What frights await those who closely watch the panning camera in Zach Cregger’s 2025 horror movie,Weapons. The director of2022’s terrifying and unexpectedBarbarianis back again, and he’s picked up some nifty lessons in the intervening years. With his camera and his story, Cregger drags us along toward another hair-raising destination where there are plenty of scares, punctuated with jokes just funny enough for us to let our guard down before the next terrifying image grabs us.
Weaponsoperates inthe space between comedy and horror. Sometimes to great effect, like with theShawn of the Deads andEvil Deads of the world, and sometimes to ruin, like withPiranha 3DDorBride of Chucky. The key to finding a good middle ground is obvious: include “dead” in your title. However, if your film just has to be titled otherwise, then take a page out ofWeaponsand make sure that the jokes are strong but brief and scant.
Weapons Hints At Frightening Real World Tragedies, But Doesn’t Go Far Enough
The Creative Construction & Terrific Mystery Still Make For A Satisfactory Ride
While there are certainly moments of tension-relieving humor,Weaponsnever stops being a horror movie, moreScreamthanCabin in the Woods. For all the comparisons,Weaponsis a singular film. At 2:17 AM, one night in a quiet town, 17 children suddenly disappear. The only clue to what happened comes from videos taken by doorbell security systems. Grainy, silent playback recordings show children exiting their homes and fleeing into the woods, their arms outstretched as if they were birds ready to take a leap of faith on their first flight.
It’s a clever twist. Those ubiquitous cameras designed to protect inhabitants from menaces outside the home can only watch helplessly as their tiny wards flee out of frame. For all our fences, doors, cameras, and other security measures, can we do anything to protect our children? It’s an idea that swims quietly throughWeapons, though a bit too quietly. For all Cregger’s exceptional ability to conjure scares in any setting,what is most disquieting is the sight of a lone boy sitting in an empty classroom, with an adorned memorial to his missing classmates outside.
It’s an image that’s strikingly horrifying and dishearteningly familiar. This sinister metaphor is later punctuated when a gigantic assault rifle slowly appears out of the clouds above the home of one of the missing children. Cregger does not explore school violence in such a head-on way for the rest of the film. He instead chooses to focus on the effective scares and the mystery of where the kids have gone, which proves to be a properly disturbing web.
Weaponstells its story in vignettes following different inhabitants of the sleepy town. Each tale is introduced with a title card and the character’s name, beginning from around the same point in time, save in one notable case. A later “chapter” weaves around a previous one until the stories collide with a startling crash. It’s a good way to color in the neighborhood, and gives the excellent ensemble, which includes Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, and Benedict Wong, a chance to make us care before they face their fates.
Josh Brolin & Julia Garner Needed A Bit More Time Together For Us To Get Wrapped Up In Their Story
Brolin and Garner are the ostensible stars as Justine Gandy and Archer Graff. Archer is the grieving father of one of the lost children, and Justine was their school teacher, whom the entire town views with unveiled suspicion and rage. The only child who did not disappear that night is Alex Lilly, played with heartbreaking timidity by Cary Christopher. While Justine and Archer have the chance to make amends in some exciting sequences,I never quite got the feeling it was their story.
Instead,Weaponsis more Alex’s film, and he’s the only character who seems to undergo any sort of change.
Instead,Weaponsis more Alex’s film, and he’s the only character who seems to undergo any sort of change. We hear and see the problems with Justine and Archer. One’s a troubled alcoholic, and the other is so bereaved he can’t even say goodbye to his wife, but neither feels reconciled by the end. The “chapters” inWeaponsseparate us a bit too far from our characters, andI would have enjoyed more Scooby-Dooing by Archer and Justine. The sad, confused old dad and the sad, confused young educator make for a fun couple.
What we get instead is still quite great and quite gory. It’s not calledWeaponsfor nothing. Cregger’s camera pivots robotically, rotating around rooms to escape a horror in the den, only to be confronted by another in the kitchen. There’s a madcap, kinetic energy toWeaponsthat is wonderfully displayed in the preponderance of chase scenes inWeapons. We go under table legs and through shared bathrooms. It’s like we’re kids playing tag, and you don’t want to be “it”.
