Vague Visages’ Weapons review contains minor spoilers. Zach Cregger’s 2025 movie features Josh Brolin, Julia Garner and Alden Ehrenreich. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (2022) was a real moment in time; a thrillingly subversive, frequently jaw-dropping, all-caps declaration that the former star of The Whitest Kids U’Know (2007-11) is one of the most exciting new voices in horror. Following that film up is no enviable task, but with Weapons, Cregger’s accomplished sophomore feature, he proves that Barbarian was definitely not a fluke. A propulsive, edge-of-your seat shocker, it expertly builds tension through a fiendishly clever fractured narrative structure, with several different character perspectives, mostly-handheld camerawork and hugely immersive sound design that places the audience in the middle of the action and challenges them to look away when things get really scary.

Weapons’ ostensible protagonist is Julia Garner’s troubled teacher Justine, whose entire class disappeared at 2:17 a.m., leaving just one boy (Cary Christopher’s withdrawn Alex) behind. The parents in their insulated Pennsylvania community are understandably up in arms about this puzzling incident, and they lay the blame firmly at Justine’s feet. Although she tries to soldier through, Garner’s character falls back on booze and casual sex with former paramour Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) as her coping mechanisms. Cregger is a major proponent of the show-and-don’t-tell approach, and he drops clues early on that these two have underlying issues with alcohol and thus probably aren’t the best company for each other. Justine purchases two big bottles of vodka from the liquor store to drink at home alone in the dark, while Paul’s partner Donna (a scene-stealing June Diane Raphael) badgers him about attending a meeting.

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This is one of many ways that Cregger, who also tackled the sharp script, peppers in crucial details about each character without falling back on clichés. This isn’t a redemption narrative; nobody falls off the wagon and learns the error of their ways because they weren’t exactly on it in the first place (at least not willingly anyway). James (Austin Abrams) pushes this idea even further as a no-good local addict whose scrounging for stuff to pawn for drug money lands him in some pretty sticky situations, including with Paul’s crooked cop, who’s more concerned with impressing his father-in-law/boss than actually protecting the community. Cregger consistently switches the focus to other areas of town, to provide a more rounded view of its various denizens as they interact with each other and, more often than not, fight. As such, Weapons takes its time slowly drip-feeding plot points until the pieces finally start to come together, chiefly through Josh Brolin’s distraught, man-on-a-mission dad, Archer. 

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In a lesser film, Archer and Justine would team up immediately to save the day, but Cregger is less interested in the ways in which his characters rise to the occasion in Weapons and more concerned with how they fall short at the worst possible moment. One of the biggest and best scares comes when Justine drunkenly falls asleep in her car after following Alex home, even after her boss (a twinkly eyed Benedict Wong as Marcus) explicitly warns her not to. As much as the discourse (lord help us) would have you believe that Cregger’s movie has nothing to say, it’s clear from the character focus that the writer-director wants to dissect how flawed, otherwise regular people react in a crisis (typically by zeroing in on a boogeyman that doesn’t exist or, worse, has absolutely nothing to do with the terrible thing that happened). 

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But Weapons is a horror movie and, although Cregger keeps the Big Bad in the foreground for much of the 128-minute runtime, the payoff is more than worth the wait when she finally emerges. Every glimpse up until that point is satisfyingly spine-tingling too. Without spoiling anything, the character design calls to mind both The Witches (2020) and Longlegs (2024) in that it’s a bastardization of standard beauty practices that’s immediately jarring to witness even from far away. Cregger already proved that he knows his way around a scare, and Weapons is somehow loaded with even more nightmare-fuel imagery than Barbarian (Justin Long and the director’s wife, Sara Paxton, who both appeared in the director’s debut, also have cameos in his 2025 film). Naturally, the same rug pull can’t be replicated, so Cregger delves deeper by tapping into the childhood fear of being abandoned by your parents, or of them becoming incapacitated and unable to look after you. He also targets parents watching predominantly through Archer, who at one point hallucinates a massive assault rifle in the sky, hinting that the whole thing could be taken as a metaphor for school shootings, which have become so prevalent as to barely make a ripple anymore.

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Weapons builds the tension and intrigue organically through its split perspectives, almost to a breaking point, but Cregger’s comedy background shines through in a handful of well-placed jokes that fortunately take nothing away from the horrors lurking just outside the audience’s periphery. Likewise, the killer synthwave score, by Hays Holladay and Ryan Holladay, alongside Cregger himself, rattles the bones in perfect time with jerky camerawork and fast-cut editing. It’s a clever, unique and devilishly involving approach from somebody who clearly has a lot to say about the everyday terrors of American polite society. Weapons isn’t explicitly political in the manner of a film like Eddington (2025) — there are no red MAGA hats or slurs thrown around — but the predominantly white, middle-class characters (and how the movie handles violence) speak to the white picket rot that Cregger tackles. The devil is in the details, and she arrives in the full light of day, with a big, lipstick-smeared smile and reassurances that she can be trusted.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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