Weapons (2025)
Horror has always had a fondness for the unsettling power of children, but Weapons (2025) finds a genuinely fresh angle on that old fear. The premise is almost nursery-rhyme simple in its creepiness: at precisely 2:17 in the morning, every child from a single school class gets up, walks out of the house, and disappears into the dark. Every child except one. What follows is a community horror mystery running at a generous 129 minutes, structured episodically across several points of view rather than following a single protagonist from start to finish. It is the kind of high-concept setup that genre films often squander, and whether Weapons earns its premise is very much the question at its centre.
The film is written and directed by Zach Cregger, whose name you may know from Barbarian (2022), a low-budget horror that became a genuine word-of-mouth phenomenon, the sort of film people pressed on friends with very little explanation because context would ruin it. Weapons is a considerably larger undertaking, produced under the New Line Cinema banner alongside Subconscious, Vertigo Entertainment, BoulderLight Pictures and Domain Entertainment. Cregger wrote the screenplay himself, as he did with Barbarian, suggesting a filmmaker who keeps tight creative control over his material. (I also reviewed the Resident Evil reboot, which Cregger directed and which sits, fairly or otherwise, as his other major recent work to consider alongside this one.) The budget has not been officially confirmed, but the production values are polished, a step up from the contained scrappiness that made Barbarian feel so effective.
The cast is a strong one on paper. Julia Garner, who made such an impression in Ozark and Inventing Anna, takes the lead, playing a character the script does not go out of its way to make easy company. Josh Brolin brings his particular brand of weathered gravity, the kind of presence that can ground a scene without needing much dialogue to do it. Alden Ehrenreich, whose career has had an odd trajectory since Solo (see my thoughts on that film for a companion piece on how much expectation can weigh on a performer), gets to work in a register closer to his actual strengths here, and Benedict Wong and Austin Abrams complete a cast that, between them, covers a wide range of tone and register. The episodic structure means each of them operates in something close to their own contained story, which places real demands on how well each section holds together individually.
Cinematographer Larkin Seiple shoots the film in a way that earns its dread through texture rather than cheap shock. Seiple has built a reputation for images that feel slightly off-kilter even in naturalistic settings, and here the night scenes in particular have a cold, flat quality, residential streets rendered as places that have lost their familiarity. The darkness is not stylised or especially theatrical, which makes it more unsettling than a more heavily art-directed approach might have been. The score is a collaboration between Cregger himself and Ryan Holladay, an unusual arrangement that keeps the musical tone closely tied to the director's vision of the material. The result sits somewhere between ambient unease and more conventional horror orchestration, rarely drawing attention to itself but consistently keeping the air a little tighter than it ought to be. Editor Joe Murphy's cutting is notably patient in the film's first two thirds, letting scenes breathe and build, which makes the handful of well-placed jolts land considerably harder than they would in a film that had been keeping you on permanent edge.
I will be upfront about why I watched Weapons: I disliked Zach Cregger's Resident Evil so much that I simply had to find out what all the fuss about him was. And the premise here is a terrific one. In the dead of night, at seventeen minutes past two exactly, every child in one school class but a single boy gets up, walks out of the front door and never comes home. It is a wonderfully eerie hook, and the film is smart enough to know it.
Julia Garner takes the lead, and I have to say she did not quite work for me. Her character is clingy, self-absorbed and hard to like, and I am not sure the performance does enough to make that compelling rather than simply off-putting. The supporting cast fare much better. Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich and Austin Abrams each round out the story from their own angle, and the film's episodic structure, handing the perspective from one character to the next, is the thing I enjoyed most about it.
For most of its length it is well put together. The jump scares land when they are needed rather than being flung at you, and the story unfolds at a nicely judged pace. My problems are all at the back end. The ending is abrupt, lurching to a close just as it ought to be tightening its grip, and I could see the shape of it coming a good way off. Worse, there is a sizeable plot hole in how it all resolves, the kind that has the police and the characters conveniently overlooking something glaringly obvious, and once I had spotted it I could not un-spot it.
That abrupt finish is telling, because it was my single biggest gripe with Resident Evil too, and I am starting to wonder whether landing an ending is simply Cregger's weak spot. For all that, this is comfortably the better film of the two, and I can now see what the fuss was about. Three and a half stars, a gripping, inventive and cleverly structured horror, let down only by a rushed and rather silly final stretch.
Weapons lands as a horror film that is more interesting in its construction than in its conclusion, a description that applies to quite a lot of ambitious genre work. The anthology-style structure, the committed ensemble, and Seiple's cool, unsentimental images all suggest a filmmaker with genuine craft and ambition. For fans of thoughtful, slow-burn American horror, there is plenty here to engage with, even if the final stretch may leave you feeling slightly short-changed. Sometimes the scariest thing a horror film can do is remind you how hard it is to end well.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-10-11
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Weapons (2025) on YouTube
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