The delightfully nasty Weapons spirals in the wake of unimaginable loss
This cast splits the film into perspective-driven chapters, as Weapons slowly reveals the fallout from all the children of Justine Gandy's (Julia Garner) elementary class simultaneously arising at 2:17 AM and sprinting off into the night. Well, all but one child. The quiet, baffled Alex (Cary Christopher) is the sole survivor of the bizarre incident, a reminder to parents like Archer (Josh Brolin) of what they've lost and another complication to a question with no answer. As Cregger's script unfolds, doubles back, and reveals new details around events the film has already shown, it's more clever than terrifying, relying on its mystery and its likably frayed characters to propel a story that incorporates the wackiest tinfoil-hat thinking and most grounded emotional suffering spiraling out from the only things that arbitrarily rob Americans of classrooms full of kids: school shootings.
But, despite its title, Weapons isn't a cheap allegory. Though its unimaginable and seemingly random loss resonates with contemporary touchstones like Sandy Hook and COVID, it's more in keeping with the timeless communal horrors of King, where the ubiquitous failings and fears of our friends and neighbors effortlessly come to the surface. The fast-twitch brutality of a cop (Alden Ehrenreich, channeling a slimy, self-loathing Bill Hader), the discarded despair of a homeless drug addict (Austin Abrams, just as funny and film-stealing as in Wolfs), the off-putting eccentricity of a visiting aunt (Amy Madigan, staggeringly versatile), and the by-the-book bureaucracy of a school principal (Benedict Wong) have nothing to do with kids stiffly running out of their homes and into the unknown, but they are real, recognizable elements of a flawed town.
When these flailing characters ricochet off the fantastical disappearance (and each other, as many parents aggressively turn on Justine, who must know something), it's just as honest as the use of doorbell cams to document this modern nightmare. Those pushing too hard on the internal logic may, like with Barbarian, find themselves dissatisfied, but this is a far more satisfying riddle than Cregger's debut, even if it's in keeping with some emerging pet themes for the filmmaker. As Garner and Brolin capably delve into their prickly mourning and into the plot's puzzle, the layered fairy tale they fall into thankfully never feels false even as it becomes more desperate.
The underlying truth, the feeling that this is really how people would respond to something so senseless, allows dread to naturally build, and for the steam releases—whether in moments of sleep-depriving terror or through hilariously frustrated dialogue (many characters echo an inevitably arising audience concern: 'What the fuck?')—to just as naturally relieve it. This is aided by Larkin Seiple's flexibly slick camerawork, which shifts accordingly depending on the character the film is following, wobbling a little too closely to the vodka-chugging Justine or zipping in a rapid, nightmarish zoom when Archer's having a bad dream. Cregger's aesthetic is constantly playful and energetic, even when incorporating his patient, well-framed scares. For every gross-out Day Of The Dead moment or freaky-faced jumpscare, there are just as many invigorating sight gags or edge-of-your-seat beats of tension.
Weapons rudely disrupts the illusion of suburban safety with impish delight and a fully stocked horror arsenal. It also addresses some of the magical thinking that incomprehensible tragedy can inspire in people who would otherwise never engage in it. Its characters slide away from reality out of necessity, out of weakness and pain. This manifests in the real world all around us, as conspiracy theories infect our peers and Jim Acosta interviews a technozombified school-shooting victim. Weapons alchemizes this grasping, grotesque attempt at closure into bold, crowd-pleasing, gleefully R-rated horror.
Director: Zach Cregger Writer: Zach Cregger Starring: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan Release Date: August 8, 2025
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Still, I like the idea that terrible questions don't always get answers — and I hope Cregger keeps asking them. Sign up for Indie Focus, a weekly newsletter about movies and what's going on in the wild world of cinema. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) tries to protect Justine from the heckles (and her own bad decision-making) but the shouts of 'lock her up' chase Justine straight to the liquor store, where cinematographer Larkin Seiple's steady shot through the booze aisles tells us she's beelined to the vodka many times before. Justine's opening section is the longest, and it showcases the film's two key fixations: failure and people tip-toeing around peering through cracks. (There's enough gliding hallway footage to fill several listings on Zillow.) Garner excels at pale, quiet girls like Justine who are all nervous energy and self-destruction. Several of the awful things that happen to her aren't mystical at all. An aggressive confrontation with her ex-boyfriend's wife (June Diane Raphael) is her own darned fault, and when she tries to do an ill-conceived stakeout, she gets drunk and falls asleep. An ordinary script would put Justine at the center of the action so we can have fun watching her make one mistake after another until she magically saves the day. But she's not up to the challenge, and Cregger has other characters to introduce. Half of them are less preoccupied by the mystery of the missing kids as they are with the drama of their own lives, from tension with their boss to a desperate need for cash. There's a police officer named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) and his main obsession, James (Austin Abrams), a junkie who is so caught up in getting his next fix that he lives in his own splinter comedy. It only ever seems to rain in his scenes, and when spooked, James dives into his tent head-first like a cartoon cat. Clownish Gladys (Amy Madigan, meddlesome and needy) rounds out the ensemble, sporting bright '70s polyester leisure suits while adding a dash of Italian giallo melodramatics. She hints at what 'Suspiria' would look like transported to the suburbs. The retro needle-drops by George Harrison and Percy Sledge give the film its own style, as does the fantastic main musical theme (by Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay and Cregger) that's a harmony of harp, piano and rattling bones. Horror fans have seen plenty of unlucky cops ring the right doorbell at the wrong time, only to get mercilessly dispatched. Knowing Paul's name and his own problems doesn't add that much to the overall storyline, but it does put a fun spin on clichéd beats, even if Cregger is too much of a prankster to want us to feel extra empathy for the guy. Elevating side characters to main characters means there's too much going on for us to work up much empathy for anyone except Christopher's abandoned boy. But it does give us a sense of the world as a place where the ordinary is fused to the outrageous, where normal life and normal houses and normal people can be suddenly, brutally destroyed. Cregger is great with details. He gets a fantastic, audience-wide gasp just from the noise of a door opening off-screen. There's as much pathos in the production design as there is in the people. One character, for reasons you'll observe, wordlessly switches from soup cans that require them to use a can opener to ones with a pull tab. Nobody mentions the change, but when you spot it, it breaks your heart. Here, as in 'Barbarian,' Cregger understands the scary hush of a residential street and the perils of not knowing, or trusting, your neighbors. Part of the issue is that kindness has, in the community's time of crisis, been deemed 'inappropriate' — the word Principal Marcus uses when chastising Justine for driving a stranded kid home. (Later, however, his strict boundaries seem smart.) But it's still a cold statement on inhumanity when Justine flees into a convenience store for safety, only for the clerk to order her back outside. The dialogue's percussive f-bombs get a laugh and make the point that people in crisis can't come up with a snappy comeback. A former sketch comic, Cregger knows how to work a crowd. The combination of his assurance and his characters' confusion is wonderful in the moment, as though you're listening to a spiel from someone who sounds crazy but might be making all the sense in the world. (A scene just like that happens in the movie.) The ending is strong and satisfying and leaves you discontented in all the right ways, even as 'Weapons'' spell lifts after you leave the theater. Some of the ideas that felt significant in the darkness don't stand up to daylight: the dream sequences, an image of a floating gun, the film's own title — which doesn't seem to go much further than Archer's description of the children running like 'heat-seeking missiles.' It's particularly annoying that the end credits insist that the shape of a triangle is, for whatever reason, symbolically significant. Still, I like the idea that terrible questions don't always get answers — and I hope Cregger keeps asking them.
