A hauntingly ambitious horror film that trades easy scares for lingering unease, weaving grief, violence, and mystery into an unforgettable experience.
A review by Ioanna Gousiopoulou
Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025) is most effective when it makes you uneasy. It avoids jump scares for their own sake and shuns the comforting conventions that make horror stories comprehensible. Instead, it wallows in discomfort—unrepentant ambiguity, broken narratives, and a tension that gets under your skin and won’t release. The movie is not without its flaws, but it is a transgressive, queasy addition to the 2020s horror canon that sticks with you long after the credits roll.
Like Cregger’s 2022 hit Barbarian, Weapons makes it clear from the start that it has no desire to follow any genre rules. The movie does not dictate a clear path of action for any of its major characters. Instead, it builds a series of narratives that converge and diverge. While each narrative strand pursues a distinct set of people, moods, and strange occurrences, all must ultimately deal with the same fundamental mystery: the ominous disappearance of seventeen students from the same class at exactly 02:17 am one night—a disappearance that appears to owe itself to an invisible entity. The plot reads as a mix of anthology, riddle, and dream that makes you sick.
Cregger focuses on mood instead of big, flashy shots. He favors peaceful, empty settings over constant activity. Rooms are too quiet, the hallways too long, and the shadows ever-lasting—never fully revealing what they hide. The horrific images serve a story about loss, guilt, and the impact of violence. Julia Garner gives a crisp, subdued performance as Mrs Gandy, the elementary school teacher trapped in an uncontrollable situation after finding out that her whole class has vanished. Her quiet strength draws you in. Josh Brolin supplies the film with its emotional core, embodying a parent filled with grief and anger, struggling with loss and its terrible effects. Amy Madigan, as Aunt Gladys, is the surprise standout—sad, dangerous and unpredictable. Her presence leaves a haunting emotional imprint, shaping how you remember the whole film.
Weapons examines how families unravel under pressure, how fear is passed on from one generation to the next, and how communities crumble. These themes add depth and stay with you beyond the scares. The glacial speed of the film will not appeal to everyone, but when horror does appear—through sudden violence or bizarre, disorienting images—it has its impact because it has been held back. The climax proves this: two tense, slowly-developing hours of growing unease give way to all hell breaking loose in a messy but satisfying exhibition of violence and mayhem.
The film has sparked more conversation than any other horror film released this year. The pacing, especially in the second act, stumbles at times. Cregger’s effort at presenting a multi-layered story too frequently leads to scenes that drag or tangent unnecessarily. The ending, left intentionally murky, is also divisive. Some see it as bold and thematic, refusing to offer easy meaning. Others see it as evasive, unwilling to make a clear point. For me, those risks eventually pay off. The ending’s ambiguity felt intentional rather than evasive, and even the erratic pacing appeared to be a component of a greater effort to unnerve the audience. I was impressed by the movie’s willingness to defy simple explanations, and I left with the impression that Cregger’s gamble was both valuable and essential to the plot he was pursuing.
To understand Weapons, you have to be willing to accept that it does not offer easy answers or closure. But if you are willing to face the distress and sit with the questions, the film can get under your skin in ways you didn’t anticipate. It is, at times, an imperfect movie, but a brave one at that; its images, silences, and fractured plots linger. Challenging, ambitious, and haunting, Weapons finally makes clear that Zach Cregger is one of the most daring voices working in horror today.
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