‘Weapons’ review: You’re not ready for Zach Cregger’s wild new horror film

The last thing I ever want to do is overhype a movie, but just trust me when I say: You are not ready for Weapons.

I don’t mean that in a “This is the scariest horror movie you’ll ever see!” way, although writer-director Zach Cregger (Barbarian) stirs up plenty of frights that had my whole theater hollering. Instead, I mean it more in the sense that Weapons is a wonderfully surprising film. Whatever you think it’s going to throw at you, chances are you aren’t prepared for what it actually lobs your way.

What is Weapons about?

Opening narration by a young girl (Scarlett Sher) clues us into the chilling premise of Weapons. One night, at 2:17 a.m., 17 children from the same third grade class at Maybrook Elementary ran from their houses, arms outstretched in the exact same way, never to be seen again. Only one child, Alex (Cary Christopher), remains.

The image of the kids charging into nothingness is an eerie one, contrasted with Sher’s matter-of-fact voiceover relaying the story two years after the fact. Cregger peppers her monologue with fillers like “I guess” or “like that,” small beats that make you feel like you’re in the room with her as she relays a story that’s clearly been passed around the community it impacted.

That community is the main focus of Weapons, which splits its time between various non-linear viewpoints, including Justine (Julia Garner), the missing kids’ teacher, and Archer (Josh Brolin), father to one of the missing children.

Weapons tells a relevant story of a community in crisis.

Julia Garner in “Weapons.”
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Both Justine and Archer are focused on the disappearance to the point of obsession. Justine tries time and again to contact Alex, even though Maybrook Elementary Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) forbids her from doing so. He says she’s putting herself first and not caring about the pain Alex must be going through. Meanwhile, Archer pesters other worried parents for information about the night their kids disappeared, even if they’re not comfortable revisiting that loss. He and Justine pick incessantly at open wounds in their search for answers, their actions spiraling out into broader Maybrook.

Maybrook’s sense of communal grief over the loss of the 17 children calls to mind the aftermath of school shootings, tragedies that are all too common in the U.S. As if the foreboding title Weapons weren’t enough of a tie-in, Cregger also accentuates this connection through some surreal gun imagery, along with the potent image of a makeshift memorial for the kids outside Maybrook Elementary. The memorial’s message of “Maybrook strong” echoes responses to other U.S. school shootings, such as “Uvalde strong” and “MSD strong.“

With Weapons, Cregger also speaks to broader anxieties about the role of parents within the American education system. The Maybrook parents, including Archer, immediately turn on Justine. They wonder what malevolent work she was doing in her classroom to make their kids disappear. Their fearmongering about Justine gestures out to real-world discussions about parents’ rights over their kids’ education, often used to push conservative agendas hoping to erase the teaching of anything related to race, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

These are heady topics, ones Cregger most overtly examines in the first half of the film. However, Weapons‘ examination of grief is far from dour. After all, this is Cregger we’re talking about, the man who brought us the sometimes funny, sometimes gory, always twisty Barbarian. He brings those same qualities to Weapons, creating a veritable horror roller coaster.

Weapons’ scares and twists are shocking — and a whole lot of fun.

Julia Garner and Josh Brolin in “Weapons.”
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

With the help of Weapons‘ many different points of view, Cregger creates a layered tale where each new perspective adds further depth and context to what came before. (Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia as an inspiration for the film, and there are touches of Rashomon in the structure as well.) Each new perspective does the vital work of further building out the town of Maybrook, but they also take Weapons in increasingly unexpected directions. Remember when Barbarian cut from a horrifying monster encounter in a darkened basement to Justin Long driving blissfully along the California coast? Weapons pulls that kind of switch several times over, each more discombobulating than the last. And don’t just take it from me. Take it from the woman in my theater who kept screaming every time Cregger looped in a new perspective.

Each new point of view brings with it a different kind of horror. Since Justine lives alone in a large house and keeps receiving threatening messages, her opening section feels somewhat like a slasher film, where a murderous stalker could leap out at any moment. A section of the film focused on policeman Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) reads as more grounded, a portrait of a psychological spiral seemingly removed from Weapons‘ biggest scares. (Don’t worry, Cregger always finds a way to connect everything.)

Elsewhere, elements of body horror and the psycho-biddy subgenre surface, with Cregger happy to alternate between heart attack-inducing jump scares and slower burn frights at a moment’s notice. Occasionally, Weapons undercuts its own terrors with well-placed comedic beats, offering us catharsis amidst the ever-escalating mayhem. When Josh Brolin yells, “What the fuck?” after an especially distressing encounter, we’re right there with him.

By Weapons’ end, though, we’ve moved into something far different from what the film’s opening few minutes would have you expect. Each step of the way there makes sense, but you’d never have thought to take that step in the first place had Weapons not set you on that path.

That’s the fun of Weapons, though. The best way to prepare for its thrills is to simply not prepare at all. Instead, sit back, and let yourself be pulled along for the riotous, unforgettable ride.

Weapons is now in theaters.