Review: Weapons (2025)

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When a horror movie about a mass loss of children has a prominent nightmare visual of a giant AR-15 floating above a home, you know the filmmaker is a bit of a prankster. Weapons, the new horror mystery hit from Barbarian filmmaker Zach Cregger, taps into the potent subconscious of our modern world, with themes, teases, and visuals that identify a collective wound and press down on it for maximum effect. It also once again demonstrates that Cregger’s narrative approach is borrowed from sketch comedy, where scenarios build and twist before he can land the inevitable punchline. It’s a canny approach to horror, as both horror and comedy circumvent reason and play directly to a viewer’s emotional thinking. Thus, it’s no wonder that Weapons isn’t entirely credible in its resolution; it’s taking big swings without thinking much of the result. That said, it’s effective and frequently startling, both as horror and as cultural examination.

The film begins with a prologue that depicts the inciting incident: one night in a town in Pennsylvania, 17 children from a single classroom open up their front doors, run into the street, and disappear into the dark. With his camera placed low to the ground and moving perpendicular to the action, Cregger cuts between one child after another running into the street with their arms straight back like an airplane (or like the so-called Naruto running pose). It’s a startling visual, perhaps with the potential to become iconic based on the film’s enormous commercial and critical success. The prologue is also narrated by an unknown small girl who tells it like a cross between a fairy tale (the Pied Piper of Hamlin is the obvious connection) and a noteworthy bit of local history. The performer, Scarlett Sher, never appears in the movie, and so we never really comprehend who this little girl is who’s telling us this story. Nevertheless, her unaffected delivery establishes a dreamy tone right from the start—the raw, sheer childishness of the narration is reminiscent of the voicework in A Charlie Brown Christmas or the girl in M83’s effective song, “Raconte-moi une histoire.” It all adds up to an opening that works gangbusters as a microfilm in itself, tapping into a brilliant conceit that contains so much mystery and dread about our modern world. Does the film pay off the promise of the opening? Like Barbarbian, yes and no.

Weapons is a film of tonal ambition and formal dexterity, but its themes are deliberately ambiguous, perhaps even muddled. The narrative structure is borrowed from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, with different chapters, identified by a title card with the POV character’s name, following different characters through the aftermath of this nightmarish scenario. After the prologue, we first follow Justine (Julia Garner), the young teacher of the classroom of kids who disappeared. The kids’ parents blame her for what happened, identifying her as the common thread in this tragedy. We watch Justine grapple with the aftermath and fixate on Alex (Cary Christopher), the sole child from her classroom who did not disappear. Once her story brings us to an inflection point, we move onto Archer (Josh Brolin), one of the parents of the missing kids, then Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a cop and Justine’s ex-boyfriend, and so on and so forth.

Each chapter brings us closer to a resolution to the narrative, but like a true comedian, Cregger refuses the punchline at the end of each individual segment, rather teasing out the possibilities of what happened and playing games with how all these characters are circling the truth without ever hitting the bullseye. Inevitably, we learn more of what happened than any individual character does, and so our knowledge fuels much of the dramatic tension, where we know something bad is likely to happen as characters move further into their investigations, much like we know it’s a bad idea to go down into the mysterious basement of Barbarian.

Weapons is also frequently hilarious, with tonal twists and turns that match its narrative ones. The middle section of Barbarian was notably comic in tone, essentially playing as a comic inversion of the opening section. No chapter of Weapons might be as consistently comic, but it does weave humour into the dread, gags into the gore, wielding character climaxes as sick punchlines. Its repeated visuals, whether the airplane arms of the kids or a clown rictus that rears its head in nightmares, teeter on the absurd and play as funny or scary depending on what Cregger wants to do in the scene.

The performers are also game here and do well with the shifting tone and uneasy narrative ground. I was particularly impressed by Julia Garner’s vulnerability as Justine. She strikes a nice balance between self-righteous indignation and frustrated self-destruction, never devolving into pure victimhood or playing too hard for the audience’s sympathy. A bar scene between her and Ehrenreich is an apt showcase for her good work. Brolin and others are sturdy as well. Ehrenreich is perhaps the funniest of the bunch, taking the Justin Long role, in a way (although Long shows up in a cameo as one of the parents of the missing kids).

Like the characters themselves in their pursuit of the truth of what is happening, I keep circling around the question of whether Weapons is remarkable as a unified work despite having many remarkable elements. Part of this is that I don’t want to give away its narrative reveals for those who haven’t watched it yet—this is a movie that plays better the less you know going in. As well, so much of its shortcomings are tied to its resolution. Is this to say the narrative resolution is disappointing? Somewhat, not so much in what it implies, but in how straightforward it seems in retrospect.

Like Magnolia with its rainstorm of frogs and its formal approach that weaponizes the steadicam to showcase its director’s ambitions, Weapons similarly bites off more than it can chew, outpacing its director’s ability to keep everything in balance. Moments don’t land. Some of the narrative collisions are a bit cute. The leaps in logic are a bit wider than they were in Barbarian. But there’s also much to like here. Weapons is compelling, creepy, occasionally even chilling. It’s original and bold without being sloppy, which is saying a lot in our current cinema environment. With two films, Zach Cregger has made himself the new Jordan Peele or M. Night Shyamalan: a horror prankster whose showmanship and technical skill is worth the price of admission.

7 out of 10

Weapons (2025, USA)

Written and directed by Zach Cregger; starring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, Toby Huss, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan.

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