“Weapons” Review: Horror and Havoc in Small-Town America

With his previous film Barbarian, actor-turned-director Zach Cregger staked out a space in the horror genre that flirted with what’s often labeled “elevated” or auteur horror—without ever letting go of the pleasures of a good, old-fashioned scare. His follow-up, Weapons, takes that sensibility into much more ambitious terrain—both formally and in terms of scale. The result is a hybrid: part social drama, part mystery thriller, part absurdist comedy, and, in its final stretch, a full-blown descent into chilling horror.

For much of its running time, Weapons plays like a small-town mystery with ominous undertones. The inciting incident is a disturbing and inexplicable one: at exactly 2:17 AM, seventeen children from the same third-grade class rise from their beds, walk out into the night with arms outstretched, and disappear into the darkness. Security footage captures their movements, but not their destination. The question isn’t just where they went, but why—what compelled them to do it?

The only child not affected is the timid, withdrawn Alex. The rest were students in the class of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), a young teacher now at the center of a town-wide firestorm. With no answers from the police investigation and no leads surfacing, grieving parents lash out—many suspecting Justine of some unthinkable involvement. And Justine, for her part, doesn’t exactly keep it together: she drinks heavily, rekindles a messy romance with her ex (Alden Ehrenreich) –a cop now in a relationship with someone else–, and clashes with the school principal (Benedict Wong), who she believes isn’t supporting her enough. Eventually, pushed to the edge, she launches her own investigation.

But Cregger—using a structural trick familiar from Barbarian—interrupts the narrative flow, jumping to multiple perspectives that slowly reassemble and complicate the puzzle. The most prominent of these is Archer (Josh Brolin), the furious and grieving father of one of the missing children, whose escalating rage makes him a central antagonist. Other perspectives include the aforementioned cop, the school principal, a neighborhood junkie (Austin Abrams), the traumatized Alex, and an eccentric older woman named Gladys (Amy Madigan), whose role grows in significance as the story unfolds. With each new strand, the mystery deepens—and the portrait of the town grows darker and more fractured.

Hints of horror start creeping in through the recurring nightmare sequences experienced by different characters—arguably overused at times—but the genre fully takes over in the film’s final third. What had felt grounded, however mysterious, suddenly tilts into the surreal and the grotesque. The tonal shift is jarring, and the fantastical elements introduced may initially feel arbitrary or hard to grasp. But as the chaos unfolds, Cregger regains control of the narrative, infusing the story with dark humor and bursts of brutal violence that build to an audacious, climactic payoff—one of the most visceral and memorable endings horror has offered in recent years.

Weapons is a film begging for interpretation. At its core, it shares thematic ground with Ari Aster’s Eddington, setting up a small town as a microcosm of larger societal collapse. It’s about paranoia, institutional failure, and the social ruptures caused when no one listens and everyone’s ready to blame. There are hints of political allegory throughout: conspiracy theories, police abuse, parental entitlement in education, and other threads that can’t be fully unpacked without revealing too much. Cregger’s gaze is clearly aimed at a broken culture, with a disintegrating community standing in for a fractured nation.

Even as the film unleashes its horror elements—and leans into the genre’s love of dread, violence, and uneasy laughter—it never entirely abandons these ideas. Not all of the mysteries are wrapped up in a tidy bow, but the emotional and thematic impact lingers. By the time the meaning of the title Weapons becomes clear, it lands with devastating clarity—and force.