Weaponsis a film that shapeshifts before your eyes. That’s both the strength and weakness of directorZach Cregger’s follow-up to his smash hitBarbarian,which sees him circling similar thematic territory as he indicts the manufactured comfort of suburbia. If his 2022 film was a patient and unsettling dismantling of that safety.Weaponsrips the band-aid off with primal glee, as Cregger exposes the latent terrors underneath the fences of artifice in a much more expansive and sprawling way. It’s a big swing, with an outrageous ending that provides hysterically vicious catharsis. But its propulsive momentum is often at odds with the more patient story Cregger seems to want to tell, resulting in a film that feels less than the sum of its many exciting parts.
Part of what givesWeaponsits disjointed feel is that its central story is fractured across six chapters, with each segment dedicated to a different member of its ensemble cast. The film opens with a chilling voiceover that places us in its central mystery: A suburb is struck by tragedy when school teacher Justine Grady (Julia Garner) goes to her classroom on a random Wednesday morning, only to find one student, Alex (Cary Christopher), alone in the room. Through monitoring various Ring cameras, we learn that at 2:17 AM, the 17 other students woke up and ran off into the night, with no clue as to where they might have gone.
The Senselessness of Loss
A contingent of parents led by Archer (Josh Brolin) is outraged at Justine, believing that she was either directly responsible for their children’s disappearance or was careless about protecting them (“You’re either negligent or complicit,” a parent accuses). As with all tragedies in America, the mourning period is truncated in favor of going back to business as usual. And while life resumes for most of the town, there are a few who are determined to get to the heart of these disappearances. Justine and Archer are driven to take the investigation into their own hands, kickstarting the film’s first couple of acts.
Weaponsdeploys genre staples in measured bits throughout each segment. But it works best when it allows its characters to feel the weight of their emotions, namely the inconsolable grief of losing a child. Leading up to the film’s release, some speculated that it served as an allegory for the aftermath of a school shooting; interestingly, Cregger has emphatically distanced himself from that take, insisting that there’s nothing “political” about his movie. That’s both hilarious and rueful given the iconography and archetypes he’s playing with here, from corrupt cops abusing their power to emotionally closed-off parents who give their kids a blueprint for bullying.
Regardless of how one chooses to read the film, whatWeapons gets right is depicting characters imperfectly processing insurmountable loss. There’s certain pain that can’t ever be explained away, and whose aftermath leaves victims desiccated, desperately trying to make meaning where there is none.Weaponsexplores how we build our lives in such a way that we don’t allow ourselves to feel the senselessness of certain types of grief and loss. While characters like Justine, Archer and school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) try to solve the mystery, their workaholism is framed as an inability to sit with trauma. And their drive to fix the issue, while understandable, only makes things worse for themselves and the town.Weaponsis at its most emotionally potent when it simply turns its sights onto characters who have to grapple with the loss of control, realizing there’s no protocol for their strand of anguish.
Meditative Pacing Clashes with Horror Thrills
You can feel this movie fighting itself. It wants to bask and ruminate, but it also has to answer to horror fans who came not for thrills, not meditation. Those two directives are fundamentally at odds with each other, and you can feel this in the film’s pacing. It speeds things up when it should slow down, and it often grinds to a halt when we’re in the midst of something exciting.
Some chapters blend nicely into each other, such as one focusing on Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), a police officer who is in pursuit of a burglar named Anthony (Austin Abrams). But each new chapter seems to come right as the previous one was getting somewhere interesting, often setting us back several days. There’s some inherent intrigue that comes with novelty, but thisGroundhog Day-esque touch-and-go becomes tedious to sit through.
It’s when Cregger allows the horror to get patient that he’s able to conjure nerve-shredding paranoia. (The scare that will stay lodged in this reviewer for a long time is an unbroken take involving a sleeping woman, an open car door and an assailant shambling forth slowly with scissors.) Cregger is a master of patient terror, twisting the knife so delicately we barely realize it’s lodged its way inside, handle and all. The film could have used more of these sequences. Coupled with a ludicrous ending that’s sure to go down as one of 2025’s best set pieces, these horror scenes makeWeaponshard to look away from. It may not hit every target, but the ones it does, it pierces with poise.
