Movie Review: “Weapons”

First impressions can be a tricky thing to pull off, and rarely does a movie’s marketing capture my attention almost immediately while showing very little. The initial teaser for “Weapons”, released in April 2025, was heavily cryptic, showing only silhouettes of children silently running across a neighborhood in the middle of the night. This wordless teaser, being for Zach Cregger’s newest film since 2022’s “Barbarian”, caught my attention almost immediately.

“Weapons” follows the residents of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, who grapple with the disappearance of 17 children who suddenly run from their homes in the middle of the night. The story presents itself in a nonlinear fashion, with each section of the film following a different member of the town, unraveling how each character relates to the overarching mystery.

The unique direction of the film leaves the audience with many questions, which are slowly answered throughout its intriguing runtime.  Although there is a fair amount of characters at play, the children’s teacher, Justine (Juliana Garner), and father to one of the missing children, Archer (Josh Brolin), continuously play a crucial role throughout the entire story.

If any of this sounds interesting, I urge you not to research further into this movie’s plot, as I feel one of “Weapons’” biggest strengths is its central mystery. Most of my favorite parts while watching were attempting to figure out what was going to happen next by unraveling the conflict before the film revealed it to me. 

Its approach to storytelling definitely builds on the audience’s intrigue, as viewers are often left wondering how all the different characters will tie back into each other. The revelations it presents may have been some of my favorite moments in the theater so far this year. However, it is also in these revelations that I find some of Weapons’ weaknesses lie.

Coming into this movie, I had high expectations that the horror it would subject me to would be wholly unique and completely unexpected. The imagery of a floating gun alongside a bloody man whose eyeballs are popping out was what I had glimpsed from some of the additional trailers, and only stoked my desire to potentially see a brand new type of horror. 

While it does utilize some creative storytelling elements, Weapons ended up not being this type of horror to me. Some of its revelations, while unexpected, did not excite me as much as I hoped they would, especially considering its initial setup was so incredibly intriguing. I can’t fault the film for this because I may have set my expectations a little too high in terms of expectations of

Despite this minor issue, I found Weapons to be a great watch, especially in the theater. A few scenes in particular were able to pull off major shifts in tone in a way that I feel genuinely surprised everyone, and made it clear that Cregger was toying with our own expectations. I walked away disappointed that this was not quite as interesting as I would have hoped, but still satisfied with the risks it was willing to take.