Weapons
Writer/Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong
With his horror feature debut, 2022's Barbarian, writer/director Zach Cregger crafted a world in which his audience was never sure of its footing, a horror story so seemingly limitless in its possibility that we could be simultaneously shocked and accepting over whatever came next. It's a handy talent to have for this genre, and with Weapons, Cregger not only proves Barbarian wasn't a fluke — he tops it.
Tense, unpredictable, and swirling with the malevolent sense that it's always careening toward something horrifying, Weapons is the horror film of the summer, a movie so confident and relentless that it'll blow you through the back of the theater.
The inciting incident of the film is well-known to horror fans at this point, because it's really the only concrete information the film's marketing has provided. One night, in a small town, 17 elementary school kids get out of bed and run outside into the darkness, never to be seen again. It's a strange event by any measure, but it gets stranger when parents and investigators piece together that every single kid left their homes at the exact same time – 2:17 a.m. – and that they were all students in teacher Justine Gandy's (Julia Garner) classroom.
The film begins with the stark, crushing introduction of this premise, presenting it not just as an awful, soul-rattling event for everyone involved, but as the stuff of local legend, a strange event that'll be whispered about in the lore of this small town for decades to come. In the present, though, all the parents, including local contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), have focused their ire and confusion on Justine herself. After all, the kids were all from her class, so she must know something, right?
It's easy to see the real-world comparisons to this event, because Weapons is, after all, a movie about more than a dozen school-age children simply getting wiped away by a traumatic event, but Cregger's film is too clever to simply throw out a one-to-one metaphor there. Instead, the film breaks itself into chapters, focusing on the interconnected lives of various adults involved in the tragedy as they try to sort themselves out in the aftermath. Justine disappears into herself, obsessed with the only clue she has, while Archer throws himself into private investigator mode and the school's principal (Benedict Wong) tries to do damage control.
These neat dividing lines in the narrative, breaking it up by chapter titles, give Cregger a chance to show the contrasts in individual responses to what's happening, but they also allow Weapons, like Barbarian before it, to go nonlinear with things, explore not just the aftermath but the buildup, the sheer strangeness of it all. In a country where we're accustomed to processing mass grief at this point, it's both an unnerving strategy and a rewarding one, especially as the film barrels toward its conclusion.
And as with Barbarian, Weapons has thrived on a marketing campaign built on compelling imagery with no real solutions. It's plainly a mystery film, and the central mystery is apparent from the opening seconds. This search for answers will no doubt dominate the minds of many of the moviegoers who throw down their money for tickets. Rest assured, Weapons does offer answers, but they do not arrive conveniently packaged, nor are they entirely complete. Cregger's writing style is built on delivering the absolutely unexpected at any given moment, then finding a way to weave those threads together in the end.
What makes Weapons particularly effective when it comes to this storytelling strategy is just how shocking and flat-out gnarly Cregger's moments of horror really get. He seems to instinctually build his stories out in a way that almost feels like he's daring himself to do the most unexpected thing at any given moment, then daring himself again to come up with some kind of structure that weaves the unexpected into the inevitable at the end. In Weapons, he goes quiet when other filmmakers might have gone loud, goes cerebral when you expect gruesome, and pushes himself to the heights of depravity just when you're expecting some kind of neat solution. It's a remarkable feat of horror storytelling, and even as a seasoned fan of this stuff, I was absolutely vibrating in my seat throughout, unsure of anything but unable to look away.
All of this, combined with powerful performances from Brolin, Garner, and supporting star Amy Madigan (oh, just you wait until you meet her), makes Weapons one of those horror movies you'll wish you could experience for the first time all over again. It's a stunner, one of the highlights not just of 2025 but of horror in the 2020s so far, and if you only see one horror movie in theaters this summer, make it this one.
Weapons is in theaters August 8.
