Movie Review: Weapons

Thanks to the success that Jordan Peele found making horror films after a successful career in sketch comedy, it’s been astutely observed that the two genres demand some similar skills from their directors. Both jokes and scares can rely heavily on timing and framing to be successful on screen, so it makes sense that being adept at one would translate to talent for the other. Further proving the point, Zach Cregger, once of The Whitest Kids U’Know, delivered a memorable shocker in 2022 with Barbarian and has now followed it up with Weapons, showing that the success of his debut was no fluke.

Teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) finds herself the target of public ire after all but one of the students in her third-grade classroom vanishes one night, with Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the children, being especially vicious about it. As a result, one month after the disappearances her boss Principal Miller (Benedict Wong) puts her on leave. As one would imagine she is not coping well and, after spending a drunken night with her alcoholic ex-boyfriend and local police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), she begins to try to reach out to the only one of her students who didn’t go missing, Alex (Cary Christopher) as she tries to piece together exactly what happened.

To say anything more would be doing you a disservice, as half the fun of Weapons comes from trying to figure out what’s happening for yourself. Structured similarly to Doug Liman’s Go, the story is broken into chapters that each focus on the perspective of one key character, letting us see different viewpoints on shared events while also doling out new information we can use to puzzle out the core mystery of what happened to all the missing students. This is not a typical horror film, as Cregger almost entirely eschews the usual genre tropes and instead uses increasingly odd events to gradually generate tension and unease.

The cast is superb, taking characters that are often not that developed beyond the machinations of the plot and getting us to care enough for them that their fates can be deeply affecting, and some of what befalls these people is every bit as heartbreaking as it is unsettling. The ways that some in the community can be so quick to pass blame without evidence in order to cope with something inexplicable feels like a mirror to modern society, as does the pain of being forced to watch your friends or loved ones be radically changed by outside forces.

I was already impressed by Barbarian, but Cregger has really outdone himself here. Right from the eerie opening sequence set to George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” it is clear that we’re watching something special, a notion that is only reinforced again and again as the movie goes on. Calling to mind classics like Magnolia and Donnie Darko and featuring some of 2025’s most memorable imagery this film manages to stand out in what has already proven to be a great year for horror. With its unique premise and a smart script that offers up just the right amount of answers while keeping the audience on edge for its entire two-hour runtime, this will be remembered as an instant genre classic. ★★★★★