Up late: A child takes flight in ‘Weapons’.

WEAPONS **** (129 minutes) MA
All we demand of any mystery movie is to keep us firmly locked is an ever-ascending spiral of befuddlement until the denouement drops. 

Here, writer/director Zach Cregger, hot from the 2022 horror hit Barbarian, honours the finest traditions of the genre with the outstanding, sensational horror mystery thriller Weapons, a dark suburban opus meticulously designed to keep you wondering at every twist and turn what the heck is going on. 

One bright morning in the type of middle American township so favoured by Stephen King – to whom Cregger openly acknowledges a huge debt – teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) turns up to find all but one pupil in her class is missing.

Seems they all got out of bed at 2.17am and disappeared into the night, their arms outstretched as though they were about to take off.

With the parents of the missing demanding answers, all hostile attention falls upon the hapless Justine, now the subject of constant harassment and abuse.

Though it’s far from the first time the devise has been deployed, Cregger cleverly unpeels the mystery from several overlapping viewpoints, so there’s lots of tantalising moments where odd things that happen in one chapter are explained later on as things slowly begin to add up.

It’s exquisitely done, commanding your full attention from the get go as the mystery deepens and questions defy answers.

To buy into all this we must, of course, make reasonable allowances. There aren’t many but one or two common-sense lapses might cause minor irritation to plot pedants. Still, the piece is so well-directed it’s not a huge ask to grant a pass to such matters.

With a generous smattering of finely judged moments of humour, Cregger delivers a compelling, mesmeric horror tale full of suspense that also abides by its genre obligation to let the gore flow when needed.

In a way, the film serves as perfect counter-programming in a cluttered movie firmament, offering the precise inverse of the experience most filmgoers endure at the multiplexes. Rather than knowing how things will pan out in most films, Weapons is dedicated to doing the opposite.

And it succeeds superbly.

FREAKIER FRIDAY **1/2 (111 minutes) PG
Sometimes while watching a film a reviewer’s mind will split in two. 

One part will respect how well a film is working, how cleverly it is put together and acknowledge the skill with which the makers have fashioned the work to appeal to the mass market.

The other part will quietly whine and suffer as it witnesses, for the umpteenth time, a successful film formula being squeezed with atomic force to extract one more title to an aged franchise.

If there, indeed, is a personal Hell awaiting the hapless reviewer in the Hereafter, it is surely being forever strapped to a cinema seat, Clockwork Orange-like, and being forced to watch such a film play on for all eternity.

This is what watching Freakier Friday felt like. 

A sequel to the 2003 mother-daughter body-switch comedy with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis – itself spawned from the 1976 Jodie Foster-Barbara Harris and based on the book by Mary Rodgers – we now have Lindsay as single mother Anna to bratty teenage daughter Harper (Julia Butters).

This time around, she body swaps with her daughter while Tess (Jamie Lee) swaps with Lily (Sophia Hammons), who is the daughter of Lindsay’s fiancé Eric (Manny Jacinto).

So, there’s a heap of fun step-sister bitching and all the usual stuff about seeing beyond your own prejudices by experiencing things from somebody else’s perspective thus punching all the chestnut Disney family film themes about empathy and love and respect and, of course, family values all of which neatly clicks in to Disney’s post-woke shift back to the homespun basics on which the mega-corporation has long relied for viewers of its content and ticket buyers to its theme parks. (Yes, that was one sentence.)

Yet to a Jurassic journo who has sat through more than anybody’s fair share of franchise extenders, the film was a special form of torture. Fortunately, such dissenting reactions are wholly irrelevant with a mathematically devised crowd-pleaser such as this.

Watching Freakier Friday with a packed preview audience on Tuesday night that laughed on cue to every gag and bought in to every pluck of the emotional heartstrings, it is impossible not to admire such knowing mass-market artistry while simultaneously squirming with tedium, a product of having seen the formula unspool a thousand times too often.

With the inevitable pending success of this epic, in which Lindz and Jamie Lee had a hand in producing, one can but brace for the grievous bodily impact of Freakiest Friday, in which we shall no doubt witness even more multiplications and permutations of the ever-reliable body-swap comedy device.

One hopes at least that such an event would make a little room for a cameo from Jodie. That’d be sweet.