Movie Review
Weapons
Directed by Zach Cregger
MTRCB Rating: R-16
FIRST OF ALL: Weapons is easily the best horror in 2025 to date, an ingeniously written, inventively shot and staged film written and directed by Zach Cregger, whose debut feature Barbarian was also an inventive ingenious horror written and directed back in 2022.
All that out of the way — WARNING: plot and surprise twists discussed in close and explicit detail!
First thing that strikes you is the fairly unusual script — not for Cregger the trope of the brave young woman caught in a perilous situation; in an interview he recounts how he had started with something similar in Barabarian (girl arrives late one stormy night at a Detroit Airbnb only to find it already occupied by creepy young man) was immediately bored with the limited possibilities and wondered how he could change things up. In his case the solution was both simple and radical: he shifted perspective and brought in someone new.
With Weapons he ups the ante: Justine (Julia Garner) comes to class only to find all her students absent save Alex (Cary Christopher); the community is upset and angry at the disappearance of their children and blame Justine; she naturally feels motivated to find out what had happened, and perhaps make sure Alex is all right.
Cregger follows Justine’s thread far as it goes then pivots to follow someone else’s; the result is a tapestry that captures the mood and personality of an entire town, or a surprisingly wide sample of its citizenry.
He’s cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia with its multi-character, multi-narrative script as inspiration, but I submit an equally relevant influence is, of all things, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, where the strands of various characters are woven together to execute a racetrack heist — here you see the same rewinding back to a previous event, the same retelling an incident from a different point of view, the way discrete moving parts come together to form a complex whole — not this time the mechanism of a tightly planned robbery but of a haphazardly staged crime investigation, where there’s the added suspense of which eventually succeeds, the coverup or the investigation (for much of the picture it’s pretty much neck-and-neck). The lucky breaks, the unlucky accidents, the sometimes surreal way things can come together or unravel — Cregger hooks you and drags you along, wanting to know not just what happened but how it happened and why, arguably the most primal appeal of the art of storytelling.
But it isn’t just all about story, which is impressive enough; the characters engage. Justine has the clenched jaw look of someone who suffered a traumatic ache, got blamed for it, and is determined to prove the whole community wrong; Archer (Josh Brolin), business owner and father of one of the vanished, has the more haunted look of someone who regrets not knowing what he had till it was taken from him (but still hasn’t learned all the lessons — Cregger leaves the suggestion, unresolved, that Archer is responsible for a sophomoric act of vandalism on Justine); Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) is a sad sack cop with an impulsively heavy fist who can’t stay away from Justine (they meet for the odd hookup), keeps getting in trouble (he’s really dating his superior’s daughter and tiptoes round the boss’ good side); local druggie James (Austin Abrams) is equally funny as a professional leaf on a wind and Paul’s occasional punching bag; Marcus (Benedict Wong) is amusingly beleaguered as Justin’s school-principal boss and constant defender to the angry parents.
Cregger doesn’t quite see his people as plot functions; each has their points of view, their varying predicaments, their sometimes foolish, sometimes cruel ways of dealing with each other; we view them, we laugh at their absurdities (in an interview Cregger noted that when he tried to write a deliberate joke it fell flat, but when he just let a character act according to his or her nature, the humor came across unforced and honest), we can’t help but be invested in what might happen to them.
The picture’s far from perfect. I’d like to have seen a more grounded form of witchcraft taking details from actual rituals — but I suppose Cregger would leave himself open to accusations of cultural appropriation or, worse, demonizing a niche sect (speaking strictly for myself, I’d love the publicity). The director strains credulity when he asks us to believe Alex can move around town unnoticed, buying bags of canned soup without his dad taking him in the family car (which he’d previously been seen doing), and stretches credulity even further when the police don’t dig deeper into Alex’s family circumstances considering he’s the only student left. I’d also note that while Cregger is deft at introducing and developing characters (even better, I submit, than ostensible role model Paul Thomas Anderson), he still hasn’t mastered the knack of granting them a suitable exit — Marcus in particular feels poorly served (Justine could at least pause a moment to mourn him, he seemed like a real if reluctantly supportive ally to her); same with Paul and James, who deserve to be in each others’ arms, if not at each others’ throats.
The film does have its memorable imagery, an essential for good perhaps great horror — mainly the way the kids flit into the night with arms spread out like, as someone pointed out, winged sycamore seeds, or, better yet, like cruise missiles dropped and winging their way to the preassigned target. I like the way it uses long sustained shots and unsettling staging and framing — motionless figures in the dark glimpsed at from the top of a stair for example — to ratchet up suspense. The film isn’t as off-kilter quirky visually as Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs — the flavor of some of Perkins Jr.’s compositions still linger on the tongue — but Cregger does show ability.
As the crucial Gladys, introduced late in the story (chillingly foreshadowed in one of Archer’s dream sequence), Amy Madigan goes full-on batshit complete with caked makeup and Stephen King clown fright wig — she’s clearly channeling Ruth Gordon’s Minnie Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby but can’t quite capture Gordon’s sly sense of humor (ambitious noteworthy attempt, though). I do think her ultimate fate is fully hilariously realized (and as for the complaint that the finale is more comedy than horror — Oh come on: Sam Raimi, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George Romero, Mario Bava, James Whale. Show a little intellectual flexibility).
Maybe the core performance of the film is Cary Christopher’s Alex — his story explains what’s going on and if you don’t fall for his character or feel his predicament the whole picture falls flat. I recognize Alex — have worked with him or kids like him before, the youth who finds himself in over his head, forced due to circumstances to step up and act as surrogate parent to people he cares for, sometimes operating below the radar of society. Kids like Alex are amazing — the strength, the resilience they show — but victims too; the term we have for them are “parentified children” and it’s not a (how do you put it?) superpower but a sustained and painful trauma, with lasting consequences; kids aren’t meant to be parents, they’re meant to be kids, to be as goofy as they need to be before sloughing it all off (or at least most of it) and assuming the mantle of responsibility. Cregger, to his credit, doesn’t cure everyone with a miraculous wave of the wand; some don’t start speaking again till years after, others are institutionalized — but what happened to Alex, you know from the look on his face, will stay with him for the rest of his life.