Weapons

by Chris Stewart 08.2025

We begin with a voice-over. This is a story, we're told, of strange happenings in a small town. One night, at 2:17 am, every student but one of Ms. Justine's elementary classroom left their homes, never to be seen again. Now, the town is in disarray. Fists shake at town hall meetings. There's something strange in the air. Grieving parents sleep in their missing children's beds. Marriages strain at the seams. With no answers, how long before somebody, or everybody, cracks?

In Weapons, Zack Cregger's superb third film, the imagery of horror is applied to an interweaving social drama, smartly characterized and filmed with formal rigor.

The camera roves and tracks and, as in his notable 2022 film Barbarian, Cregger understands the value of letting your core drama breathe. The stronger the basic compelling character beats, and the more controlled our viewpoint, the further the filmmaker can take us when it's time to get our hands dirty. Like Barbarian: what a soothingly confident work this is.

Cregger has cited Magnolia as an influence. I was put in mind of Reuben Östlund. Watching Force Majeur and Weapons back to back would be an excellent exercise in how close in tone well-staged comedy and well-staged horror are. Weapons has real laughs. But it's a sprawling, sincere, bloody fairy-tale at heart.

At the center of this is the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner, wonderfully reactive, with slippery layers) and Archer (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing students who takes a paranoid eye to whole affair. How he ping-pongs between aiming these suspicions at Justine as opposed to broader conspiracies is one of the film's chief pleasures. It is no small accomplishment that Brolin, and the script, never loses sympathy.

As these two circle each other in confrontations public and private, Cregger carefully doles out

information about exactly who was where (and doing what) prior to the children’s disappearance. The structural method I will not spoil, but suffice it to say that it risks testing a horror audience’s patience. It pays off gorgeously.

A big ask. Particularly in an era of unflinching studio safety. Cregger, along with cinematographer Larkin Seiple and editor Joe Murphy, conveys such a sense of geography and spacial relation that Weapons is sublimely transporting. This is critical during slower early passages. Comparisons to Carpenter are not wrong.

I do not read this as a post-Covid film. We are not being offered lessons regarding the decay of the modern soul (a fine goal for filmmakers choosing to take that angle). Rather, we are dancing playfully around age-old threats, which the best horror always locates as equally internal and external. Note that addiction is handled facilely and even humorously in this film. Like the true fear underlying many a fable: we worry not that the little ones will be susceptible to things that go bump in the night, but rather, that when they go bump, we may be so caught up in our own indulgences, we won't even hear it.