Weapons (2025) – Review

“WEAPONS”

Weapons is a recent horror film written and directed by Zachary Cregger. It garnered very favourable reviews upon its release, reaching in the 100% club on Rotten Tomatoes for a brief period.

Calling Weapons a pure horror film isn’t entirely appropriate in my opinion for a couple of reasons, but I’ll get to that as we go. Safe to say there will be no spoilers in this review, in fact I won’t even be able to talk about some actors’ performances to avoid spoilers. As a result, I won’t be doing a summation of the plot per se, not because it’s complicated or it will give away too much, but because Weapons doesn’t follow a traditional structure.

The basic premise is that in one night all of the children bar one (a little boy named Alex) who are all in the same class wake up at 2:17am, get out of their beds, and no one has seen them since, and the town is in uproar about where the kids have gone. A large portion of the town suspects that the classes’ teacher, Justine (played by Julia Garner) is to blame.

To go back to what I said previously about it not following a traditional structure, while it does sort of tell its story in a linear fashion, it doesn’t necessarily answer all of your questions- it takes a lot of breaks and then comes back to reveal some missing gaps and follows different characters during these sections. It reminds me of the Simpsons episode ‘Trilogy of Error’ which had mysteries in one section that become answered when you follow a different character in another. The first section follows Justine, and another that follows a police officer played by Josh Brolin, and so on and so forth.

There’s quite a few chapters to get through, and this works initially, where the first few sections feel like a traditional horror film. The weird thing is, when we get to the third segment involving the cop it kind of abandons the horror element and almost feels like we’re in a different movie. With the way the movie was going, I was considering maybe that this was a television series at some point but that the plans had changed part way through production, though considering how many Marvel actors are in this movie, that might not have been the case, especially with Benedict Wong showing up and playing very against his usual type- no disrespect, he gives a very good performance here.

If anything though, this structure makes this feel more like a mystery-thriller and not a horror film. Don’t get me wrong, there are some creepy elements but they tend to come in the early portions of the movie, the late portions don’t really succeed in this manner.

All that being said, if you’re at all observant, you’ll probably figure out what’s going on relatively early. The twist is a bit of an interesting one, but it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but it doesn’t collapse the whole movie, and the film does a very good movie playing off of genuine fear, since it deals with a lot of fears that parents have about their own children, something that I think will resonate quite well with people that have children. Thematically, the film does have some very good ideas going on, but it’s very difficult to get into them here without giving away too many spoilers.

When you get to the final act, the entire film goes off the rails completely. I am not joking! I haven’t seen an ending this insane in a long time. I’d say while I think that the ending won’t work for everyone, it really worked for me, and despite the fact that I felt the middle portion was a bit ropey, the ending really made it all worthwhile.

I will stress, however, that Weapons is a particularly gory movie- there are some quite graphic effects used for several sequences, so I’ll advise some discretion if you’re going to see this film, since I think they did such a good job with them that it was really hard to not wince. Especially considering that I think this was mostly made using practical effects.

Weapons is not a perfect movie, the middle portion of the film kind of meanders, some of the characters are a bit all over the place, but as a whole I don’t think those points impact on the plot too much, and I think that there is something here that is commendable. I’d describe the film as being very weird but well made, and it doesn’t fall into the trap of making a film weird for pretentious reasons. The performances are great across the board and I think the film, while having one of the most bizarre endings of all time, does have an effective ending.