Review: Weapons

Zach Cregger’s Weapons opens with a sequence so haunting, so strange in its stillness, that it feels ripped from the pages of a dream you’re only half-sure you had. At 2:17 a.m., seventeen children from the same third-grade class rise from their beds and vanish into the night, walking, not running, their arms held out like sleepwalking airplanes slicing through the dark fog. The only child left behind is Alex, a boy too quiet, too small, and perhaps too lucky to be missed. It’s a jaw-dropper of a prologue, not just because of its mystery, but because it announces Weapons as the rare horror film that fully commits to the art of suggestion, only to pull that rug from under you, douse it in kerosene, and light it on fire.

This time, the horror isn’t hidden beneath a Detroit Airbnb, but in the cheery cul-de-sacs and PTA meetings of suburban Maybrook. As the town reels from the disappearances, we meet Justine Gandy (Julia Garner, brittle and terrific), the children’s teacher, who becomes the prime suspect for no reason other than proximity and the feverish need of grieving parents to find a target. Chief among them is Josh Brolin’s Archer Graff, a man whose cowboy stoicism barely conceals the cracks forming under the pressure of loss. Brolin is a blunt instrument of fury and helplessness, a kind of small-town Captain Ahab, thrashing against the unknowable.

What sets Weapons apart from its genre peers is structure. Rather than following one protagonist through a typical three-acts, Cregger splinters the narrative into six chapters, each from a different perspective, each nudging us closer to a terrible truth. We shift from Justine to Archer, then to a weary school principal (Benedict Wong, quietly devastating), to a directionless cop (Alden Ehrenreich, having a ball as a man both laughably unqualified and weirdly empathetic), and beyond. There’s even a junkie named James (Austin Abrams) whose role at first feels like a detour, until it isn’t. Every detour here has a destination.

If this sounds ambitious, that’s because it is, but it’s also remarkably disciplined. Cregger has grown since Barbarian, not just in scope but in confidence. He knows the scariest moments aren’t always the loudest. Long stretches of Weapons unfold with dread so thick it feels physical. Larkin Seiple’s cinematography finds menace in wallpaper and empty roads, while the Holladay brothers’ score buzzes with low-frequency anxiety. There’s one slow-motion sequence, the children, silhouetted against moonlight, eerily tranquil as George Harrison’s "Beware of Darkness" plays, that’s so in control of tone that it sticks with you long after the film is done.

Still, Weapons is no solemn funeral march. Cregger’s darkly comic sensibility seeps through in bizarre character moments, like the arrival of Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys, a grotesque vision of smeared clown makeup and maternal menace. She’s both hilarious and horrifying, a surrealist sideshow who wouldn’t be out of place in a David Lynch nightmare. When the film finally tips into campy ultraviolence, it does so gleefully and without apology, delivering a memorable third act.

What’s most shocking is that it all holds together. Thematically, Weapons is preoccupied with influence, how fear turns communities inward, how grief can be weaponized, and how belief (or lack thereof) can distort reality. The title becomes a metaphor, then a plot point, then something worse. Children are instruments. Parents are ammunition. And in the end, Weapons becomes a story not just about what we’re afraid of, but what we become when that fear festers unchecked.

There will be debates about the ending, as there always are with stories this oblique, this slippery. Some will say Cregger narrows his scope too much in the final stretch. But even if the last puzzle piece is a bit too neatly shaped, the picture it completes is undeniable: a twisted, ambitious, and darkly funny fable that sticks with you like a bruise. Cregger isn’t just playing with horror conventions anymore. He’s rewriting them.

4.5/5