‘Weapons’ film evaluate: Zach Cregger’s creepy sophomore is diabolically sensible

Zach Cregger’s Weapons opens with one thing weird sufficient to provide pause. At precisely 2:17 AM, in a neat Pennsylvania suburb the place nothing ever appears to occur, seventeen youngsters get off the bed, stroll to their entrance doorways, and slip into the evening with their arms stretched large, like silent little airplanes slicing throughout manicured lawns at midnight. They don’t come again. Just one baby from Justine Gandy’s third-grade class stays, and nobody can clarify why.

The premise feels on the precipice of tipping over into Brothers Grimm territory, and Cregger — whose Barbarian was a madcap, claustrophobic journey by way of an Airbnb from hell — appears to relish in bringing this horrific fashionable fairy story to life. The place Barbarian was spring-loaded with shocks round each nook, Weapons is extra like a locked puzzle field, and each flip of the important thing feels deliberate and designed to make you lean in.

Cregger breaks the story into chapters, every from the attitude of somebody in Maybrook whose life is tilting off its axis. Julia Garner’s Justine is pale, quietly drowning in vodka, and taking the brunt of the city’s suspicion. Josh Brolin’s Archer is a broad-shouldered, broad-voiced father whose grief has hardened into anger, a lot of it aimed instantly at Justine. There’s additionally Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a moustached cop with a messy private life; the light college principal Andrew (Benedict Wong); and Anthony (Austin Abrams), a twitchy, half-charming junkie with the survival instincts of a cornered rat.

A nonetheless from ‘Weapons’
| Photograph Credit score:
Warner Bros.

Every chapter rewinds the clock, replaying moments we’ve already seen however from a special angle, together with a shouting match at a college assembly, a vandalised automobile, and glimpses right into a creepy home. The Roshomon Impact warps the shift in perspective to uncover the thriller. Particulars we thought we understood slide into totally different meanings as we begin to unravel the knot.

For some time, Weapons has the identical tense, lived-in air as one thing like Prisoners, with its gradual pans, watchful silences, and a brooding rating that vibrates in your chest. Larkin Seiple’s digital camera hovers and drifts, typically leaning in on faces like an eavesdropper over a dialog. Cregger makes use of the area nicely, letting his actors stretch out. Garner wears her character’s exhaustion and anxiousness like an additional layer of pores and skin. Brolin performs grief as a type of muscle reminiscence, and his each motion feels heavy with unfinished enterprise. Ehrenreich’s Paul seems completely hungover from alcohol and dangerous selections.

Proper when the seriousness begins to calcify, Aunt Gladys arrives. Hidden below sloppily drawn lipstick and one eye disturbingly smaller than the opposite, Amy Madigan’s Gladys flips the stress in direction of a gleeful sense of derangement, and immediately the laughs, which had been tentative till now, begin bursting by way of. From right here on, the movie begins to shed its pores and skin, letting the horror and comedy bleed into each other till they’re exhausting to inform aside.

Cregger has a present for letting absurdity coexist with dread reasonably than breaking the stress outright. Abrams’s Anthony, for instance, has a knack for saying precisely the mistaken factor at precisely the mistaken time, and his twitchy opportunism turns a tense police encounter into one thing nearly vaudevillian. And Madigan’s lopsided eyes and vaguely satanic Mary Poppins vitality flip scenes into surreal gothic comedy sketches with out letting you totally unclench. The humour is on a stress valve, but it surely’s concurrently additionally an accelerant that makes the violence that follows land tougher, since you had been simply laughing.

Although not all of Cregger’s gambles land. The eventual reveal, of what’s been pulling the strings and what occurred to the kids, feels smaller than the chances the movie’s first hour steered. The place Barbarian used its reveals to open trapdoors beneath us, Weapons narrows its scope and tightens the story simply whenever you need it to maintain increasing. When the gore lastly ramps up, it’s delightfully over-the-top and can scratch the itch for style followers, but it surely doesn’t fairly hit on something deeper. Nonetheless, Cregger is a pure at constructing moments that reside in that uncomfortable uncanny valley, and a throwaway glimpse of these little airplane arms at midnight has the identical endurance as a ghost story.

A nonetheless from ‘Weapons’
| Photograph Credit score:
Warner Bros.

There’s additionally a hum of subtext if you happen to care to tune into it. Maybrook’s finger-pointing and its determined have to affix blame someplace feels emblematic of real-world panic. It could possibly be learn as a look at small-town paranoia, and the convenience with which concern curdles into mob logic, and even at America’s present expertise for turning unexplainable occasions into elaborate, weaponised conspiracy. Cregger doesn’t underline these echoes, but the resonance is pulsing simply beneath the style mechanics.

All through, Cregger delivers his scares with a sadist’s timing, but it surely’s the way in which he stitches dread into the mundane and lets it detonate with out warning that makes Weapons such an exhilarating expertise. By the tip, you’ve both been holding your breath or grinning away, as a result of that is what the style seems like when it’s within the palms of somebody having an indecent quantity of enjoyable.

Weapons is exact the place it counts, and it earns its place as one of many 12 months’s sharpest, most satisfying horror movies. And identical to Barbarian, it’s the type you’d most likely need to suggest instantly, with a depraved smile and no particulars in any respect.

Weapons is at the moment operating in theatres

Printed – August 08, 2025 06:40 pm IST