Zach Cregger’s Weapons opens with something bizarre enough to give pause. At exactly 2:17 AM, in a neat Pennsylvania suburb where nothing ever seems to happen, seventeen children get out of bed, walk to their front doors, and slip into the night with their arms stretched wide, like silent little airplanes slicing across manicured lawns in the dark. They don’t come back. Only one child from Justine Gandy’s third-grade class remains, and no one can explain why.
The premise feels on the precipice of tipping over into Brothers Grimm territory, and Cregger — whose Barbarian was a madcap, claustrophobic trip through an Airbnb from hell — seems to relish in bringing this horrific modern fairy tale to life. Where Barbarian was spring-loaded with shocks around every corner, Weapons is more like a locked puzzle box, and every turn of the key feels deliberate and designed to make you lean in.
Cregger breaks the story into chapters, each from the perspective of someone in Maybrook whose life is tilting off its axis. Julia Garner’s Justine is pale, quietly drowning in vodka, and taking the brunt of the town’s suspicion. Josh Brolin’s Archer is a broad-shouldered, broad-voiced father whose grief has hardened into anger, much of it aimed directly at Justine. There’s also Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a moustached cop with a messy personal life; the gentle school principal Andrew (Benedict Wong); and Anthony (Austin Abrams), a twitchy, half-charming junkie with the survival instincts of a cornered rat.
A still from ‘Weapons’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros.
Each chapter rewinds the clock, replaying moments we’ve already seen but from a different angle, including a shouting match at a school meeting, a vandalised car, and glimpses into a creepy house. The Roshomon Effect warps the shift in perspective to uncover the mystery. Details we thought we understood slide into different meanings as we start to unravel the knot.
For a while, Weapons has the same tense, lived-in air as something like Prisoners, with its slow pans, watchful silences, and a brooding score that vibrates in your chest. Larkin Seiple’s camera hovers and drifts, sometimes leaning in on faces like an eavesdropper over a conversation. Cregger uses the space well, letting his actors stretch out. Garner wears her character’s exhaustion and anxiety like an extra layer of skin. Brolin plays grief as a kind of muscle memory, and his every movement feels heavy with unfinished business. Ehrenreich’s Paul looks permanently hungover from alcohol and bad decisions.
Right when the seriousness starts to calcify, Aunt Gladys arrives. Hidden under sloppily drawn lipstick and one eye disturbingly smaller than the other, Amy Madigan’s Gladys flips the tension towards a gleeful sense of derangement, and suddenly the laughs, which had been tentative until now, start bursting through. From here on, the film starts to shed its skin, letting the horror and comedy bleed into one another until they’re hard to tell apart.
Weapons (English)
Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, and Amy Madigan
Runtime: 128 minutes
Storyline: When all but one child from the same classroom mysteriously vanish on the same night at the same time, a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance
Cregger has a gift for letting absurdity coexist with dread rather than breaking the tension outright. Abrams’s Anthony, for example, has a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, and his twitchy opportunism turns a tense police encounter into something almost vaudevillian. And Madigan’s lopsided eyes and vaguely satanic Mary Poppins energy turn scenes into surreal gothic comedy sketches without letting you fully unclench. The humour is on a pressure valve, but it’s simultaneously also an accelerant that makes the violence that follows land harder, because you were just laughing.
Though not all of Cregger’s gambles land. The eventual reveal, of what’s been pulling the strings and what happened to the children, feels smaller than the possibilities the film’s first hour suggested. Where Barbarian used its reveals to open trapdoors beneath us, Weapons narrows its scope and tightens the story just when you want it to keep expanding. When the gore finally ramps up, it’s delightfully over-the-top and will scratch the itch for genre fans, but it doesn’t quite hit on anything deeper. Still, Cregger is a natural at building moments that live in that uncomfortable uncanny valley, and a throwaway glimpse of those little airplane arms in the dark has the same staying power as a ghost story.
A still from ‘Weapons’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros.
There’s also a hum of subtext if you care to tune into it. Maybrook’s finger-pointing and its desperate need to affix blame somewhere feels emblematic of real-world panic. It could be read as a glance at small-town paranoia, and the ease with which fear curdles into mob logic, or even at America’s current talent for turning unexplainable events into elaborate, weaponised conspiracy. Cregger doesn’t underline these echoes, yet the resonance is pulsing just beneath the genre mechanics.
Throughout, Cregger delivers his scares with a sadist’s timing, but it’s the way he stitches dread into the mundane and lets it detonate without warning that makes Weapons such an exhilarating experience. By the end, you’ve either been holding your breath or grinning away, because this is what the genre looks like when it’s in the hands of someone having an indecent amount of fun.
Weapons is precise where it counts, and it earns its place as one of the year’s sharpest, most satisfying horror films. And just like Barbarian, it’s the kind you’d probably want to recommend immediately, with a wicked smile and no details at all.
Weapons is currently running in theatres
