Full spoilers follow for Weapons.
It’s time to hold your arms out to the side and race towards your nearest cinema, because Weapons is now in theaters. Coming courtesy of Zach Cregger, director of Barbarian and the upcoming Resident Evil reboot, Weapons is a barn burner of a horror film, standing as one of the year’s most distinctive and accomplished theatrical offerings so far. IGN’s Tom Jorgensen echoed this sentiment in his 9/10 Weapons review, saying that Cregger manages to take his “blend of unbearable tension and dark humor to a new level of razor-sharpness.” Weapons was already heavily anticipated by genre fans because of its strong marketing, but now that critics are raving, it’s sure to be among the most talked about original films of 2025.
But what makes Weapons so creatively successful? We’ve already had a handful of solid horror entries so far this year, such as Sinners, Companion, and Final Destination Bloodlines. What puts Weapons near the top of that list? The answer is that the movie has a secret, well, weapon: its ability to be genuinely unpredictable. In a genre that’s as beloved for giving fans exactly what they expect as what they might not, Weapons is carefully crafted to keep viewers uneasy by not letting what the movie’s actually doing become obvious to the audience until near the very end. By embracing both narrative and tonal unpredictability in such a widespread fashion, Weapons doesn’t just use surprise as a tool; it makes surprise its entire identity.
Weapons and a Fluid Foundation
As revealed by the film’s trailers, Weapons takes place one month after 17 children from the same classroom in the town of Maybrook disappeared into the night. The movie has an ensemble cast and regularly shifts perspectives, never truly settling on a single main protagonist (although Julia Garner as class teacher Justine Gandy is the closest) as it explores various individuals and how they’ve been affected by the situation. This kind of structure isn’t anything novel, but the way Cregger deploys the convention serves two purposes: to allow the reveal of crucial information about the central mystery to be delayed as long as possible without annoying the audience (since we’re always learning something narratively new with whichever character we’re following), and also to acclimatize viewers to the array of tonal registers the movie plans to use by indicating that we’ll be following an array of different characters.
From the moment the “Justine” title card appears on screen, we understand that we’ll be seeing events from multiple perspectives and jumping back and forth along the timeline. Subconsciously, this technique also prepares the audience for how tonally disparate the movie plans to be from scene to scene, sometimes even from beat to beat. Early on, viewers might feel a bit confused as to where the horror is in this horror film, with many scenes in the first half hour having either a somber or humorous flair. The former is to be expected with an entire town having a classroom of children ripped out of it, but the latter is the secret sauce that reveals Cregger’s true conceit: that he literally “weaponizes” the balance of solemn character drama, off-kilter humor and expected scares to ensure the audience never quite knows what the movie will do next.
Cregger ‘weaponizes’ the balance of solemn character drama, off-kilter humor and expected scares to ensure the audience never quite knows what the movie will do next.
This perpetual uneasiness heightens the sense of terror because it makes it much harder to predict exactly when the movie will show something terrifying. Not knowing whether the next big beat will make you squirm in, jump out of, or fall laughing out of your seat is what makes Weapons such a thrilling moviegoing experience. But there’s more to the film’s success than having this kind of feel. Many mediocre to terrible genre movies feature “random stuff happening” and severe tonal whiplash only to fall on their face. The difference is Cregger’s adept command of the technique, of knowing exactly when to deploy humor, heart, or horror without any of them undercutting each other, that proves him to be one of the most promising up and coming horror filmmakers.
A Time for Twists
Another part of Weapons’ unpredictable nature is how it takes advantage of transitions between points of view. Whenever the movie is about to shift perspectives, it tends to end on something scary and bizarre that recontextualizes the entire scenario, raising questions the audience will be chewing on during the next section. This creates anticipation for the eventual answers while also broadening the scope of the story as it moves further along. What first appears to be a mere mystery about why the kids all ran away slowly unravels to reveal greater supernatural levels that are still a danger to the characters in the present tense. This onion peel narrative structure isn’t just gratifying to watch play out, but also makes a great subversion as to the contents of the story compared to its presentation.
The ultimate answer as to what’s happening here is remarkably old school: quite literally, a witch did it. Gladys (Amy Madigan), the aunt of Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the one student in Justine’s class who didn’t disappear, is a witch who is behind all the dark goings-on in Maybrook. She’s taken over Alex’s house by hypnotizing his parents (and later his classmates, who she’s keeping in the basement), and seemingly needs them to rejuvenate her body, although exactly how and why is left a bit vague. What makes the witch reveal work is how it’s essentially smuggled into the structure. The opening acts indicate the movie will be something more stylistically modern, so the twist that what we’re really doing is in the dark fairy tale wheelhouse gets to play out like an actual surprise, even though this knowledge elucidates all of the unexplained idiosyncrasies that came before.
This “twist as genre clarification” technique is something Cregger also used in his 2022 film Barbarian. That movie was what I’ve referred to as a “plot twist delivery machine,” a descriptor that works both for that film and the Cregger-produced but Drew Hancock-directed entry Companion. While both of those movies are perfectly enjoyable on their own terms, Weapons is a significant upgrade because of Cregger’s more audacious script and improved formal discipline. Weapons isn’t just a slickly produced roller coaster moving from reveal to reveal; it’s a well-crafted and strikingly unorthodox picture that expands its emotional scope as it narrows its genre focus. It takes serious directorial muscle to make a horde of third-graders chasing an old woman through the suburbs like a pack of zombies and literally tearing her limb from limb simultaneously unsettling, hilarious, and dramatically satisfying, but Cregger pulls it off.
What Other Horror Movies Should Learn From Weapons
This is not to say that every horror movie should copy the Weapons playbook. What makes the film work goes deeper than “it’s scary and funny!” But when looking at the last decade or so of horror films, the ones that have risen to the top of the pile share many of the same virtues, namely skilled directors who marry unique sensibilities and strong craftsmanship, a greater emotional range than merely “tense or frightening,” and a commitment to what makes the horror genre enjoyable without trying to be “better” than it. Movies in this category have been helmed by a variety of talented filmmakers, such as M. Night Shyamalan, Jordan Peele, Dan Trachtenberg, and Arkasha Stevenson, and Zach Cregger now finds himself among such esteemed company.
The real lesson that future movies should take from Weapons is the same one I’ve harped about before on IGN: that studios should let filmmakers make the movies they want to make. Horror is better at this than many other genres because of the lower budgets they tend to have, but even they can fall into the same traps as big-budget films like sloppy adaptations, those with paper thin narratives, or ill-conceived legacy sequels. As for problems endemic to the horror genre specifically, the deluge of movies that turn their monster of the day into an abstract threat that’s supposed to be some one-to-one analogue for “grief” or “trauma” has cut many a promising premise down at the knees. Smarter storytellers understand that such thematic seasoning should be exactly that: seasoning, not a blunt force metaphor. The monster being “depression” is so much less fun than the monster being a monster.
Weapons Gallery
It may sound simple, but “strong director making an unembarrassed genre movie in their own style” really is the big takeaway. It will always be the big takeaway, because it’s really all you need to make a satisfying movie experience. If every film that entered the cinemas followed that principle, perhaps a movie like Weapons wouldn’t feel like such a standout.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
