‘Weapons’ Review – Neighborhood Nightmare Brilliantly Splits The Difference Between Frightening And Fun

If there’s an apt connection to be made between Paul Thomas Anderson’s perfectly imperfect masterpiece, Magnolia, and Zach Cregger’s sophomore feature, Weapons, it’s that both films prominently categorize interconnectedness as a feature, not a bug. That, and the whole frog rain thing, if said amphibians were seen falling from the sky repeatedly throughout the mosaic – like the possessed humans running with their arms stretched out in the form of an airplane on the runway in Cregger’s film – as opposed to one extended scene. But beyond those jogging juveniles lie secrets aplenty, each warranting their own chapters, making Weapons the twisty sort of nightmare that its writer-director is quickly becoming known for. Being a member of the “Whitest Kids U’Know” comedy troupe is one claim to fame, but a legacy in horror filmmaking is another.

It’s the sort of modern footprint that Jordan Peele both inspired and is currently enjoying, and it’s no wonder the Get Out auteur reportedly parted ways with his longtime management team after failing to secure the rights to produce Cregger’s second solo screenplay, the first since 2022’s surprise mega-hit, Barbarian. According to a Deadline report from February 2023, Peele was prepared to kick in a chunk of his contractual backend in order for Weapons to be released under the Monkeypaw banner, and upon losing the bidding war to New Line Cinema, dropped his Artists First management team. A rash judgment call? Perhaps it looks that way on paper, but it’s not like Peele was judging a book by its cover: He had read the book – or what was literally on paper – in all its gory glory. 

Audiences will all but immediately understand what hooked Peele within the first few minutes of Weapons, as the existential dread that oozes from Cregger’s script – consistently punctuated throughout by Larkin Seiple’s assaultive cinematography and a careful, creepy score that Cregger co-crafted with Hays and Ryan Holladay – is omnipresent from the moment the film’s youthful narrator sets its stage. One month prior to our starting point, 17 of the 18 kids in Justine Gandy’s classroom woke up at 2:17 a.m., got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark, and never came back. 

The nature of their collective disappearance hasn’t been pinned on Justine (Julia Garner) by the police, but plenty of the kids’ parents are sure she’s involved; Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) is their spokesperson, a mantle that any backseat baseball coach would naturally take up after his floppy-haired third grader goes missing. Also lurking on the fringes of the proceedings are Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local beat cop who has a romantic past with Justine and is halfheartedly pursuing sobriety at his wife’s behest; an unhoused addict (Austin Abrams) who lives in a needle-ridden tent in the woods; the school principal (Benedict Wong) who is as placating as he is detachedly unbiased regarding whether or not his employee is a sadistic kidnapper; and Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the lone class member to stay asleep once his clock read 2:18. 

What presents itself as an embarrassment of names and faces to remember is ultimately what makes Weapons so thrilling – and disarmingly hilarious – to follow, a calling card of Cregger’s that, when first seen executed to perfection in Barbarian, sudden time and setting jumps felt like being jerked out of an anxiety-induced coma. A filmmaker who clearly prefers his characters to be connected in some form or fashion, he expands his arsenal in Weapons, weaving a web designed for dozens of spiders to share (the six most significant get chapters here), whereas Barbarian only had room for a handful. If your mind has the capacity to recall the events of a film you watched from behind protective fingers three years ago, you’ll remember that we only ever really saw one character interacting with one other in its many parts, whether that was Tess (Georgina Campbell) with Keith (Bill Skarsgård), Tess with AJ (Justin Long), or AJ with The Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis), and so on. Their encounters didn’t complicate matters as much as Cregger’s crafty grasp of the proper time to interrupt grisly violence with jet black comedy. But in Weapons, nothing matters more than who spoke with whom, where and when it happened, and when the last time they were heard from was. 

If there’s one thing the prospective viewer should shy away from when it comes to Weapons – save for consuming any clips and/or spoilers released prior to the moment their butt has been firmly planted in their seat – it’s attempting to solve the movie’s inherent mystery, the reason why these 17 schoolchildren woke up and walked into the night all at once, as it’s being laid out before you. I’d recommend allowing it to wash over you and send a chill down your spine at its pace, not the one a moviegoer tends to set for themselves before writing a film off for its “predictability.” For one, Cregger deftly dictates his twists with a narrative focused less on exposition that will help you place its puzzle pieces in the right notches than it is on providing memorable images to help decipher the labyrinth’s final shape. Take, for instance, a recurring triangle, one that initially appears inside a circle and later shows up on an object that will prove pivotal to the film’s terrifying truth. Its initial appearance caught my eye for reasons unrelated to its ultimate significance, but the presence of alcoholics/addicts in Cregger’s tale makes its presence feel far more intentional than if it were referring to the Illuminati or a peculiarly mowed corn field from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan. 

The “Triangle of Recovery,” which often appears on anniversary chips given to celebrants in a variety of recovery groups, represents the three pillars of sobriety – recovery, unity, and service – while the circle that surrounds it represents the communal journey that group members share. That’s not to say that Cregger’s film is an allegory for the long, non-linear journey of sobriety, but why else would Paul feel exasperated by his wife’s pressure to attend a meeting after work? Justine relapsing on a few jugs of vodka mere minutes after a brutalizing town hall can’t be a coincidence, nor can Paul’s reservations about her free-wheeling alcohol consumption or James’ scramble for one last hit. Not to mention the fact that Cregger himself got sober in 2015, six years prior to the death of his WKUK partner, Trevor Moore, the tragedy that led to Cregger writing Weapons. “The movie’s about that overwhelming emotion you get when you lose someone close to you,” he told GQ in July. “This script was me venting about that. So I didn’t explode.”

Personal yet unyielding, Weapons also remains interested in what occurs inside broken communities, the commonalities meant to bring people together, yet only drive them further apart. I was reminded more of Eddington than of Magnolia here, not because the yarn Weapons unspools isn’t worth its weight in logic tables illustrated for Wikipedia scourers, but because it’s a hell of a lot more fun to ride the wind to its ultimate destination than to try to read the direction of its gusts from top to bottom. To warn in the form of George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” – a strong candidate for the needle-drop of the year – “Watch out now. Take care, beware of the thoughts that linger. Winding up inside your head, the hopelessness around you. In the dead of night, beware of sadness.” Just maybe not in the way you might suspect.

Weapons will debut exclusively in theaters on August 8, 2025, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.