WEAPONS (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Weapons, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 8, 2025

The confidence of writer/director Zach Cregger's sophomore solo film is sometimes staggering to witness. The screenplay alone is a thing of surprising ambition. Here is a horror tale that calls to mind some vaguely remembered urban legend, that grounds its story in recognizably flawed but sympathetic characters, and that uses its back-and-forth structure as a means of both piecing together a puzzle and peeling back the layers of its characters' regrets, resentments, and traumas. That Weapons is also eerie and genuinely disturbing means that Cregger gets the genre basics right, too.

First and foremost, the narrative is a mystery, set in some anonymous small town where an entire classroom's worth of kids, except for one, suddenly disappear in the middle of the night. That idea is frightening enough, and Cregger portrays the kids' flight from their homes—each of the soon-to-be missing 17 leaving at exactly the same time—with an additional bit of uncertainty. They don't just walk outside like zombies or unthinking things, ambling and meandering toward some destination. The children bolt at a full sprint, with the arms extended to their sides as if trying to take literal flight. Are they running toward something or trying to escape from something else?

Once the script reveals its approach, that question seems even more pertinent. The main cast of characters here are interconnected by the inexplicable tragedy of the missing children, but just as the kids are literally lost, the adults—who have been tasked with, taken it upon themselves to effect, or unintentionally find themselves embroiled in the effort of finding the children—are each lost in a different way. If the adults are so caught up in their own problems and hangups, it might take a mass exodus of these kids for those adults to realize what has been happening right in front of them or under their noses.

There's Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), for example, a recent hire at the local elementary school who has the misfortune of being the teacher of the class whose students disappear. About a month after that night of the running kids, people in town are convinced that she must have known something no one else did or had some part to play in whatever happened to the children. From what we and the local cops can tell, that's about as far from the truth about Justine as possible, but it doesn't stop her from trying to solve the mystery on her own, drowning her helplessness in booze, and making some bad decisions in her professional and private lives.

Another struggling adult is Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing students who leads a rally against the teacher at a town hall meeting. The poor man doesn't know what to do but knows he must do something, as misdirected as his anger may be.

When the film switches from Jutine to Archer, our first real sight of the man is of him sleeping in the bed of his missing son, and a nightmare that has him running in a big circle while looking for his kid ends with a sort of confessional. Archer could never bring himself to tell his son that he loves him, and the only chance he has now is in a dream. The scene would be unfathomably sad, and it is quite upsetting—to the degree that Cregger allows it to be, before using the moment of naked honesty to completely catch us off guard with a perfectly executed jump-scare.

The other main characters of note are Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local cop who has a connection to Justine and has an encounter with the homeless James (Austin Abrams), and Marcus (Benedict Wong), the school's by-the-books counselor who defends the teacher even though he knows her care for her students sometimes means that she crossing professional boundaries. It's nothing sinister, and compared to an emotionally repressed man like Archer or parents who seem to have given up hope or a pair who have locked themselves up in a house with newspapers covering the windows, Justine might be the embodiment of what children need but don't receive at home.

Unlike so many modern horror films of late, Cregger doesn't push any specific ideas or attempt to weave thematic concerns inextricably into the narrative. Instead, they emerge naturally here, defined by what we see of the characters and what is revealed of the plot, which twists and turns in ways that make it nearly impossible to know or even guess what will happen from minute to minute in the story.

It is, obviously, about the relationships between parents and children, especially how unnatural and incomprehensible loss affects an entire community. At a time when classrooms are unnaturally emptied of children because of the incomprehensible motives of violent people and the even more inexplicable failure of society to respond to tragedy after tragedy, the most potent potential metaphor here might be right in our face.

Cregger, however, doesn't concentrate on that, because the layers of these characters and of plot, which shows us different perspectives on shared events and precisely reveals key pieces of information in the process, are what matter here. Well, there's that element, but there's also the film's baser intentions—to shock, frighten, and keep us wondering what horrors or terrors lie beneath the mystery or within the dark shadows of an opened door. The structure of the plot benefits those genre-centric components, too, because Cregger allows the quiet to linger and the darkness to envelop—all the better to scare the hell out of us when the timing is exactly right. The filmmaker somehow knows when that is each and every time.

There are other parts of Weapons that are almost too tempting to ignore, such as what the answer to the mystery is, who is behind it, and how that performance creates a memorable horror villain, who is equal parts pathetic and menacing. To say more, of course, would be unfair, but everything does come together in the film, opening up new ideas about the effects of domestic abuse, while also resulting in a climax that is simultaneously brutal in its violence and quite funny in its sense of satisfaction. Cregger's ambitions reach high, but his command of this material means they pay off quite well.

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