Publication Date: 08-08-2025

Weapons (2025) review

Dir. Zach Cregger

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★★

“One day you’re here. The next day you could be gone. And it’s sad.” – Gucci Mane, “Letter to Takeoff“

When Zach Cregger’s Weapons was first announced back in 2022, it ignited a furious, and to use Cregger’s own words, “stressful,” bidding war amongst various studios. The director’s debut in the horror genre, Barbarian, wasn’t just a financial success, it was a critical darling; a rarity for a film that disturbing and gory. Ultimately, it was New Line who won the rights to the flick. Reportedly, that was the impetus for Jordan Peele — who launched a competing bid on behalf of his company Monkeypaw Productions — firing his longtime managers, one of whom was/is also Cregger’s manager.

When a script is so good, it makes Jordan Peele incensed that he couldn’t get his hands on it, you can’t help but be intrigued. As difficult as it was, I actively avoided every nugget of news, rumors, spoilers, and even trailers for Weapons once the bidding war concluded. Going in, I knew as much as the film’s theatrical poster told me. I didn’t even know Josh Brolin nor Alden Ehrenreich were in it. If you’re reading this review before you’ve seen the film, you already know more about it than I did. I recommend you keep it that way. Come back after you’ve experienced it, hopefully, as I did, in a crowded theater where audible shrieks, guffaws, and expressive looks of shock permeated through the darkness.

A sprawling horror epic with divine character work and a plot structure that builds to something harmonious, Weapons drops us into the quaint smallish town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania. A young girl tells us, via narration, that one school night, at 2:17am, 17 children went missing all at once. They got up out of their beds, opened their front doors, and ran out into the night, arms outstretched by their sides, as if to mimic an airplane. Every one of them is a student in Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner, Wolf Man) third grade class. Miss Gandy’s class is now empty, save for a shy little tyke named Alex (Cary Christopher), who is as clueless as the many angry parents in the town as to where his classmates might’ve gone.

Taking cues from great films like Seven Samurai and Magnolia, Cregger’s sophomore effort gives us six different perspectives of the same story. We have Miss Gandy, who catches the ire of many angry parents in the town, such as Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children. She is forbidden from talking to Alex, and also has a history with a police officer named Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), who has a confrontation with a junkie named James (Austin Abrams). Trying to keep the peace between his employees and the town as a whole is Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong), the principal of Maybrook Elementary School.

With Weapons, Cregger — whose origins are the sketch comedy series The Whitest Kids U’ Know (WKUK), which has become a cult-favorite — further establishes himself as a craftsman when it comes to plot structure. Barbarian told a very linear story in a divine, nonlinear three-act structure that left no loose ends and elicited ample intrigue. Weapons has a comparable anthological structure, only instead of centering around a creepy Airbnb, it examines several denizens within the same locale. Maybrook is a manicured, friendly suburban enclave that turns into a boiling pot of angry parents, varying perspectives, and intersecting characters.

Many will compare Cregger to Peele — even myself, as this is the second comedy-lifer to make an entrance into the horror genre with the conviction that he’s been working in this space his entire career — but Weapons has more in common with Stephen King. The filmmaker leaves us in the dark for so long that our mind can’t help but wander to conclusions, a commonality in King’s written works. Judging the parents’ emotionally charged reactions, desire for answers, and quest for someone to blame in Justine, my first blush reaction was the film was an allegory for school shootings.

Each of the six Maybrook residents Cregger chooses to profile are compelling. Josh Brolin’s Archer is the one liable to surprise you the most. He’s a father desperate to find his son, and the chief rabble-rouser who implicates Justine at a school meeting, suggesting she has a nefarious, didactic practices over the children in her class that compelled them to runaway. His gruff voice and grizzled jaw have seldom been utilized so effectively. The fact of the matter is this, so states the police captain (Toby Huss in limited, but impactful action): nobody led the children out of their homes that fateful night. They did so on their own volition, as it appears.

Also leaving an impression is Austin Abrams as a scuzzy lowlife, who haplessly tugs the handles of car doors in search of items to pawn whilst on the phone with friends he’s convincing that he’s looking for a job. Abrams, who, at certain angles, looks like the late Clark Gable III, turns in an exceptional performance as a desperate societal outcast in search of his next hit, be it a dose of heroin or a shot at the $50,000 reward that comes with finding the whereabouts of the missing children.

When you recognize that Cregger wrote Weapons as a way to grieve the loss of his friend, Trevor Moore, who died in a tragic accident in 2021, it all starts to make sense. Moore, who was one of the co-founders of WKUK, and his spirit are deeply felt throughout the film. Whether it’s the subtle inclusion of exactly seven hot dogs in one scene, or the fact that the film was released on the day Moore died (August 7th), the film can simply be viewed as a tribute to a fallen friend. Cregger has stated that he wrote the film as a way of dealing with the emotions in lieu of his friend’s death.

You can view every major character in the film as a reflection of those feelings:

• Justine (suffering in silence, trying selfishly to make amends)
• Archer (acting on outrage, a desire to do something)
• Paul (impulsive anger)
• James (acting on destructive impulses)
• Marcus (trying to keep peace and maintain normalcy)
• Alex (experiencing a loss of innocence)

The seven hot dogs thing in #Weapons / #WeaponsMovie is a tribute to Trevor Moore. pic.twitter.com/8T95v4TuDv

— Courtney Howard (@Lulamaybelle) August 11, 2025

A recurring image in Weapons is the face of a clown-like figure, complete with a painted white face, smeared makeup, and eyeballs that appear to be two different sizes. That figure is played by an unrecognizable Amy Madigan in a performance that resides comfortably alongside Nicolas Cage’s in Longlegs and Kathryn Hunter’s in The Front Room in the realm of contemporary, chameleon turns that succeed in being unsettling for reasons that go beyond the heavy use of makeup.

While there might not be a larger, more pivotal reason for Weapons having the anthological structure it does, that point is moot when you realize just how skilled Cregger is when it comes to matching the pieces in the larger puzzle. Maybe more impressive is the third act, which executes a tonal and thematic trifecta even seasoned filmmakers wouldn’t attempt.

The final chapter of Weapons is where themes of abusive relationships and the suffocating effect they have on young children come into play. With that, however, is where sadness starts to creep into the film. Up until this point, we’ve been hurled in so many different directions; elegantly so, but to a degree that would make lesser movies, without such intimate focus on character, feel overstuffed. It’s here, we’re mostly stuck with a singular point-of-view, and it’s upsetting, all while impending dread and unease starts to choke us as we anxiously await a reveal.

And then, Cregger gives us the answers we’ve been seeking since the opening narration. They hit like the punchline of a WKUK sketch. You can’t help but laugh. Justice has been served, vengeance has been enacted, and uppance has come. Part of the reason you might find yourself laughing is because you’re so damn relieved, while also astonished at the gruesome, grisly direction the climax takes.

Also graduating to a new level is Cregger’s shot composition, which works in unison with Joe Murphy’s editing. You feel the panic when a character tries to exit a home, but the door is latched, prompting him to tug at it two or three times with greater force. Cregger’s camera jerks with the character, and Murphy’s editing creates a punching effect. There are copious swivels and pans, such as when Miss Gandy visits Alex’s home, or when another character is being chased by a mob, that carry another dimension thanks to the immaculate way in which they are filmed and presented.

Weapons earns a place alongside other contemporary works like Hereditary and Longlegs because, from the jump, it compels you with a mystery that has stumped authorities and left townspeople an uneasy mess of emotions. That kind of hook brings out the murder mystery junkie in all of us, who believe we can solve any cold case after a couple of reddit threads and a podcast or two. What Cregger executes in only his second horror feature is a film that’s horror lingers. There might be a supernatural element, but the themes on which it draws are broad enough to represent real, lasting societal fears. While it’s not an impressionistic work by nature, it’s a modern movie that stokes modern fears. If you don’t want to confront those, there is plenty of surface-level entertainment here to rivet. Just don’t be surprised when Weapons sticks in your mind longer than anything you choose to stream after a long day of work.

My review of Barbarian (2022)

Starring: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, Toby Huss, June Diane Raphael, Whitmer Thomas, Callie Schuttera, and Justin Long. Directed by: Zach Cregger.