“Weapons” Fires on All Cylinders

One of the most highly anticipated movies of the year, Zach Cregger’s sophomore solo directorial feature film, Weapons, is sure to take the film industry by storm upon its official wide release this week. Rumors of Weapons’ surety to satiate the appetite horror fans have for a movie that is both balls-to-the-wall and high concept have spread like wildfire since the release of the first teaser in April of this year. The miniscule taste of some truly chilling visuals coupled with the film’s Pied Piper-esque premise depicting a classroom of children who leave their homes and vanish into the night grabbed audiences’ attention. Tale of a bidding war for Cregger’s screenplay between Universal Pictures and the film’s eventual home, New Line Cinema, continued to add gasoline to the already burning word-of-mouth flames.

In fact, filmmaker and owner of MonkeyPaw Productions Jordan Peele, who took part in said bidding war in conjunction with Universal, even parted ways with two of his managers over losing out on the script—one of whom is also Cregger’s manager! Building upon momentum from Creggers’ 2022 debut Barbarian, Weapons is a fairly superior follow-up and it shockingly retains a relatively similar tone to its predecessor despite their trailers having quite distinct feels. Of all the details the two released trailers hide, the film’s dark comedy is among the most notable.

Let’s unpack the grim fairytale that is Weapons (2025) below. This is a movie that is truly best experienced knowing as little as possible going in, so I highly recommend seeing the film in theaters for yourself. Spoilers ahead:

What better place to start than with the film’s first gag-worthy moment? The majority of the marketing for Weapons, aside from the official description for the second trailer, cultivates the impression that the entire class of children goes missing. So when Julia Garner’s Ms. Gandy walks into her classroom the morning following the disappearance of her students, it is genuinely a shock to the system when there is actually one student in class. Even the shot itself is knowingly filmed as a big surprise: the one present student, Alex Lilly, is revealed as the camera moves behind Ms. Gandy. This, working in collaboration with the marketing itself, had me genuinely put off from the one detail I thought I knew about the movie when walking into the theatre. And it made me thrilled for more of the unexpected.

That being said, there are indeed no shortage of twists and turns that are deliciously meted out with an effective precision one cannot help but marvel at. The screenplay is certainly the standout component of the entire production (not to dismiss the many other fine elements at work) for a slew of reasons. Weapons is framed as an epic dark American fairytale, opening with a child’s gloomily nonchalant recount of the events that will unfold. This prologue is reminiscent of the prefaces often given before classic campfire tales, reminding us that some stories are passed down through generations purely by memory and spoken word between parties, which ironically mirrors the same phenomenon that has already garnered the film much acclaim! Most of the rest of the story is told in a series of segments, each following a single character’s experience of the film’s events all the way from Ms. Gandy to Alex Lilly. Each “book” in this epic, with the exception of Alex’s, becomes shorter and shorter in terms of screen time; but they also go deeper and deeper into the chronological events of the film, constructing a fascinating pace that turns out to be the perfect vehicle to deliver information with maximum effect. The mystery is set up so exquisitely that by the time the runtime arrives to Alex’s perspective, you are rabid for answers. And answers you get, in a truly devastating segment that fully displays the abject horrors the poor kid has been subjected to since his Aunt Gladys came to town.

This unique, and surely incredibly difficult to construct, narrative structure sets up for one of the most physically cathartic and rewarding endings in any film. Ever. Full stop. Much of Cregger’s genius on display here is in the form of his ability to manipulate tension. You are in the palm of his hands, akin to the allegorical gullible child hanging on every word his camp counselor tells over the fire. And while there are absolutely other moments of release, nothing compares to the thrilling sensation of watching those 17 possessed children chase the film’s ultimate antagonist, Alex’s witchy Aunt Gladys, through multiple houses until they can catch her and literally rip her apart, rendering her a series of fleshy chunks strewn across a well-manicured lawn. I had to resist the urge to stand and cheer like I was watching my favorite football team (if I had one) get a pick-six (if I knew what that was).

Genuinely, there is no shortage of compliments to give this film. The sound design is stellar and seamlessly integrated with the direction. The visual style is distinct and cohesive, and the performances knock it out of the park. Garner is of course a force in her character of Ms. Gandy, who proved to be far more dynamic and, frankly, unlikable than expected, in the best of ways. The trailers give the impression that Ms. Gandy is wholesome, innocent, and keen on finding her students amidst being wrongfully blamed by her town for the tragic disappearance of her students. While much of this is true, we come to see that Ms. Gandy is far from a saint. Beyond her poor decision-making, she is also frankly kind of insufferable—perfectly so. We are forced to reckon with the fact that she is just as deserving of sympathy for her misappropriated suffering, even if she has a terrible personality!

But I could speak at length about any and every one of these performances. Josh Brolin is heartbreaking, Amy Madigan is so felicitously freaky I mistook her for Kathryn Hunter, and Alex Lilly’s child actor Cary Christopher exudes a quiet and controlled terror most actors his age could never come close to. The cast of Weapons was actually almost quite different, with Pedro Pascal, Renate Reinsve, Brian Tyree Henry, and Tom Burke initially being cast in Brolin, Garner, Benedict Wong, and Alden Ehrenreich’s roles, but all four actors had to drop out due to production delays caused by the industry strikes in 2023. That being said, the film’s final ensemble clearly understood Cregger’s assignment, and they all aced it.

I mean it when I say there is only one singular moment in the entire film’s runtime that I could not buy into. It is so minute that I would almost rather ignore it, but it was unfortunately such a bizarre choice that I cannot. Dream sequences are fairly heavily featured, and one such sequence depicts Brolin’s grieving father figure, Archer Graff, searching for his missing son. He stumbles upon a house and spots a mysterious floating gun above it that reads “2:17,” the same time his son and all the other students left their homes. There was speculation online that Weapons would be an allegory for the misaligned blame hurled in the wake of American tragedies such as school shootings, and in many ways, it is. However, upon seeing this image, it seemed as if things might take a turn for the ham-fisted and boring. Luckily, that strand is pretty much just left there, and the film returns to its much more interesting path.

While Weapons may have been more straightforward than some wanted, it deserves to be commended for doing what it does achieve so excellently. A solid meditation on grief, a truly captivating mystery, and a fairly complex interpersonal drama are all contained within these 128 minutes. There is a comedy in the outrageous that harkens back to Barbarian, but is even more refined and strategic here. And as mentioned, the suspense-building at work is like no other. The version of this film with bloated thematic constructions stuffed in through the seams would not be half the experience that the final cut is. That version is how we get more floating gun dream sequences and we hate the floating gun dream sequence. But we love Weapons. Go see it in theaters this weekend.

Gabe Ozaki is an actor, writer, and film critic. He is based in Chicago.