Review: Weapons (2025)

August long ago gained the moniker of Hollywood’s dumping ground, a reputation that has only worsened in the age of franchise IP. But the surprise $42 million opening of Zach Cregger’s gory horror whodunnit Weapons last week demonstrates that the summer movie season still has some life left. 

The follow-up to Cregger’s 2002 sleeper hit, Barbarian, the film charts the aftermath of how the sudden disappearance of 17 children who collectively walked out of their homes at 2:17 am reverberates through a small American town. Structured as five vignettes from the perspectives of the characters at the center of the tragedy, it offers a Rashomon Gothic take on a culture usually reserved for the Hallmark movie. 

Unlike typical summer horror offerings, Weapons boasts a cast of formidable actors, including Josh Brolin as a dad in mourning, Doctor Strange’s Benedict Wong as an emphatic principal, and Ozark’s Julia Garner as the semi-alcoholic teacher in charge of the class who went missing. By grounding the film in such finely drawn characters, Cregger humanizes the horror and makes it all the more effective. 

However, while Weapons serves as a well-crafted respite from the horror formula, what keeps it from reaching the eschalons of instant classics like Hereditary and Us is its cursory attention to “flyover” America and its dominant beliefs. For all his impressive character work and echoes of COVID era education commentary, Cregger never bothers to provide his setting with any real identity—a lifelong city dweller’s imagining of what Trump County life is like.

Such also extends to the film’s central mystical threat which the director unleashes into a world bereft of religious belief, a bedrock that separates horror classics like The Exorcist and The Conjuring from their imitators. 

Regardless, Weapons is the rare studio horror entry that seems to be trying. All flaws aside, it still towers above its recent competition.

Weapons is now playing in theaters.