater waiting for it to flicker before me on a great big screen. For me, part of the tremendous appeal of Cregger’s preceding bigscreen effort, the 2022 horror film Barbarian, was the sense of discovery as the writer-director exploiting tropes and corresponding audience expectations to regularly tilt the story on its axis. Barbarian is rich enough in its themes that it doesn’t rely on surprise, but it still does benefit from Cregger taking full advantage of the assured storyteller’s earned right to slyly deceive.

So, even as I am not typically one for expending lots of words of recounting plot elements when I write about a film, I am disinclined to share, well, really any details about Weapons. Let’s see how that goes.

I will share that Weapons is another strong film that keeps Cregger solidly in the conversation of modern creators who see the genre of horror as an avenue to explore modern issues with thematic depth rather than a mere dispenser of jolts and gruesome shocks. He begins the film with an unsettling premise and then spends the next two hours unfolding and refolding the story, like a sheet of paper fashioned into a dozen different origami animals. Or maybe it’s the same origami animal considered from different angles. Either way, Cregger’s clearest skill and keenest interest is in using narrative structure inventively, revealing character motivations and other story elements at times when they are most satisfying or startling instead of by the plain dictates of chronology.

Because Cregger shapes his film by feel, there are times when he cheats a little. Certain columns of data don’t quite tally up to the conclusion Cregger offers. His headlong creativity and his obvious joy in stretching the most outlandish concepts so tautly that they twang with a high pitch are adequate compensation for the moments when plausibility falters. I want to suspend disbelief because enjoying the freewheeling rush of the film is more enjoyable than counting plot holes. If there’s also an arguable problem with some of the subtextual arguments and thematic imagery failing to cohere into a complete argument, that similarly strikes me as a reasonable trade-off. Too many ideas is usually better than not enough.

Fundamentally, Weapons works because Cregger knows how to put a movie together. He knows how to structure a scene or sequence to heighten tension or make a punchline land. He casts well and gives his actors the latitude to express all the messiness of their characters. Maybe most importantly, he doesn’t flinch, taking the film to its most logical conclusion, no matter how brutal it might be. In the best way, Cregger creates like an ideal audience member, the sort who wants to be entertained, shocked, intrigued, moved, and have a whole mess of things to talk over dinner after the show. Weapons hits all those marks.