Review of Weapons (2025)
Seen in 2026.
One morning, Alex Lilly is the only kid in Miss Gandy’s third-grade class who shows up to school. The others went missing when they got out of bed at 02:17 A.M. and ran away from their homes.
The adults in the ensemble cast are all good, but the kid who plays Alex Lilly had an impossible job. I respect the writers for presenting a reasonably thorough and definite set of answers to the initial mystery, but the main answer is inherently silly: It’s efficacious sympathetic magic foreshadowed by the earlier “witch” graffiti, portrayed in such a traditional way that there are magical lines of salt on the floor. The triple foreshadowing about parasitism is mostly a red herring; it is implied that the witch drains some kind of “life force” from her victims, but it doesn’t seem to help her. The director would have needed to do more work on Alex’s personality to bring the character through the second-to-last chapter in such a way as to sell the explanation even for the purposes of character psychology, and the Naruto runs don’t help.