Every now and then, horror gets a shake-up, a cinematic defibrillation that zaps the genre back to life and reminds us why we fell in love with being terrified in the first place. It doesn’t happen often. There are good horror films every year, sure. Clever, gory, stylish little demons that make you spill your popcorn and whisper “what the hell” to the friend next to you. But true game-changers? The kind that crawl under your skin and settle in for a long, sleepless stay? That’s rarer than a coherent plot twist in a Saw sequel. Enter Weapons.
The new film from Zach Cregger (yes, that Zach Cregger, of Barbarian fame and, before that, the Whitest Kids U’ Know, because life is weird) doesn’t just tiptoe into the horror pantheon, it kicks the door in, rearranges the furniture, and smears something deeply troubling on the walls. It’s terrifying, yes. But it’s also darkly funny, structurally audacious, and gleefully unhinged in a way that feels both fresh and deeply, deeply cursed. Watching Weapons is like opening a beautifully wrapped gift only to find a live snake inside. A snake that then explains trauma to you, bites you, and somehow makes you laugh while you’re bleeding.
The setup is straightforward on paper: one night in a sleepy, nondescript town, seventeen elementary school children, all from the same class, wake up, walk out of their homes, and vanish into the night without a trace. No bodies. No blood. No answers. Just gone. That’s the first five minutes.
From there, Cregger slices the story open and tells it like a shattered mirror: multiple perspectives, nonlinear timelines, overlapping scenes, and a growing sense of dread that feels less like a slow burn and more like being slowly lowered into a pit of demonic reptiles, one POV at a time. Think Pulp Fiction if it had been rewritten in a haunted cabin by a sleep-deprived Ari Aster with a head wound. Act I alone is told from six different characters’ perspectives, all orbiting the same event, the children’s disappearance, each one revealing just a sliver more of the terrible truth.
There’s Julia Garner as Justine Gandy, the teacher whose class has gone missing, whose haunted eyes and barely-suppressed panic make you wonder how many Xanax she’s crushed into her morning Vodka. Josh Brolin is Archer Graff, the father of one of the vanished kids, and if you’ve ever wanted to see Thanos go full Liam Neeson-in-Taken-but-make-it-sad, this is your moment. There’s also Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a cop with a complicated past and an even more complicated relationship with Justine. Anthony (Austin Abrams), a jittery criminal who’s either deeply unlucky or knows far more than he’s saying. And finally, there’s Andrew (Benedict Wong), the school principal who seems increasingly less concerned with education and more concerned with surviving whatever fresh hell is about to arrive.
And oh, it arrives.
Weapons doesn’t just play with structure, it weaponizes it. The way Cregger parcels out information is borderline sadistic. Just when you think you’ve figured out where this is going, the movie folds in on itself, adds a wrinkle, a reveal, a flashback, or, God help us, a completely new genre for five minutes, just to keep things interesting. He’s not just telling a story; he’s pulling the rug out from under us repeatedly and then lighting the rug on fire.
What makes Weapons so effective, beyond its clever structure, gorgeous cinematography, and top-tier performances, is how deeply it respects the intelligence of its audience. This is a film made by someone who watches horror. Who understands why we groan when characters make dumb choices or enter dark basements unarmed. Who knows that true fear doesn’t come from jump scares, but from anticipation, silence, implication. Cregger answers every “wait, but why would they” with a cold, logical answer that somehow makes things worse. It’s a horror film that seems to say, “Oh, you think you’re smart? You’re not. None of us are. But let’s suffer together.”
There are nods here to Hereditary, The Witch,Sleepaway Camp, and yes, Tarantino, but Weapons never feels derivative. It’s a stew of influences cooked down to something wholly original. The cinematography is precise and intimate, often lingering just a second too long on a hallway or a half-open door. The score hums with dread. And then there are the scares; sick, inventive, and timed to perfection. Cregger doesn’t just know how to scare you. He knows when. There’s a scene involving a character walking out of a house into the night that had the entire theater holding its breath, waiting for the obvious scare, only for Cregger to sidestep it and hit us with something infinitely worse. It’s like he wrote the scene just to say, “I know what you’re expecting. Now scream anyway.”
Garner is phenomenal, managing to portray trauma, paranoia, and quiet strength without ever slipping into cliché. Brolin, too, is excellent. He’s grizzled, grief-stricken, and perpetually one bad lead away from losing it completely. Abrams is unnerving in a way that feels lived-in, and Wong provides a welcome (and humanizing) dose of grounded desperation.
And that third act? Good luck. It’s audacious. It’s brutal. It’s batshit. It’s the kind of finale that reminds you you’re alive, because your heart is racing, your palms are sweating, and your jaw is somewhere on the theater floor. No spoilers, but let’s just say that by the time the credits rolled, someone in my row gasped audibly and muttered “What the f** just happened?”, just like Brolin’s character screams in the film. Which, honestly, should be on the poster.
There’s no question: Weapons is the best horror film in years. Maybe decades. It’s the rare film that doesn’t just aim to scare you, it aims to change you. And it succeeds. I left the theater thrilled, shaken, and already plotting when I could see it again. It’s the kind of movie that’ll have horror fans talking for years and Halloween stores scrambling to mass-produce costumes by mid-September. God bless Zach Cregger. And someone please check on Jordan Peele.
