I Liked Weapons!

Despite utterly adoring Barbarian, I somehow forgot Zach Cregger’s sophomore directorial effort, Weapons, was coming out this year. I was under the impression his next movie would be yet another Resident Evil revival until last week, when friends started posting euphorically after seeing this original Cregger film. Oh, right! I read about that on Wikipedia a while back! Yes! I guess my 2025 has been too full of champagne dreams and sexy chaos for me to remember. That or the PR campaign was minimal. Or the advertising algorithm screwed up big time. 

Thanks to these eagle-eyed mutuals and their extreme enthusiasm, this lapse of cultural awareness (life in the carpool lane!) wasn’t going keep me from catching Weapons as soon as possible. In fact, it may be the first film I’ve seen in theaters in a non-dad/date capacity since Nope! Two years ago! And only Longlegs stands in between as a film I might have seen in the theaters solo, if necessary! Apparently, it still takes a comedy actor turned horror auteur’s follow-up to a modern classic to get me in theaters. That…or a lady. (My son, who made us leave Dogman half-way through, is in no rush to suffer a half-hour of ads and trailers to see a bombastic adaptation of a beloved graphic novel again. Which is fine with me.)

All I knew about Weapons beforehand was the director, a few actors involved, and the info on the poster (also revealed in the first five minutes of the film). I’m grateful for my ignorance, and - if you plan on seeing it, and aren’t a total scaredy-pants - I’d stop reading now. NOW! In hindsight, it would have been nice to see the movie with a large weekend audience sharing their WTFs and OMGs, but it wasn’t in the joint-custody stars this month. In fact, I caught a showing before noon, so I’d have time to either write, or roll up in a ball and cry, before picking my kid up from camp. 

You see, one of the few downsides of parenthood, in my experience, is that I can rarely handle children’s pain or endangerment in films. I didn’t always like movies where child actors were put in dubious situations, or their screams were used to establish stakes, but now I have to sincerely trust a director’s sensibility to even risk the triggering of anxiety. I loved Mike Flanagan’s first two Netflix series, the supernatural traumatization of tots done tastefully, but I still haven’t watched Before I Wake, his tale of parental bereavement, or rewatched Doctor Sleep, thanks to Jacob Tremblay’s cruelly torturous cameo. I enjoyed The Babadook before dad life, but haven’t dared watch it since. I didn’t make it through Skinamarink and vehemently resent its existence. Having an adorable moppet of my own has ruined my ability to watch adorable moppets suffer. I really hope this passes once my own kid gets less cute. If I stop being able to watch adolescents mime agony, I guess I’ll have no choice but to read more.

I’m happy to say Cregger, despite his wry taste and gift for startling audiences, does right by us wimps. As promised by the poster, Weapons opens with all but one child from a third-grade class in a small Pennsylvania town leaving their homes at 2:17am and disappearing into the night. The sequence detailing this is narrated by a child, and uses the language a good parent would use to explain such a bizarre, upsetting scenario to a child. Cregger trusts the circumstances to be gripping enough that he doesn’t need to unduly milk the parental confusion or the innocence of those lost. The stakes of the mystery are transparent without either elaborating on or avoiding the inherent anguish.

Julia Garner plays the equally clueless schoolteacher whose students, save one, have disappeared. I noted in my blurb about Wolf Man that I could see her aloof detachment put to better use in another film, and Weapons indeed does. After Barbarian’s exquisite portrait of vulnerable narcissism, it’s interesting Cregger is focused on characters like Garner’s Justine Gandy, who are clearly guarded and self-centered, but sincere in their affection and concern for others. Most of the leads, including Josh Brolin’s Archer Graff, the least passive of the parents, and Alden Ehrenreich’s Officer Morgan, are similarly pulled down self-destructive paths by the conflict between selfish impulses and their shame at failing others. By the time a hapless junkie named James enters the narrative, his own distracted morality is just a comic heightening of what we’ve already seen.

Enjoyably obscuring any message is the film’s format, which jumps forwards and backwards in time to show how different characters experienced the events. Such a device can be a real threat to a film’s pace, especially one that establishes its core drama almost immediately. But Cregger subtly makes each chapter brisker than the previous, keeping the film from repeating scenes and information more than necessary. The lateral moves are never at the expense of storytelling, or even a replacement for it.

That sense of economy does undercut the grandiosity, making a film far more focused than, say, Jordan Peele’s similarly chaptered Nope, but also less ostentatiously “epic.” I’ve heard people question the arbitrariness of the villain’s actions, and they’ve got a point. Cregger shamelessly lets us hear the definition of a “parasite” at the start of a flashback concerning the arrival of “Aunt Gladys,” and it can feel glib to explain such a surreal scenario simply by suggesting some people don’t care who they hurt. After sleeping on the movie, I think the choice suggests something about how it’s harder to make space for others, and sit with pain, than it is to be purely selfish and avoid it. He wants the drama to emanate from the former choice. But Weapons leaves a lot of the audience wanting to understand this unapologetically cruel, magical figure (played by Amy Madigan with enigmatic self-certainty), and how the hell they wandered into such an ordinary world.

Weapons underscores the truth in Billy Wilder’s belief that opening narration can be a tremendous way to provide exposition, but closing narration is an indulgence: we don’t need help getting out of a story, the way we might getting in. The info narration provides at the beginning makes it easy to give a shit as we follow individual characters to their jobs or to dive bars. But its return at the end might as well be “and they all lived with PTSD ever after.” It’s not as absurd a denouement as the text at the end of Unbreakable, but shares a similar desire not to dwell on the broader implications of what we’ve seen. Like whether we should trust our own aunts.

Whether the film transcends being a mere yarn, it’s still an inspired, exciting, unpredictable yarn. I have to go back to Pulp Fiction to remember an audience made this giddy by the sense that we had no idea not just what we’d see next, but who would be involved and when (and I saw this with a surprisingly non-negligible pre-lunch weekday audience!). Cregger has so much fun with POV shots, whether it’s weaving through the liquor store aisle, or the different ways someone might react to newspaper-covered windows. There’s a viciously gratuitous and delightful celebration of Steamboat Willie entering the public domain, and while I literally cannot see now-respected character actor Toby Huss without flashing on his hysterical ‘90s and ‘00s comedy work, I wound up glad he was involved. 

Children are barely interacted with for the first half of the movie, which made it a little easier to take when we finally find out young Alex Lilly has had a more terrifying time than everyone else combined. Cary Christopher (who has an Emmy nomination for Days Of Our Lives!) plays Lilly with the resigned calm of a kid who’s accepted bullying is just part of his day. It might be disturbingly familiar to see someone so young almost seem unaware of how unwarrantedly terrible they have it, and I was digging my fingers into my arm for much of his chapter. But man, do we get a cathartic climax for our troubles. I almost forgot horror movies can provide those!

I went into Weapons sighing over Cregger making a goddamn Resident Evil movie next (not five years after the last attempted reboot!), but now I’m glad. After Nope and Beau Is Afraid, it's a relief the former Whitest Kid U Know is following two fantastic original horror films with a more mercenary gig he might learn new technical skills from, rather than blowing his wad on a bloated "personal vision" that’s three hours because he thinks he needs to top himself. In 2025, it’s almost a novelty to see a smart Hollywood director commit to entertainment. 

If you want to say, ask, or suggest anything to me, I'd shoot a line to anthonyisright at gmail dot com.