2025 | rated R | starring Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, Cary Christopher, June Diane Raphael, Amy Madigan | written & directed by Zach Cregger | 2 hrs 8 mins | 5 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest #3
We’re in a creative drought right now, no doubt about it, so I’m going to attempt to moderate my excitement for Weapons, which feels like getting a bottle of ice-cold water in the desert. But there are also internet hack critics who criticize everything and made a career off of that based on the rising tide of an ocean of very bad movies that come our way every year now. So be watchful of how these people still take that cynical, nit-pick, CinemaSins, plot-hole criticisms to Weapons, a movie that is at worst objectively well-made, well-acted, beautifully shot, smart and timely and at best the side I’m coming down on: an exceptional film and the best I’ve seen in, well, 2 years.
I suppose you could call Weapons a horror movie, but that’s only for lack of a better term and a demand that movies be slotted into something. I could compare it more to my favorite movie of last year, Oddity, which had its moments of creepiness but falls more in as a supernatural mystery than a conventional horror movie. That’s what Weapons is. A mystery, presented like a puzzle that unfolds a piece at a time by writer/director and Whitest Kids You Know actor Zach Cregger. He worked with a similar structure with his streaming 2022 hit Barbarian, a movie I felt was fine. Just fine. It’s flashbacks and time shifts succeed in throwing the audience completely off balance as well as fleshing out the story more. I didn’t feel like that movie was as smooth as this one. Since then he’s polished his process, refined his storytelling skills. It’s a great joy to witness.
So what’s the mystery? One night in a small unnamed midwestern American town, 17 children got out of their bed at 2:17 am and ran out into the darkness. Ring cameras capture them running out with their arms outstretched like airplane wings to give the movie a found footage sense. The police are baffled. A month later with no clues in sight, the town has turned on Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher from whose class all 17 kids came from, and the single remaining student Alex (Cary Christopher). As the town gets more unhinged, Justine takes the investigation into her own hands, along with a grieving father (Josh Brolin) and a local cop (Alden Ehrenreich). For the purposes of keeping things vague I’ll use actor names for the rest of this review.
Told Rashamon-style from multiple perspectives, we see this story unfold from multiple angles, each chapter answering a question and posing a new one. Cregger knows exactly how to use this style, it’s not a gimmick here, and he doles out the information in the most satisfying of ways. By breaking up the film like this he lets it marinate in all the themes associated with each character’s take: Garner’s paranoia (and alcoholism), Brolin’s desperation and helplessness, Ehrenreich’s fear and loss of control, and Austin Abrams as a local drug addict dropped in for comic relief. At every turn the movie fully commits to what it’s about in that moment and that story, instead of biding its time to drop the next twist.
Did I mention it’s gorgeous? Cregger takes his time to build out the word of a town coming unglued. As everyone walks in and out of each other’s stories, the town expands. The homes of the town feel lived in, cluttered with stuff and furniture from a previous decade. Where everyone and everything has a purpose and a life they lived before the events of the film. It’s not straight horror, it’s not about jump scares or even brooding atmosphere, but when it commits to something creepy it pulls it off. Cregger milks the most mileage out of doors spontaneously opening into blackness and a show-stopping sequence where Justine falls asleep in her car, that is shot and scored for maximum goosebumps.
What I ultimately adored about the movie is the thing that will turn off a lot of strict horror fans. Weapons sets up what seems like an otherworldly problem and trades the horror of the unknown for a solid, tangible (and fightable) solution. I get that people might be disappointed by that, but for me that’s the point where the film breaks out of the genre and becomes something bigger. I’m as big a fan of The Babadook and It Follows as the next guy, and more so of Hereditary, but after a decade of elevated horror movies with protagonists wallowing around in impossible cerebral battles against grief metaphor monsters, Weapons was a refreshing blast of good old-fashioned cackling villain storytelling. While I feared the film might get too artsy for its own good, Cregger has teed up a total barn-burner of a finale here where the multiple character arcs fold into a tense, fun, multi-pronged climax.
Weapons is one of the most satisfying, richly drawn out, cleverly crafted and purely entertaining movies of this year. Is it making a big profound statement with a thought-provoking theme? Not really. It’s storytelling for storytelling’s sake. The most important reason to tell a story. Not to push an agenda or change someone’s mind. An original story, very well told, that unfolds before your eyes in layers and kept me either guessing or enthralled the whole way. Just about every decision takes the movie in the right direction and it’s full of little details that makes the movie a distinct work of genre filmmaking. It’s an absolute blast.