Review: Weapons (2025)
Mourning what could've been 3.5/5
Quick Review: Weapons is a wonderfully directed and edited horror-mystery, but it trades some of its best qualities to set up a concise and snappy ending. 3.5/5 Stars.
Main Review:
This summer’s acclaimed blockbuster-horror movie, Weapons, is finally winding down its time in theaters, and will be available for digital rental by the time you’re reading this review. After seeing all the hype about it online, my FOMO got the best of me, and I cleared some time out to go and watch it in the theater.
Weapons’ opening prologue explains that one Wednesday night, at exactly 2:17 a.m., 17 children from Ms. Justine Gandy’s third-grade class ran into the night. No one has seen them since. This tragedy serves as the backdrop to the rest of the film.
About halfway through the movie, I was convinced that I would be giving Weapons a five star review. It was firing on all cylinders, every aspect of the film working together to deliver something that was unsettling, thematic, and personal. The camera work was inspired, the editing was invisible (in a good way), the score helped drive home the emotional beats. But all those elements served to support the actor’s performances and the excellent writing.
The film uses an episodic story structure as a way to control information and deepen characterization. Each episode (or chapter) is focused on a specific character, exploring their lives in the aftermath of the tragedy. The first chapter focuses on Justine Gandy, the teacher whose class goes missing. We see that she cares deeply for students and is often willing to cross professional boundaries to support them, we see her drinking become more and more of a problem, we see the suspicion cast on her by the town… And as we watch Justine in her struggle to cope with the tragedy, the mystery of it all infects every aspect of her life. We see her slowly pulled in by the weight of this black hole, knowing she’s innocent, but still unable to avoid casting some amount of suspicion on her. Is she involved? Did she make a decision that somehow led to this? What is she hiding?
But Justine isn’t the only one who falls victim. We see it happen to Archer, the father of one of the missing children, Matthew. We see in the background that Matthew was a bully, particularly targeting, Alex, the only student who didn’t go missing? Did Archer’s parenting lead to his son’s disappearance? Why isn’t the Principal investigating Alex and his family? The characters feel real, each one struggling with their own flaws, each one burdened by the weight of the missing children. Each one being slowly pulled in by the mystery…
A recovering alcoholic beat cop and a homeless drug addict cross paths at the wrong time. Each one afraid of the law bearing down on them, each one dropped into the tragedy by pure happenstance. Their relationship and subsequent tit-for-tat was the highlight of the film, and some of the strongest storytelling I’ve seen in a movie all year.
Weapons is at its best when its a movie about the aftermath of a tragedy. When its a film about systems, cycles, and community. About the interrelatedness of our lives, our inability to produce good on our own accord, our need to find a scapegoat in the face of suffering. It’s at its best when it delivers deep themes without clear answers, when its mysteries feel like a spiral collapsing in on itself. Sadly, its style shifts about halfway through.
Its director/writer, Zach Cregger, is a comedian at heart (he’s also one of the founding members of The Whitest Kids U'Know), and the genre-shift in Weapons makes that abundantly clear. During the chapter focused on Alex, Cregger shifts the film into something that closer resembles a horror-comedy. While the technical aspects of the film remain stellar, its storytelling strengths begin to take a back door. We see the exploration of the movie’s themes take a back seat in order to explain a “magic system” and deliver a punchy ending.
This is where to review begins to shift more into a matter of personal taste.
I don’t think the genre-shift was poorly done, I don’t think the horror-comedy elements were bad. I’m not upset that the antagonist “was just a witch.” But there is a part of me that can’t help but mourn the loss of what this film could’ve been. I found myself wishing that the mystery lingered just a little longer. I wanted the fate of the children, the reason for their disappearance, to be the climax. To be the big reveal. I wanted the themes of the film to deepen and simmer for longer.
If you look at online discussions of the film, despite the (totally deserved) praise that Weapons gets it feels like something is missing. I get the sense that many people want to have deeper discussion on the messaging of the film, on how it reflects our lives in intentional (and unintentional) ways. The problem is, that these discussions are cut off at the knees, because that’s not what Weapons delivers. Instead it focuses on delivering a fun popcorn-ending, as if it was intentionally trying to avoid the “elevated horror” accusations (“elevated horror” is worth its own discussion at some point).
I can’t say this enough: Weapons is an excellent film and it is definitely worth a watch. I respect Creggers willingness to take a risky turn, and I think he managed the genre shift as well as anyone could, but I disagree that it was the right decision. Either way, I heartily recommend Weapons, especially if you can manage to watch it with a crowd.
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