Zach Cregger, the guy from the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know who suddenly became a horror auteur with BARBARIAN (2022), is back with his ambitious followup. Cregger has mentioned being inspired by MAGNOLIA when trying to explain what he’s doing here, which might sound kind of ridiculous, but it makes it fitting that it’s New Line Cinema putting a whole lot of faith in a promising new director. Pretty big budget, final cut, advertising based on mystery and “from the director of BARBARIAN,” and they even gave it an IMAX release! But I think their confidence is warranted.

The only thing we really knew about from the somewhat cryptic trailers is a mysterious event explained in the opening by a child narrator (reminded me of SHOGUN ASSASSIN). One night at 2:17 AM in the small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen kids get up out of bed, run out their front door into the night and don’t come back. The weirdest part is that they’re all in the same class, taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, WE ARE WHAT WE ARE). So when she comes to school the next day only one kid is there, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Since nobody can figure out what the fuck happened some of the parents, especially Archer Graff (Josh Brolin, THRASHIN’), assume Justine had something to do with it. She’s getting harassing phone calls, threatening knocks on the door at night, her car vandalized, and she has no teaching to do. Things are not going great for her.

I know from THE ASSISTANT and THE ROYAL HOTEL that Garner can play a really compelling combination of vulnerability and strength under great pressure and harassment. Here she combines that with another type of character I enjoy: somebody I can sympathize with and relate to even though and/or because she’s a fuck up who makes bad decisions. When she literally gets chased out of a school meeting by parents, Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong, LARGO WINCH) advises her to go straight home for her own safety, but instead she stops at the liquor store. I thought yeah, I get that in this type of situation, and I thought that again when she went to a bar to see her police officer ex-boyfriend Paul (Alden Ehrenreich, COCAINE BEAR). But when he pointedly ordered just a Coke and worried about her driving home I realized oh no, this is not just some extra comfort at a bad time. This is a bad problem coming back. Or it might just be every day for her.

Marcus mentions her “behaving inappropriately” with students, which turns out to mean very understandable things like giving a girl who missed the bus a ride home. But she does seem to have some questionable ideas about boundaries, because she keeps wanting to talk to Alex about what happened (even though she’s told it will further traumatize him) and then actually follows him home and when he turns out to live in a creepy house with all the windows covered in newspapers she parks her car down the street and basically stakes him out.

The story is divided into chapters that follow different characters, including Archer, who has more in common with Justine than he realizes. We can see it when he’s drawing lines on maps looking for patterns and knocking on doors asking to watch other grieving parents’ recordings from their Ring cameras. Both of them are assured that the police, under the leadership of Captain Ed (Toby Huss, COPSHOP) are going to find the answers but understandably don’t seem to buy it.

Each chapter tells us more about a character from the previous ones, gives us new context to some of the other incidents, moves the characters and story threads closer toward connecting. The one I didn’t see coming follows James (Austin Abrams, THE KINGS OF SUMMER), a squirrely junkie who lives in a tent in the woods, first seen in the story as a panhandler, later gets involved when Paul catches him trying to break into a building. He’s the saddest character but also the funniest and maybe the most important because he (spoiler) stumbles across the missing kids during a burglary. I mean maybe Justine would’ve been obsessed enough to break into that house eventually but it took an even more serious addiction to push things along.

THIS IS THE PARAGRAPH OF MAJOR SPOILERS. In a story like this there’s a risk that it’s eerie/scary/intriguing when you have no idea what happened but becomes corny/dumb/disappointing when you find out the answer. That’s kinda how I felt about LONGLEGS, but not about this one. I guess one difference is that I thought LONGLEGS was creepy when I didn’t think it was supernatural, this one you kinda figure up front that the situation is too weird for a logical explanation. So I was all-in for the kids being in a trance in a basement under the spell of Alex’s eccentric great aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan, STREETS OF FIRE, ANTLERS), in some kind of scheme to consume their youth. As different adults discover her whole deal she magically enslaves them and can use them as, you know, weapons. When she snaps their little wands made of thorns and blood and personal items they get set loose like Jet Li in UNLEASHED. Not that I’m super familiar with Madigan, but I did not recognize her. She makes Gladys an unusual horror villain with at least three stages: 1. weird old woman face seen in scary flashes and nightmares 2. mean old witch who is not a good person to have looking after kids 3. public-facing goofball representing the family and pretending everything is fine. The lady in Hansel and Gretel never had to get dressed up to go meet with the principal.

Director of photography Larkin Seiple did a bunch of music videos and EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE – compared to that his work here is obviously gonna seem subdued, but there’s definitely some invention in there. Cregger has a directorial confidence I like: lots of interesting camera angles and moves and match cuts that rarely feel very flashy or indulgent, except for the musical montage of the children running away, but that’s a perfect type of indulgence, announcing “okay, this is not like some Blumhouse ghost movie or something, we’re gonna mess around a little.” Soon Justine distracts herself and us from the horrors at hand with her messy life and I never thought “okay, let’s get back to it” because seeing her get into trouble for her personal decisions completely unrelated to the missing children is also a thrill.

This fits a favorite story template of mine: it goes all over the place for a while and then it’s a surprise how perfectly everything fits together at the end. I went to the pretty well attended 2:17 pm (get it?) Thursday show at a multiplex, and though there was one nerd bloviating about internal logic and long term plans during the end credits the rest of us were quite won over. In the last stretch when things really got ripping there were many guffaws and even some genuine applause – I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that kind of loud reaction at a Thursday matinee before. I definitely was not thinking about Paul Thomas Anderson during this movie, but a the climax I was thinking of Sam Raimi, some RAISING ARIZONA (you’ll see), some DAY OF THE DEAD. I love a movie that can have such funny verbal and physical comedy while still feeling completely serious about its world and its characters and its horror. Shit hitting the fan in a way that gets big laughs but not at the expense of intensity – just an exhilarating release of mayhem and resolution. The good stuff.

Some of my friends have read some timely symbolism into it, and I like their interpretations. There’s definitely something there about the oldest generations holding the youth and their futures hostage and their parents’ generation being incapable of saving them. But I want to note that none of that occurred to me until it was pointed out, so I’m not high on some “here’s a horror movie for our times” kinda shit. It’s also just a good one. BARBARIAN wasn’t a fluke. By the way release that one on disc you weirdos, what the fuck are you doing?

P.S. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER. One of my favorite parts was when James kept getting up over and over and Archer just kept picking him up and tossing him across the room.