Rating: B
Dir: Zach Cregger
Star: Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Amy Madigan
By the time I got to the end of this, I knew this was by the director of Barbarian. I’ll not say much more than that, although without spoilers I can explain that both films a) feature basements, and b) likely work better if you don’t know too much before going in. Which makes me wonder how his reboot of the Resident Evil franchise is going to go next year, since that’s hardly an unknown quantity. Anyway, here we quickly reach the heart of a mystery. In a mid-size Pennsylvanian town (the part of Pennsylvania played, quite convincingly, by Georgia), seventeen pupils from the same third-grade class, all Naruto run out of their homes in the middle of the night and vanish.
This leaves, understandably, a lot of trauma to go around, including the one pupil who did not vanish, Alex Lilly, and the class’s teacher, Justine Gandy (Garner), whom many think was involved somehow. Among those with such suspicions is Archer Graff (Brolin), father to one of the disappeared kids. Gandy and Graff separately attempt to solve the mystery; although given the situation, the apparent lack of police effort here, is as inexplicable as the near-complete absence of media interest. Each is given their own, overlapping chapter in the narrative, as does Alex, Justine’s cop ex-boyfriend Paul (Ehrenreich), and even a junkie thief who crosses Paul’s path. You will need to be patient before the pieces finally fit together into a coherent whole.
The poster child for that would be Chris, who turned to me about an hour in, and politely inquired if it was ever going to make sense. It will, though at 128 minutes overall, I could probably have done without Justine and Paul sitting in a bar, yakking about stuff of tangential (at best) relevance to the situation. We do not really need to explore her feelings much, or the resulting love triangle. However, I always enjoy that tasty moment of satisfaction, when everything suddenly comes together and slots into place. This has a top-shelf example – especially for horror, a genre which typically tends to the linear and relatively straightforward. Thereafter, it’s excellent, with an ending whose like I had not seen before. I’ll leave it there.
Of course, some critics feel the need to over-complicate matters, such as the one who called it “a school shooting allegory.” As usual, that kind of bullshit says much more about the critic than the film. There is no need to try and turn Weapons into some kind of “elevated” horror: just accept it as a nasty, modern fairy story. The Ugly Stepsister might be its closest recent relation, at least in sharing a similar approach. Though it was completely grounded in the mundane, and this is not. Weapons definitely offers the most memorable horror villain of the year, and it’s in that department I would rank it most clearly above Sinners, in terms of mainstream horror from 2025.