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Review: Weapons (2025)

Weapons (2025) Weapons (2025)

Great premise, novel storytelling, captivating performances, and superb film-making all add up to a cracking horror movie.

Regardless of genre, the first third or so of Weapons is just beautiful storytelling, a writer-director (in this case, Zach Cregger) mastering the craft. As the story unfolds from mystery thriller to all-out horror, there are jump scares, thickening dread, plenty of laughs, and surprising humanity.

So many horror movies (that I’ve seen, at least) insist on explaining themselves. More often than not, the explanation doesn’t live up to the setup, or match any of the possibilities ignited in the viewer’s imagination by the most frightening elements of the film. It comes across as a lack of confidence, either in the audience or in one’s own storytelling. In this regard,

Weapons only sort of falls prey to its horror genre pitfalls, in ways which end up being to its credit.

The premise in Weapons is timely and timeless: what’s more terrifying than the mysterious disappearance of your child? What worse nightmare than the waking one of a life which continues without your child, and without answers? What’s creepier than a whole bunch of kids disappearing the same way, at the exact same time? What’s more on-the-pulse of a premise than an entire classroom of kids disappearing senselessly, without meaningful answers? And who better to blame, to believe a witch, than their unmarried, childless, female teacher?

The storytelling device is, in turn, novel: we see the timeline of events played out repeatedly, but each iteration is from the perspective of a different character, a sort of modern horror Rashomon (1950). Yet as the film shifts between perspectives, the story is funnelled into a singular truth: explanations are provided, mysteries are solved, subtext is made text, and all questions are answered. And then there’s a final-final act, almost an addendum, which is gleefully gruesome and satisfying in other, unexpected ways.

Amy Madigan explains how her performance was inspired by Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962):

Guillermo Del Toro weighs in on Carlos Aguilar’s thread on the similarities with La Tía Alejandra(1979):

Weapons has more than a bit of the spirit of The Blair Witch Project (1999), at least in its setup. There’s the use of “found” footage – in this case, modern-day home security camera footage of neighbourhood children running out of their homes, all in the same creepy Slender Man-style pose, all at exactly 2:17am. The narrator promises that the mystery is never solved – an intriguing challenge for a movie, especially one with such wonderful storytelling; and one which Blair Witch famously accepted, to powerful and lasting effect. Yet by the end of Weapons, the narrator’s tale has changed, and the story seems to have shrunk in size; the intriguing themes with which the film opened have been left not so much unanswered as abandoned, even forgotten, for the sake of a neat ending;

the very human horror story in Weapons is sacrificed for the sake of rendering its mythology coherent.

Ultimately, these disappointments are minor, and should not overshadow the fact that Weapons is inventive, lovingly made, and such a worthwhile ride. The cast, led by the magnetic Julia Garner, is full of great turns. The music by Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay, and – hey! – Zach Cregger is fantastic. And Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) DP Larkin Seiple‘s cinematography is meticulously gorgeous:

Further Viewing

Zach Cregger explains “elfing“, his secret to finishing the first draft of his screenplay (clipped from the full interview, via Room 243 Productions):

… and what to do if elfing doesn’t work:

This tracks:

Lancelloti identifies the tone- and genre-blending in Weapons – and the film-making techniques through which they’re achieved:

For a fine modern horror double-bill, we’d pair Weapons with Hereditary (2018):

Review: Hereditary (2018)