Cast: Julia Garner, josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan, Benedict Wong, Austin Abrams, Cary Christopher, June Diane Raphael, Toby Huss, Sara Paxton, Justin Long,

Written and Directed By: Zach Cregger

Release year: 2025

Studio/Streamer: Warner Bros

Runtime: 128 minutes

Audio Description provided by: (Need Credit)

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What is it?: A sleepy town is turned upside down when 17 elementary school kids get up at the exact same time in the middle of the night and run away from their homes. All of the kids were in the same class. What exactly happened? Is the teacher responsible, or is something else to blame? A tale is told from six different perspectives, piecing the story together as it goes along.

What Works:It certainly is original. Cregger, formerly of the Whitest Kids You Know, has started to make a name for himself now in the unexpected horror arena. Following his surprise breakout hit Barbarian, Cregger tells a slightly more realistic story with still a host of twists and turns that keep you guessing. He also cannot make a film without at least a few moments of cringe inducing gore, which is either debatably necessary or not depending on how you view the genre. is it possible to be horror without gore? Sure. but for some, it is way less fun.

Cregger has entrusted this sophomore effort to a host of reliable actors, but Amy Madigan is the one getting all the praise. To explain why, would spoil a lot, but let’s just say her character here is a far cry from being the supportive wife in Field Of dreams. it is just one of those totally unrecognizable turns that gets people talking, and turns heads. At this point in the year, my favorite supporting actress performances are all these weird horror standouts, led by Madigan and Sally Hawkins (Bring Her Back), who really make the most out of both of their meaty roles.

the rest of the cast is fine, with maybe some being underutilized. One of the problems I had, which made me think this wasn’t quite the second coming as some have made it out to be, is that Josh Brolin’s father feels like a dad who has been searching for his son for ten years. everyone else has given up hope, or moved on, but by God he will find his son. This is because Cregger is so narrowly thinking about only a handful of characters, his 19 little kids missing piece stumbles as parents aren’t just running around Allen the time looking for their kids. Search parties. People in this town should be shaken to the core, but Brolin feels like an odd standout, even in his interactions with other parents. It really has been a short period of time, and Cregger’s idea of what a town would look like with nineteen missing kids is just deeply unrealistic.

But Brolin certainly doesn’t give a bad performance. Like Madigan, he’s one of the stronger points in the film. Even Julia Garner helps to light the film a bit, with her character being somewhat inconvenienced by all of this and thrusting her into the center of the mystery. I normally find Alden Ehrenreich to be a dull talent, but he’s fine here as a cop trying to navigate his small town complicated life choices amidst the larger mystery.

No one here really gives bad performances, it’s more on how Cregger utilizes them. Benedict Wong, certainly, could have been given more depth as a character, instead of checking off boxes for inclusion and being the subject of the most violence within the film. While those who have seen it will probably point to the ending, which doesn’t involve Wong, it is more that his character is persistently involved in terrible things, while perhaps another character has only one. Wong both afflicts and is afflicted by, but his character is so thinly fleshed out to begin with.

Weapons is a great concept, much like Barbarian, and I appreciate Cregger’s determination to tell a story from a skewed perspective instead of making it feel like a standard horror film. But, if he could take a step back, I think he would notice that there are ways to easily strengthen what is a good film, and make it a great one,.

The Audio Description: Much like with every horror film, it lives and dies by, well, who lives and dies, and if they do the latter, how gruesome is that death. while Weapons is not a persistently gory film, it has moments of brutality that would score high on a gore or violence scale. It also has smaller moments, where details build the mystery, and you figure out how all these stories converge. even the specificity of how the kids run away from the houses is important. The track certainly cleared every hurdle it needed to, making it a great horror track.

Why You Might Like it: Weapons feels fresh. In film today, tht is hard to pull off, and in horror it seems even harder. So while Cregger’s script perhaps needed some finesse, it is nothing if not original.

Why You Might Not Like It: Oddly, the gore feels out of place, because the mystery is so much stronger. The gore certainly aligns with the genre, but Cregger’s script actually rises above the usual need to supply your audience with random acts of violence just to keep them feeling satisfied. This could have been Cregger’s The Sixth Sense, where instead of focusing on how to get shocking moments on screen, he could have instead supported it by thinking of it as what it is. A great concept.

Final thoughts: Weapons is the odd film that both celebrates the originality of its screenplay, while also being hampered by the indulgence into an admittedly catchy elevator pitch, that lacks some realistic character development that would make the film even better.

Fresh: Final Grade: 7.1/10