‘Weapons’ movie review: Zach Cregger’s creepy sophomore is diabolically smart

Zach Cregger’s Weapons opens with one thing weird sufficient to present pause. At precisely 2:17 AM, in a neat Pennsylvania suburb the place nothing ever appears to occur, seventeen kids get off the bed, stroll to their entrance doorways, and slip into the evening with their arms stretched huge, like silent little airplanes slicing throughout manicured lawns at nighttime. They don’t come again. Just one little one from Justine Gandy’s third-grade class stays, and nobody can clarify why.

The premise feels on the precipice of tipping over into Brothers Grimm territory, and Cregger — whose Barbarian was a madcap, claustrophobic journey via an Airbnb from hell — appears to relish in bringing this horrific fashionable fairy story to life. The place Barbarian was spring-loaded with shocks round each nook, Weapons is extra like a locked puzzle field, and each flip of the important thing feels deliberate and designed to make you lean in.

Cregger breaks the story into chapters, every from the angle of somebody in Maybrook whose life is tilting off its axis. Julia Garner’s Justine is pale, quietly drowning in vodka, and taking the brunt of the city’s suspicion. Josh Brolin’s Archer is a broad-shouldered, broad-voiced father whose grief has hardened into anger, a lot of it aimed immediately at Justine. There’s additionally Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a moustached cop with a messy private life; the mild faculty principal Andrew (Benedict Wong); and Anthony (Austin Abrams), a twitchy, half-charming junkie with the survival instincts of a cornered rat.

A nonetheless from ‘Weapons’
| Photograph Credit score:
Warner Bros.

Every chapter rewinds the clock, replaying moments we’ve already seen however from a distinct angle, together with a shouting match at a faculty assembly, a vandalised automotive, and glimpses right into a creepy home. The Roshomon Effect warps the shift in perspective to uncover the thriller. Particulars we thought we understood slide into totally different meanings as we begin to unravel the knot.

For some time, Weapons has the identical tense, lived-in air as one thing like Prisoners, with its gradual pans, watchful silences, and a brooding rating that vibrates in your chest. Larkin Seiple’s digital camera hovers and drifts, typically leaning in on faces like an eavesdropper over a dialog. Cregger makes use of the area effectively, letting his actors stretch out. Garner wears her character’s exhaustion and anxiousness like an additional layer of pores and skin. Brolin performs grief as a form of muscle reminiscence, and his each motion feels heavy with unfinished enterprise. Ehrenreich’s Paul seems completely hungover from alcohol and unhealthy selections.

Proper when the seriousness begins to calcify, Aunt Gladys arrives. Hidden below sloppily drawn lipstick and one eye disturbingly smaller than the opposite, Amy Madigan’s Gladys flips the strain in direction of a gleeful sense of derangement, and all of a sudden the laughs, which had been tentative till now, begin bursting via. From right here on, the movie begins to shed its pores and skin, letting the horror and comedy bleed into each other till they’re onerous to inform aside.

Cregger has a present for letting absurdity coexist with dread fairly than breaking the strain outright. Abrams’s Anthony, for instance, has a knack for saying precisely the fallacious factor at precisely the fallacious time, and his twitchy opportunism turns a tense police encounter into one thing nearly vaudevillian. And Madigan’s lopsided eyes and vaguely satanic Mary Poppins vitality flip scenes into surreal gothic comedy sketches with out letting you absolutely unclench. The humour is on a stress valve, nevertheless it’s concurrently additionally an accelerant that makes the violence that follows land more durable, since you had been simply laughing.

Although not all of Cregger’s gambles land. The eventual reveal, of what’s been pulling the strings and what occurred to the kids, feels smaller than the chances the movie’s first hour urged. The place Barbarian used its reveals to open trapdoors beneath us, Weapons narrows its scope and tightens the story simply once you need it to maintain increasing. When the gore lastly ramps up, it’s delightfully over-the-top and can scratch the itch for style followers, nevertheless it doesn’t fairly hit on something deeper. Nonetheless, Cregger is a pure at constructing moments that dwell in that uncomfortable uncanny valley, and a throwaway glimpse of these little airplane arms at nighttime has the identical endurance as a ghost story.

A nonetheless from ‘Weapons’
| Photograph Credit score:
Warner Bros.

There’s additionally a hum of subtext in case you care to tune into it. Maybrook’s finger-pointing and its determined have to affix blame someplace feels emblematic of real-world panic. It may very well be learn as a look at small-town paranoia, and the convenience with which worry curdles into mob logic, and even at America’s present expertise for turning unexplainable occasions into elaborate, weaponised conspiracy. Cregger doesn’t underline these echoes, but the resonance is pulsing simply beneath the style mechanics.

All through, Cregger delivers his scares with a sadist’s timing, nevertheless it’s the best way he stitches dread into the mundane and lets it detonate with out warning that makes Weapons such an exhilarating expertise. By the top, you’ve both been holding your breath or grinning away, as a result of that is what the style seems like when it’s within the arms of somebody having an indecent quantity of enjoyable.

Weapons is exact the place it counts, and it earns its place as one of many 12 months’s sharpest, most satisfying horror movies. And similar to Barbarian, it’s the sort you’d in all probability wish to suggest instantly, with a depraved smile and no particulars in any respect.

Weapons is at the moment operating in theatres

Printed – August 08, 2025 06:40 pm IST