Atmospheric and cleverly written, Zach Cregger’s eerie thriller Weapons follows through on the promise the writer-director showed with his first film, Barbarian. While similar in a lot of ways – both positive and negative – Weapons marks a stylistic and narrative step forward for Cregger following his cult hit debut. A movie that slowly and surely looks to unravel a mystery that leaves an entire community traumatized and baffled, Weapons takes a character based approach to horror cinema that’s satisfying and narratively interesting. Not all of it works, and as a whole its kind of a mess, but when it comes to making the right choices at the perfect times, Weapons hits the mark more often than it misses.
Weapons opens with a tense meeting between the staff at small town Maybrook Elementary and concerned parents one month after an unusual, unexplained, and unsolved tragedy occurred. One night, at precisely 2:17 am, seventeen children woke up, left their homes, and were never seen again. Outside of some security camera footage that saw the kids leaving, no one knows where any of them went and leads are scarce. The only thing linking the seventeen missing kids is that they all belonged to the same third grade class, overseen by new teacher in town Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). Thanks to some past indiscretions and the obvious role she played in her students’ lives, many parents of the missing kids – particularly the dogged and grief stricken Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) – blame Justine for the disappearances. Despite no evidence to prove Justine had any role in the bizarre incident, she’s treated like a guilty person. The other person caught in the middle of the maelstrom is young Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the only student in Ms. Gandy’s class who didn’t take off from home in the middle of the night.
Like Barbarian, Weapons is built around a time shifting structure that fills in details about the larger picture when they would pay the biggest dividends and deliver greater shocks and a-ha moments. Weapons is divided up into chapters that looks at the story from the perspective of a different character each time, starting with Justine and Archer, then branching off in different directions before coming back to the viewpoint of the one piece of the puzzle that feels the most obvious to examine. The who and the how behind the disappearance of the kids is always in question until closer to the climax, but there’s still a bit of predictability when it comes to figuring out where Weapons is going to ultimately end up, like a big neon sign that’s pointing in only one direction while Cregger is doing everything in his power to distract from that.
The non-linear chapter structure certainly lends itself well to big reveals, deep personalities, and shocking moments, but it also makes Weapons into a film that feels longer than its already bloated and indulgent 127 running time. After strong opening salvos that introduce the viewer to Garner’s intricately layered and interesting protagonist and Brolin’s surly, myopic, but still somewhat sympathetic father, Weapons falls into a rut by focusing on increasingly less detailed side characters who are only on hand to act as conduits to bigger revelations. There’s a recovering alcoholic cop (Alden Ehrenreich), a vagabond drug addict (Austin Abrams), and the school’s principal (Benedict Wong) all in the mix, but outside of giving the film some more humorous asides (some involving the homeless man being in borderline poor taste) and jump scares, all of these threads could be cut from the film without damaging anything. All the actors in the middle portion of Weapons give great performances, but they serve a plot that doesn’t need any of them on hand for the main characters to reach their final conclusions. In a film that’s promising to built to a violent, gory conclusion (as prefaced by the little kid narrating the story), it turns out that Cregger’s own structure is where the overkill lies here. With only a couple of tweaks to the script, Weapons could lop thirty minutes off its running time and still be a good movie.
Whenever the focus remains on Garner, Brolin, Christopher, or Amy Madigan (playing a character too great to spoil here and giving a downright award-worthy performance), Weapons is at its absolute best. Cregger’s ruminating on shared trauma and small town gossip is nicely detailed, even in the film’s slower moments. While the motivations behind the film’s grand reveal are vague and up to interpretation, everything in Weapons does link up nicely, meaning even the superfluous bits that slow things down remain entertaining and worthy of viewer investment. Cregger’s love of the kind of murky, dimly lit, low light, late night cinematography that has become cliche at this point in cinema and television is frustrating to see, but as a director, he sure knows how to use silence, music, and sudden jolts of adrenaline perfectly. For every individual thing Weapons does wrong, it’s doing three other things exceptionally well.
Viewers might be puzzled by the slow start of Weapons, but the story crafted by Cregger is the cinematic equivalent of a paperback page turner. With only two features under his belt, Cregger isn’t becoming only a master of horror, but a master of mystery; someone capable of weaving deceptively intricate stories that sneak up on the viewer even after they think they have everything figured out. Despite being irked by elements of Weapons and a feeling like the film was dragging things out in an over indulgent manner, I can’t say I ever stopped wondering where Cregger was heading next or how he was going to get to the film’s conclusion. I knew what I was watching wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly creative and keeping my attention. Some might get antsy with the slow burn approach of Weapons, but all of that trepidation should go out the window once Cregger launches into his full force finale that will give viewers the gore, scares, and uncomfortable laughs they came for.
Weapons opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, August 8, 2025.
