Part of the brilliance of 2022’s Barbarian was it’s unique approach to structure. It’s unsettling horror premise gets reset on more than one occasion, giving the nightmarish scenario fuller context until we get to a satisfying conclusion. That film was from writer-director Zach Cregger, and he’s followed that surprise hit with this year’s Weapons, which has become an even bigger hit and an even bigger surprise. Weapons doubles down on the structure of shifting perspective and clever world-building, taking its time constructing the various strands of a suburban town curdled by an underbelly that would make David Lynch squirm. An quantifiable success, Weapons allows Cregger to separate himself amongst the growing contingent of horror movie directors. The only genre, it seems, where studios allow creative innovation, Cregger proves willing to step up in scale, both cinematically and narratively.
Barbarian was Cregger’s solo directorial debut, though he’d co-directed two previous films with Trevor Moore. Cregger and Moore were founding members of the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know, and remained major collaborators until Moore’s sudden death in 2021, after which Cregger pivoted to the horror genre. Both of his films showcase a filmmaker with strong visual instincts, and a deft touch with tone. Humor finds its way into both his features, and the most exciting part of Weapons is watching the way he subverts the expectation of the genre. This isn’t the snarky, attitude-based comedy that Joss Whedon brought to the MCU, but a troubling, dark humor that speaks to the muddied themes of the film’s premise.
In a breathtaking sequence, Weapons opens with an omniscient child’s narration explaining the happenings of Maybrook, Pennsylvania. On a random weeknight, at 2:17 AM, seventeen children got out of bed and ran away into the darkness. Their whereabouts were unknown but home security footage showed how they all ran in the same, unnatural way: panicked, with their arms unmoving, pointing downward. All seventeen children were in the same third-grade class, taught by newcomer Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). When she arrives in class the next morning, only one child remains: Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), a shy, sensitive boy who has little answers for all the questions pointed at him regarding the disappearance of his classmates.
Many bereaved parents take their anguish out on Justine. Without proper explanation, they point toward the teacher. Surely she must know something since all the missing children were in her class. One of those parents is Archer (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew is one of the seventeen who ran away that night. Archer makes demands of the school’s mild-mannered principle, Marcus (Benedict Wong), and Maybrook’s police captain (Toby Huss), to investigate the teacher. In response, Justine becomes isolated in her home, drinking heavily, regressing into bad habits. The film never calls her an alcoholic, but the behavior suggests the abandon of a relapse. She reaches out to an ex-boyfriend, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), an officer in the local police. Meanwhile, a local junkie, James (Austin Abrams), is oblivious to what’s going on, but in his frantic wandering, comes across something that could uncover the source of the children’s disappearance.
Cregger’s screenplay is broken episodically into various character perspectives, frequently showing the same sequence from a different point-of-view. Beginning with Justine, Cregger methodically works his way through various vantage points, adding additional layers to Maybrook’s troubling dynamic. Cregger himself has stated that Paul Thomas Anderson’s multi-character tapestry Magnolia was a major influence on Weapons‘s epic scope. There’s not that much connective tissue between the two films (the main exception being Ehrenreich’s mustachioed cop being styled exactly like John C. Reilly in the 1999 masterpiece), but one can certainly see Cregger flexing his ambition as a filmmaker, refusing the supposed limitations of working within genre. As horror becomes the go-to place for budding auteurs, Cregger directs a clever, unapologetic response to all the overdone tropes that encapsulate so-called “elevated horror”.
The film pairs well with another 2025 film, Ari Aster’s Eddington. Aster’s black comedy cut to the quick of the various ways that COVID shutdowns speed-raced American individualism and division, feeding the most impressionable among us to the world’s most manipulative charlatans. Eddington didn’t waste that much time with metaphor, and it was the film where Aster most abandoned the trappings of a horror film. (Compare that to the other major A24 director, Rogert Eggers, who only further leans into the expectation.) Cregger’s film is less exact, if more exhilarating. Its themes are grayer, its characters easier to parse. But both films speak to a country pummeled by the irrational, existential fears of the middle class; and both films give a frighteningly accurate portrayal of the ways we turn inward in the face of tragedy, and reject community.
In Weapons, Cregger cleverly uses the plight of the children as an impetus for all of Maybrook’s trauma. There’s a cruelty to their random disappearance. In the search for certainty, people find themselves lashing out at others. Most importantly, they make the tragedy about themselves, revealing (of course) how little the children even factor into their ultimate goals. This leaves them susceptible to unreliable forces that offer non-solutions in the form of anger and accusation. Sound familiar? Cregger doesn’t strike me as a particularly political filmmaker, and perhaps the key to Weapons‘s commercial success is how it stays away from the specifics (and, inversely, the specifics could have played a large role into Eddington‘s commercial failure), while still speaking clearly toward the unfortunate state of our current society. We may not be able to put it into words, but something just isn’t quite right.
Whether of not Weapons is intentional in its themes or not doesn’t actually matter too much. Its rorschach presentation means that many can project whatever meaning they can onto it. It can also be taken very much on face value as a straightforward, very plotty horror film. Its third act, which reveals quite a good a deal about the course of this community’s pain, does so with precision and without having to sacrifice the ambivalent tone that runs throughout the rest of the story. A much harder feat when you watch nearly any contemporary horror film. So often this is where the genre disappoints me, when it’s forced to explain. Some horror films abdicate that responsibility, leaving you twisted in the film’s darkness. Cregger accepts that responsibility admirably, and delivers an ending that delivers on the film’s biting humor, supernatural allusions, and suburban criticism.
I guess this is as good a time as any to mention the best performance in the entire film. Amy Madigan doesn’t show up in a meaningful way until after the halfway point, playing Gladys, an eccentric woman in heavy pancake make-up. It wouldn’t be right to tell any more than that. Part of the charm of Weapons is the way Gladys is revealed over time. I’ll say this: Madigan’s performance is phenomenal. In the hands of a less talented actor (and a less clever director), Gladys would be a figure of grotesque terror. Instead, Madigan ingeniously plays her as lonely, troubled, spiteful. That Cregger makes this woman an actual character, and Madigan brings her to life with an incredible performance, takes Weapons up another notch, past the pitfalls of so many other horror films which collapse under the narrative weight of the ending.
That’s to say nothing of Garner, Brolin, Wong, Ehrenreich, Abrams, and Christopher, who all perfectly balance the taut tonal tightrope that this movie miraculously pulls off. The film’s ending is a sick (funny!) joke that plays games with your emotional sympathies. The movie’s violence – which is ample, and sufficiently gnarly throughout – crescendoes into an act so ghastly one can’t decide whether to laugh in its absurdity or be stunned into silence by the sobering reality. Not since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood did a film’s ending shock me so thoroughly into submission. It’s thrilling, really. All the more because Cregger’s film is a wholly original enterprise, free from the clutches of IP. It’s a success story that’s incredibly heartening even if the film’s story specifically isn’t.
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Written and Directed by Zach Cregger