After making his title within the comedy world, author/director Zach Cregger shocked many by making the extremely efficient horror comedy Barbarian in 2022. That success made his follow-up movie a lot anticipated, and he’s shocking once more with the a lot darker Weapons, a title that serves to intrigue even because it’s solely barely much less random than his earlier effort.
The movie’s inciting occasion is the disappearance of just about a complete classroom of third graders taught by Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). For an unknown cause, all of them aside from Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) ran out of their homes at 2:17 am one morning and vanished into skinny air. Neither Justine nor Alex claims to know something in regards to the incident, which is seen with skepticism by many mother and father, together with Archer Graff (Josh Brolin).
Instructed in chapters specializing in completely different characters, the movie methodically approaches the disaster from a number of angles, together with deeper dives into aspect characters like Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a police officer and Justine’s ex-boyfriend; Anthony (Austin Abrams), a drug addict who tries to search out any approach to feed his behavior; and Andrew (Benedict Wong), the principal at Justine’s college.
The subject material of the movie inherently makes it deeper than Barbarian, as placing youngsters in peril is hard to take for many individuals, particularly mother and father. Cregger shines a lightweight on that stress by the character of Archer, whose obsession with discovering out what occurred to his son turns into monomaniacal. However by exhibiting the viewers tales involving different characters, particularly the best way Justine will get more and more remoted, Cregger ensures that the movie by no means turns into slowed down in unhappiness.
The range of storylines additionally serves the aim of preserving the viewers guessing as to the place the general story is heading. The strangeness of the youngsters’ disappearance and some different odd issues early on solely hints on the solutions which might be to come back. When Cregger lastly decides to place the story into overdrive, it’s a gripping journey involving ultraviolence, bewildered characters, and one supremely creepy girl performed by Amy Madigan.
The movie provides cinephiles lots to dig into with its number of completely different photographs. Cregger and cinematographer Larkin Seiple don’t do something overly flashy other than a few sequences with out cuts. As an alternative, they subtly play with angles like approaching a doorknob from beneath or saving a scary reveal till simply the best second that ups the depth of the movie enormously. Soar scares are referred to as upon a bit too usually, however the remainder of the film is finished so properly that the trope will be forgiven.
Garner, so good in her Emmy-winning position on Ozark, does a unbelievable job at carrying the emotional weight of the story. She’s aided by the always-reliable Brolin, whose character largely acts as a counterweight to hers. Ehrenreich and Abrams are good, if barely miscast. It’s nice to see Wong outdoors of Marvel films, and Madigan steals the film in her late-breaking position. There’s additionally a enjoyable cameo for followers of Barbarian.
There are plenty of completely different filmmakers who can churn out middling horror films, however Cregger now joins somebody like Jordan Peele in making constantly attention-grabbing movies that additionally ship the products in the case of scary stuff. Weapons jumps to the highest of the record for 2025 horror films, but it surely’s additionally only a nice film, interval.
—
Weapons opens in theaters on August 8.
