Zach Cregger had the world’s attention after Barbarian - and rightfully so. His 2022 breakout hit was a total revelation, the kind of batshit genre mash-up that felt like it came out of nowhere and immediately reminded everyone what made horror such a vibrant and unpredictable cinematic space. Barbarian wasn’t just scary - it was gleefully unhinged, conceptually daring, and had a truly wild sense of humor that only heightened the dread. The film’s marketing famously revealed almost nothing, a tactic that helped its biggest swings land with maximum impact. So when Weapons was announced, with a similarly secretive rollout and an ominous tagline (A classroom full of students disappears - except one), expectations skyrocketed.
And to Cregger’s credit, Weapons delivers on at least one major promise: it’s not like anything else that’s come before. This is a bold, bizarre, totally original horror epic that flirts with satire, the supernatural, melodrama, and dark comedy, sometimes all in the same scene. It plays with tone and structure the way a kid plays with LEGOs, cobbling together something unpredictable and ambitious - if also a little unstable.
This time, we’re handed a fractured narrative in the style of Rashomon (or maybe more accurately, a warped cousin to Magnolia, though even that doesn’t quite fit). The film unfolds across several interconnected character perspectives, each revealing another piece of the central mystery involving the mass disappearance of children - and perhaps something even more disturbing underneath. The first story belongs to Justine (a fantastic performance from Julia Garner), the teacher of the vanished class. Hounded by grief, guilt, confusion, and a town desperate for answers, she finds herself at the center of a public outcry she barely understands.
Justine’s POV is the most emotionally grounded, and her segment features some of the most chilling and resonant imagery in the film - especially the establishing sequence in which the group of children flee into the darkness, their silhouettes etched in memory. The camera lingers behind her shoulder like a phantom, and cinematographer Larkin Seiple (Everything Everywhere All at Once) pulls off some gorgeous tracking shots and nightmarish framing that elevate every scene he touches. He’s the movie’s MVP, no question.
From there, we spiral into the life of Archer (Josh Brolin), a grieving father who can’t move past the disappearance of his son. Archer’s story drips with anguish and disorientation, captured through surreal dream sequences and a truly unforgettable visual centerpiece that leans hard into metaphor. If Weapons has a thesis, it might be buried here - something about how American grief festers and metastasizes when left unaddressed or unanswered, how the country’s cycles of violence are fed by a refusal to reckon with their emotional toll.
Other character arcs take the film in even stranger directions. There’s Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a morally dubious cop entangled in a shady affair with Justine. His segment adds doses of noir and heightened melodrama before transitioning into something closer to pitch-black comedy, especially once a junkie named James (Austin Abrams) enters the picture. James’ chapter is perhaps the film’s most tonally daring - a manic burst of gross-out gags, slapstick horror, and loopy home invasion hijinks that recalls the mid-film switch-up Barbarian pulled off so masterfully.
There are shades of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Crazies, and Possession here, but Weapons thankfully never fully settles into any single lane. The result is both its biggest strength and its most glaring weakness. Cregger clearly wants to swing big - and when he connects, the results are genuinely thrilling. But too often, the film’s rhythm is stilted by stop-and-start pacing, repetitive dialogue, and a sense that certain ideas are being pushed further than they need to go. You start to feel the seams in the stitching, and a handful of the reveals lack the payoff they could’ve delivered on.
Like Barbarian, there’s a clear thematic subtext at play in Weapons - at least at first. The opening chapters feel like they lean into the all-too-relevant anxieties around school shootings and trying to make sense of the nonsense of America’s culture of violence, with the title itself feeling like a layered metaphor for how children are shaped, used, and discarded in modern society. But as the story splinters and the genre-blending kicks into high gear, that subtext becomes muddled. By the end, it’s hard to say what Weapons is actually “about,” beyond the spectacle of its terror.
That doesn’t mean the film is devoid of meaning - quite the opposite. There are plenty of fascinating, potentially rich threads woven throughout: grief and denial, paranoia and manipulation, the way personal and broader tragedies intertwine. But Weapons doesn’t do quite enough to explore them with clarity or depth. Instead, it plays like a high-concept mixtape of horror’s most unhinged instincts, often dazzling in the moment but ultimately feeling a little hollow once the credits roll.
Cregger’s direction is confident as ever. His command of tension, his darkly comic instincts, and his commitment to the bizarre are thrilling to watch unfold, even when the plot gets away from him. He’s not afraid to get gross, weird, and uncomfortably funny. And even if Weapons doesn’t fully cohere, it’s certainly never boring.
For some, this will absolutely be the horror movie of the year - a breathless rollercoaster of dread, goofiness, and real emotional stakes. For others, it’ll feel like a messy, uneven collage of half-baked ideas and tonal whiplash. For me, it lands somewhere in the middle: a wildly ambitious and frequently electrifying follow-up to Barbarian that proves Cregger is the real deal - even if Weapons doesn’t always hit its target.
'Weapons' is now playing in theaters.
