Weapons (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Bullet Poof

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

With Barbarian, filmmaker Zach Cregger demonstrated a high level of skill, using physical space and rhythms, as well as disconnected, dislocated storytelling, to suggest not only menace but also some of the world's real-life ills, such as deteriorating infrastructure, the #MeToo movement, etc. (He must have gone back to film school after his atrocious, odious directing debut Miss March, from 2009.) Unfortunately Barbarian disintegrated into a silly ending, but it was worth a look, and it showed promise.

Cregger's new Weapons fares much better. It has less to say about the sorry state of the world, but it's a better-made film all around. It makes use of the sectioned storytelling of Barbarian — telling its story in six chapters, focusing on six different characters — but with more immediate results. It builds a mystery story that is constantly gripping, and thrilling. As it begins, a young girl narrates, telling us that, on one fateful night, at 2:17 a.m., seventeen children got out of bed, walked out their front doors, and vanished into the night.

All seventeen children were students of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). When she reports for work the next day, the room is empty, except for one child, Alex (Cary Christopher). The police question Justine and Alex thoroughly but neither seems to know what happened. The community begins to blame Justine for the mass disappearance; if all the students were in her classroom and no other, she must have had something to do with it. Her principal, Andrew (Benedict Wong), tells her to take some time off and get away.

Instead she hits the liquor store, plops herself at the local bar, and seduces married police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich). Paul, meanwhile, is having trouble with a local drug addict and thief, Anthony (Austin Abrams). After accidentally jabbing himself with a needle in Anthony's pocket, Paul punches him in the face, an act that is caught on his squad car dash-cam. Anthony, meanwhile, finds a house to break into and rob, and discovers some very strange dealings inside.

During all this, grieving father Archer (Josh Brolin), has become obsessed with finding out what happened to his son Matthew, who was one of the seventeen. He studies porch cams and triangulates coordinates on a map. He's also one of Justine's most vocal accusers. But after protecting her from an unexpected attacker, they form a truce and begin investigating together. That's our six characters. The other important one is an auntie named Gladys (Oscar-nominee Amy Madigan, continuing a streak of horror films after The Hunt and Antlers), with alarming makeup and a strange wig.

Despite running a longish 128 minutes, Weapons is beautifully edited, layering clues on top of clues and finding interesting intersections among its chapters. (It's fun to see scenes presented from differing points of view.) Like Barbarian, the solution of the mystery isn't so much the unmasking of a killer, but rather a phantasmagoria of intense gore so shocking that we're laughing one second and squirming the next. Fortunately, the gore in Weapons remains in line with the tone of the rest of the film.

Justine's story is perhaps the most relevant, as it deals — again, like Barbarian — with the nature of accusation and the idea of a mob mentality that sees accusation as fact, with no chance for understanding or forgiveness. This inflexibility also leads to Justine not being allowed to speak to Alex, even though they are "the only two left."

But the overarching evil that permeates the story is just that: evil. It doesn't seem connected to anything relating to reality, and even the concept of human beings as "weapons" isn't explored to any intriguing degree. Walking out of Weapons, a viewer might feel physically affected by the skillful filmmaking, but it will remain to be seen just how much it lingers.