Weapons (2025)

by Adelaide Song on 2025-08-02.
Tags: horror comedy film thriller

The hype cycle around Weapons (2025) has absolutely eaten the movie in a way I haven’t seen since last year’s Longlegs (2024). While Longlegs “only” had a truly fantastic teaser rollout/ARG laying the groundwork for its release, the showbiz goss surrounding Weapons (did you know Jordan Peele fired his management, etc.), combined with the leaked script and accompanying reactions turned an already-hot movie into a molten-salt reactor. I am broadly loathe to bring up anything from Online in a review, but the hype is such that most people reading this review will be asking something along the lines of, “Is it really all that?” The answer to that is—as you should expect—“not really.” However, while the buzz of Longlegs burned away with every step out of the theater, I think Weapons is going to remain a well-deserved favourite for many viewers, albeit one that I found far from perfect.

Easily the bedrock of the film (and the main reason it was so effective at generating hype) is its central mystery. One night, all but one child from Justine Gandy’s third-grade class gets up and runs out into the dark, never to be seen again. It’s an instantly iconic setup, so baffling and freakish that it’s no wonder Maybrook’s grief-stricken parents turn to witch hunts. Naturally, Justine (Julie Garner) ends up in their crosshairs as the only link between the victims; with no other leads, every attempt she makes at self-defense just gets spun into further incrimination.

Justine’s story is the first of a series of dominoes that make up Weapons’ splintered script. Each chapter is named for its viewpoint character and comes with its own little plot curlicue: we see a slice of the investigation play out, then swap bodies at the dramatic climax. This structure is what drew comparisons to the manifold Magnolia, but there are no diagrams needed here, no connections in the great web of life. Cregger uses his characters more like different angles on an action replay. Every time you come up with an unanswered question during one sequence, your brain immediately starts bubbling up unpleasant ideas about what’ll happen in the next one. Sometimes I was wildly off the mark—the needle-stick red herring is particularly effective. Sometimes I got exactly what I… well, wanted is a strong word.

This pinballing momentum keeps Weapons an unimpeachable thrill-ride til its third act, where the metaphorical curtains start to part. It would be a miracle for the central mystery of Weapons to have answers nearly half as cool as the questions themselves; you would need the kind of narrative manna from heaven that Twin Peaks got with BOB, and no such miracle is forthcoming here. What we get is… fine? It’s fine, and it’s carried by Cary Christopher’s excellent performance as Alex, the sole survivor of the disappearances. Unfortunately, it doesn’t match the same madcap energy of the rest of the film til the dying minutes—although that final sequence does, in fact, go absolutely apeshit in a way that had the whole theater hooting and hollering.

All in all, people whose tastes tend towards the gonzo will get a huge kick out of this film. For the majority of its runtime, it’s taut, sleek and frankly just gorgeous to watch in motion. The stellar cinematography is one thing, but Larkin Sieple’s lighting department seems to have sampled my night terrors for the bottomless shadows of this film. Its plotting and character work can fail under pressure, but there’s enough effective scares and haunting images that the film will rattle around in your brain for days afterwards.

Spoilers follow.

Content warnings for suicide, genocide, existing in the world in 2025.

In the runup to the film’s release, the front-runner for Weapons’ central motif was school shootings. It’s an all-too-easy game of fill-in-the-blank that anyone who knows anything about America could play; certainly the title didn’t help. We’ve also seen the same kind of outcry from desperate, grieving parents looking for answers—how did they not see this coming? Surely they must have known this was happening, surely they must have been able to do something.

Now having seen the film, Weapons feels too squirmy to be pinned down to one specific model of tragedy. It’s not an inapplicable lens by any means—I don’t think you can literally depict a giant assault rifle looming over a child without immediately thinking of Columbine—but you’ll tie yourself in knots trying to read the entire film in this manner. The most obvious counterargument is Alex’s role in the story. If you’re being extremely nitpicky, Alex is technically culpable for the disappearance of his classmates, but he doesn’t fit either the “bullied loner” or the modern extremist profiles for a mass shooting perpetrator, nor is he even old enough to fit these demographics. Yes, there’s some (relatively) mild bullying shown, but it’s clear that the main reason he participates in Gladys’ scheme is because she’s holding his parents hostage. He clearly doesn’t take catharsis from his actions in any way, and even acts as the caretaker of all the missing children in the same way he nurses his parents. On the flipside, Alex being a neo-Nazi standin would require a degree of blame the movie never puts on his shoulders. He’s always framed purely sympathetically as the victim of higher powers.

I’ve run myself ragged trying to come up with neat readings of the film along similar lines: Gladys as a Chaya Raichik-esque figure, or God forbid a transphobic caricature akin to that bathroom mural. Each time it’s also totally fallen to bits (see ¹ for a little more.) Downside: it makes my job as a wannabe essayist harder when I’m not spoon-fed thematic throughlines. Upside: it’s pretty clear to me that Cregger is intentionally cutting himself loose from these kinds of straightforward readings, in an effort to gesture at much broader and murkier issues.

The most obvious companion piece to Weapons is Kurosawa’s seminal neo-noir Cure (1997), which prominently features its own vagrant mind-controller turning people into murderous sleeper agents. It also has own gruff, stoic protagonist going through marital problems at the center of its web, though far be it for me to compare Josh Brolin’s Sad Dad to Koji Yakusho’s perfectly Urasawa-esque performance.

Thinking about it more, though, the more I feel like these are fundamentally oppositional movies. Weapons doesn’t take cues from Cure, it actively flips them on their head. Cure’s Cesares all seem to be in totally fine mental health after their actions. The ritual in Weapons leaves its victims totally mindless after long enough, with only a few survivors even beginning to speak again. Mamiya only taps into the urges that already exist. Gladys, and then Alex, specifically direct their puppets to act in ways that go against their wishes. You could argue Marcus, Paul and Archer attempting to kill Justine are all manifestations of their resentment towards her, but those feelings are all too openly acknowledged to resemble those ticking time-bombs in Cure. The lethal potency of those emotions comes from their total repression for years on years. Meanwhile, everyone knows what’s wrong in Weapons, but that knowledge doesn’t do anything for them. Even when the victims are found, they’re irreparably scarred by what they’ve undergone—to say nothing of the broader fallout of finding out your children have torn a woman’s jaw from her skull and cannibalized her.

Ultimately, this is the most emotionally resonant note the movie strikes for me. For me and many of my friends, we live every moment under the weight of a million miseries we are victims, perpetrators or bystanders of. Opening Twitter is an invitation to marinate your brain in a 24/7 feed of children killing themselves, babies being shot in the head and miscellaneous Nazism, and nothing about your doomscrolling will meaningfully make any of it better. But you’re aware of it, and that means something, right? Enough to make a couple of acerbic jabs, which I’m sure will have some effect, eventually. Just writing about this headspace feels fraught because it swallows so much of my waking life; committing it to public text feels like a final declaration of surrender, and not even one that contributes anything new to the discussion. We all know what it’s like. That’s the fucking problem!

I believe Zach when he says he didn’t have any of these big, looming tragedies as specific touchstones when writing this movie. The thing is that you don’t need to specifically be thinking about COVID, or Sandy Hook, or Gaza to evoke this particular tenor. Whether we’re behind the camera or in the cinema, we’re all thinking about it. The most fantastical thing that happens in this film’s runtime is that there is any catharsis at all, that our valiant protagonists manage to turn that information into action. In reality I will live and die waiting for that upheaval to arrive. Nothing ever happens, and that will make us all insane. Four stars out of five.