Film review: ‘WEAPONS’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

While it had some gnawing inconsistencies and questionable logic, Zach Cregger’s 2022 home share horror film Barbarian, was so artfully creepy it signalled the writer/director as an exciting new force in the horror genre.  His latest film, Weapons is even better.  There are a few stumbles but this bizarre, disturbing mystery thriller is so cleverly constructed and so well performed that we can mostly overlook these issues.  This is the sort of film that M. Night Shyamalan almost makes before his movies invariably go off the rails.

The film takes us into an anguished community where 17 children, all from teacher Justine’s (Julia Garner) grade three class, have disappeared.  The only clue to the mystery is home security camera footage which shows the children running into the streets at exactly 2:17am.  With the incensed townsfolk suspecting she had something to do with the disappearances, Justine desperately tries to discover what has happened to the children but the reality is stranger than she could have imagined.

Cregger unfurls the story Rashomon-style with chapters depicting events from the perspectives of the five main characters: Justine, Archer (Josh Brolin) the father of one of the missing children, local cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), James, a homeless drug user (Austin Abrams) and Alex (Cary Christopher) the only child from Justine’s class who didn’t disappear.  While the Rashomon approach is familiar, it works particularly well here allowing us to spend time with each of the main characters and to see how the central mystery has impacted them.  Also, by carefully building the layers of this story, Cregger immerses us in a believable suburbia which makes the true horror of the situation all the creepier.   Also, impressively, Cregger keeps us guessing about what’s going on: is this a child abduction, is something supernatural afoot or is this film more about the destructive impact of fear and paranoia on communities?

As much as its clever script and engrossing story, this film’s impact lies in the way it looks.  Cregger, in collaboration with cinematographer Larkin Seiple, has carefully crafted each scene to give this attractive leafy suburb a feeling of hidden menace.

While much of this film qualifies as drama, there are still plenty of straight up horror moments with white-knuckle tension as characters creep around houses they shouldn’t go into and some surprisingly effective pop-out scares.

The cast are also wonderful with Garner making Justine believably sympathetic but flawed and eventually more nuanced than we first think and Brolin typically excellent as the gruff, physically imposing Archer. Ehrenreich makes the young cop Paul a likeable doofus with an unnerving self-destructive streak, while Abrams is a sad figure as the young homeless guy and Cary Christopher both vulnerable and unsettling in a role that echoes Noah Schapp’s Will Buyers in Stranger Things.  The most memorable, character and performance in this film, though, I’ll leave for audiences to discover.

Weapons has its flaws.  A forensic post-film analysis inevitably leads to questions about whether certain scenes or ideas made sense.  Also, the use of humour, particularly an over-the-top and very gory slapstick scene, will grate with some viewers.

This film succeeds a lot more than it fails, though and Weapons sits comfortably beside Ari Aster’s work and movies like It Follows as part of the remarkable 21st century horror film renaissance.

Nick’s rating: ****

Genre: Drama/ Horror/Thriller.

Classification: MA15+.

Director(s): Zach Cregger.

Release date: 27th Aug 2025.

Running time: 128 mins.

Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.

 

Related Posts:

tagged with , , , , , , , , ,