Weapons is a truly one of a kind horror epic that spins a grand, ambitious story told through multiple perspectives that conjures up some moments of blood curdling terror that only Zach Cregger could scare up, resulting in one of the year’s best films and a horror experience unlike anything in recent memory.

 

After the terrific reception of his first horror film Barbarian back in 2022, Zach Cregger’s next project became one of the most talked about scripts in Hollywood. Sparking a bidding war between multiple studios, New Line Cinemas won the rights with Cregger receiving final cut privileges for the film, which is not normally extended to directors other than the biggest names in Hollywood like Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and Martin Scorsese. And three years later, Cregger’s horror movie inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia is running into the theatres, ready to rattle moviegoers to their core. In an age of horror cinema where “elevated horror” is used to tackle grief and suffering, Cregger’s latest film is the antithesis to this idea with a sprawling mystery epic that offers up good old fashioned scares, purposeful storytelling that explores grief on a human level, and some undeniable moments of comedy that makes Weapons a truly breathtaking horror experience that audiences won’t soon forget. 

 

It is truly hard to discuss Weapons and what it does narratively, because anything beyond the premise would be venturing into spoiler territory. As teased in the trailer, the opening fifteen minutes of the film covers what the audiences knows: that all but one of the children in Justine Gandy’s class mysteriously walks out the doors of their homes at 2:17 am and disappears into the night, never to be seen again, leaving a community searching for answers. From there, Cregger begins building his story with an ambitious scope and structure that results in an utterly engaging experience. The story itself is divided into different chapters, with each chapter being told from the perspective of a different character, which slowly reveals key pieces of the puzzle that builds towards the final act where the reason behind the children’s disappearance is revealed (even if I thought the reveal didn’t go far enough given the grandeur of the storytelling). Sprinkled throughout are moments of utter terror that will have audiences jumping out of their seats, proving that Cregger’s twisted, extremely gory, and downright mean sense of terror has not softened from his previous horror Barbarian in the slightest, infused with outrageously hilarious moments that generates some great uncomfortable laughter. Not wasting a second of screen time and instead creating an unsettling tension that runs high through the film’s entirety, what unfolds is a riveting horror mystery that feels like a sinister bedtime story that hooks audiences immediately from the first scene and has them on the edge of their seat until its final moments.

 

While Cregger lays the runway for his cast with the excellently written screenplay, it is the cast that creates the film’s heart and invests the audience in the story. Julia Garner is nothing short of brilliant in the lead role of Justine, the teacher whose students go missing who becomes the town pariah as parents look for someone to blame for their children’s disappearance. With an aching devastation for her children who have gone missing and a caring, bleeding heart, Garner is mesmerizing every second she is on screen as she tries to piece together back her life as she is being attacked by the town, while searching for answers as to what happened to her students. Josh Brolin is pitch perfect as Archer Graff, the father of one of the missing children, bringing a rage and heart break as a parent trying to find his missing son at all costs. With Brolin channeling his character’s tortured state with a quiet intensity that does not need to be spoken, the desperation and grief of the parents who have lost their children washes over the audience and creates the grief at the centre of Cregger’s story.