Barbarian director, Zack Cregger, returns to cinemas this week with Weapons, another unpredictable horror rollercoaster that proves his debut feature was no fluke.
The small town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania wakes up one day to find that seventeen children have mysteriously disappeared into the night. Evidence from a number of video doorbells seems to indicate that at 2:17 AM, the kids just got out of bed, opened their front doors, and started running. No intruders, no discussions, just gone. As if that wasn’t odd enough, all seventeen of these students were members of Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) second grade class, in fact, it was all of Ms. Gandy’s class. All except for the Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), a gentle soul who becomes the focus of an intense police investigation into the mass vanishing that no one can quite understand.
Understandably distraught, the town’s parents demand answers. One parent in particular, Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), believes that there is no way Ms. Gandy is completely innocent, the fact that every other child in the school showed up that day can’t be a coincidence. Graff in intent on finding out what she knows, but a series of curious incidents will soon throw them both deep into the unknown. What happened in Maybrook was shocking and tragic, but it will soon evolve into something utterly unbelievable and terrifying.
A surprise hit when it hit theaters in 2022, much of Barbarian’s critical success was a reflection on the writer/director’s ability to manipulate what seemed like a pretty standard narrative into something completely unexpected. For the first two acts, Barbarian drastically shifted its narrative focus every 20 minutes or so, until the final reel where every tiny bit of detail falls together in spectacular fashion to create a climax that seems to come out of nowhere while also neatly tying the film’s disparate story threads up in a nice little bow.
Weapons is uninterested in simply repeating Cregger’s past successes, but rather further exploring storytelling methodologies to bring something fresh to a horror audience that often feels like they’ve seen it all. Through the central conceit of discovering what happened to the missing children, Cregger is able to explore small town dynamics, the ways in which there are no separations between the families and the teachers charged with the care of their children. Every relationship here is personal, even those that only began as a result of this tragedy.
By following the personal stories of Ms. Gandy and Archer Graff, Weapons is easily able to build the town outward in concentric circles around this duo. There is Gandy’s boss, Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), and her ex-boyfriend, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), then there is Alex, his parents, and their recent houseguest, Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), and finally a skid row drug addict named Anthony (Austin Abrams), who finds himself entangled in this world through a wrong place-wrong time encounter with Officer Morgan. None of these characters are more than a step or two removed from one another in this community, making every moment between them feel personal.
Where Barbarian did a masterful job at hiding the true trajectory of the story until the exact moment Cregger decided to send us down into the basement of that questionable rental house, Weapons is less concerned with the what of the film, and far more interested in the how. Both films are really difficult to discuss in detail without giving up crucial plot details, but for very different reasons.
From the very beginning, Weapons is about these missing children, and it never really stops being about them, instead it focuses on peeking behind the curtain to expose the how and the why of their disappearance. Cregger chooses a non-linear storytelling style where he can follow each of the central characters listed above as they play their part in unraveling the story for the audience. This manages the task of slowly doling out details in a way that makes the viewer lean in while simultaneously ratcheting up the tension in a very meticulous way. There comes a point at which Cregger opens the curtain to show the audience what has been happening, but the real magic happens when he invites us backstage to show us how he did it.
Like Oz Perkins’ Monkey earlier in the year, Weapons takes great glee in its graphic – and often pretty gross – violence as a narrative tool. Both films revel in ridiculous levels of gore, playing most of the truly gruesome deaths for laughs while still managing to deliver pathos through characters who aren’t lucky enough to get killed off and are instead left to suffer. It’s a delicate balance that the film manages with ease. Gorehounds will howl in their seats at the copious levels of splatter – especially in the film’s go-for-broke, boundary shattering climax – and those who prefer the more emotionally traumatic brand of suffering will also leave with something to chew on.
Though Barbarian set the bar quite high for Cregger’s eventual return to the director’s chair, he proves himself to be more than just a one trick pony with Weapons. A surefire candidate for best horror film of the year as we head into the back half of 2025, Weapons is brilliantly paced, confidently staged, and features a narrative with more left turns than a NASCAR race. Sure to send horror fans home with giddy bloodstained smiles plastered across their faces, Weapons is another winner from Cregger.