Weapons (2025)

Rated R for gore and generally upsetting stuff.  There were a couple of scenes where my wife asked me to tell her when it was over.  It's that kind of movie.  While Zach Cregger also did Barbarian, this isn't as brutal as that film.  But that's a pretty high bar to match in terms of upsetting imagery.  This one has that in spades.  Also, there's a bit of alcoholism, sexuality, language and violence thrown into the movie.  It's all a bit much.

DIRECTOR:  Zach Cregger

How much do I want this blog done?  Like, a lot.  How much do I want to write it?  Like, not at all.  The funny thing is that I really enjoyed Weapons.  That's not a shock.  Everyone seems to be really getting into the movie and I'm actually pretty late to the game.  I'm one of those HBO Max folks now.  But I want to be lazy like I've been all day.  Also, I know that I have another movie after this to write about, so that's just making this whole process seem overwhelming.  Don't worry, folks.  I made myself a late night cup of Earl Grey and, hopefully, that will get me through this overwhelming, self-imposed torture I've decided on.

People lost their minds for Barbarian, right?  I mean, I really liked it.  I thought the opening act of the movie was one of the most clever horror movie openings that I've seen in a long time.  I'm also a fan of The Whitest Kids U Know, so I have that going for me.  But I have to say that Weapons is something else.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it is my favorite witch horror movie.  That's a pretty low bar.  I don't know why witches don't really do it for me.   I kind of want to break that down, if only for an excuse to dump a lot of writing onto this blog.  But I don't know why.  I find them normally silly or toeing the line into other monsters' lanes.  But Gladys, for some reason, works.  Maybe its because she's so absurd of a character that I can't help but find her charismatic.  I actually am reminded a lot of the OG film of Roald Dahl's The Witches.  It's the cackling that we get from the Werid Sisters of Macbeth that we haven't really seen in a lot of films lately.  I kind of blame the A24 embracing of the super dry and subdued witches.  But Cregger, with his comedy background, knows how to play up that real discomfort that comes from a comical character being the scariest thing in the room.

Now, I have to tell you, my wife didn't care for this movie.  She doesn't like horror.  She's a lovely lady who gives me my horror movie on Halloween.  And, nomally, I don't have a horror movie in the chamber to watch.  We tend to watch a lot of garbage on Halloween, mainly because I've seen too many horror movies and I'm trying to find something that might intellectually tickle us as well.  Well, this is the first year that I feel like I've absolutely picked a gem.  We watched it a little early because I've been avoiding spoilers for this long and I really wanted to see this movie.  The reason why I'm prefacing all of this is because I want to talk about the fact that Zach Cregger is probably one of the best directors out there right now.  I can't help but make the natural connection to Jordan Peele.  Both of these writer / directors came from a sketch comedy background and I'm trying to find the throughline that brings them from short form, occasionally low-budget storytelling to making feature length films that look absolutely gorgeous while lifting up the genre.  

The easy answer is that both comedy and horror depend on the understanding of how surprise and suspense work.  But here's the deal: while Key & Peele looked gorgeous, The Whitest Kids U Know was functional at best.  I laughed at it because it was funny.  But I never imagine that Zach Cregger cut his teeth making those clips.  I also know that there was a Whitest Kids movie that infamously looked terrible.  Instead, maybe there's this drive to be something more than simply a sketch director.  These guys happened to be funny, but also seem to have a genuine appreciation for film.  We've seen movies switch out perspectives before.  Tarantino's done it a few times, most notably in Pulp Fiction.  But these are both dudes who understand that genre storytelling have gotten the raw deal over time and have pushed themselves to make something gorgeous while absolutely terrifying the audience at the same time.  I know my wife didn't care for the movie, but it didn't mean that she wasn't invested for the majority of the film.  (Note: because I'm a terrible husband and a borderline irresponsible father, I taught my kids to run like the kids in Weapons so they can terrify their mother on a moment's notice. You're welcome, Lauren.  Slash, I'm also sorry.)

One of the frustrating things I'm getting from the film is the interpretation of Weapons as an allegory for school shooting.  I mean, I get it.  But I'm also secretly happy that Cregger came out and said that he never intended it to be an allegory for school shootings.  Let's explore why people think that the movie is about such a heavy topic and why I don't think it works as a concept all the way through.  What Weapons is really good at is looking at a tragedy and showing how people react to the unthinkable.  Now, there's an easy temptation to attach the notion of "school shooting" as the framework for that.  After all, it's becoming the most common "Breaking News" story that we get on a regular basis.  It's something that's always on our mind.  Coupled with the fact that the movie is called Weapons, it scans.  But instead of saying that Cregger is tackling a heavy topic like school shootings, what he's actually doing is creating a real, lived-in world.  The thing that makes Weapons great isn't so much when it comes to plot twists or anything like that.  Honestly, if you told Weapons chronologically and from a singlular perspective, it might actually be pretty mediocre.  No, what Cregger is good at is understanding is that we need to have challenging characters that we can relate to.  Horror has always been plagued by having disposable characters and Cregger doesn't really let us off the hook when it comes to that.  It would be easier to make this about a horror movie body count.  Nope.  Each of the characters matter and nothing about the movie is easy.  I like that a lot.

I do lightly feel betrayed over one thing though.  Maybe I'm misremembering the introduction.  The opening of the film is incredibly effective.  The film starts off with a little girl doing a voice over, stating that the horrific premise of the film --an entire third grade classroom having disappeared overnight --is not really the start of the film.  It's about the characters that I talked about earlier.  But I'm pretty sure that she stated that the children would never be seen again and...um...they totally are.  For people wondering, I'm going to go spoiler light:  there is a concrete explanation of what happens to the kids.  You get to know more than you need to know about the kids and that's fantastic.  But it also is a bit of a lie because I am trying to unpack this story as we discover a whole bunch of stuff about this mystery.  I mean, this is fairly minor, but I liked it a lot.

Also, I'm super glad that I went into this movie completely blind.  I had no idea that it had such a stacked cast.  I honestly love every casting decision in this movie.  I mean, when we see Julia Garner, that oddly makes sense.  She's one of those top-tier actresses that comes from television.  For those who haven't seen Ozark, you are missing out.  But it makes sense when TV royalty do horror.  There's always a little bit of a transition issue when it comes to breaking out to other drama.  It's why I'm never quite surprised to see Jon Hamm in fun things.  But then we have Josh Brolin and I honestly thought that Josh Brolin wouldn't be showing up in horror movies about a witch.  My theory is that they just fell in love with the script.  I mean, there's a chance that Barbarian transcended the zeitgeist so much that there was a need for big name actors beyond Justin Long to show up for this thing.  But man, it was kind of refreshing seeing horror taken seriously.

Listen, I have a hard time writing about movies that I like, especially when they kind of hinge on spoilers.  This is one absolutely fantastic, yet fairly brutal, horror movie.  It lived up to the expectations and I'm now jazzed to follow Zach Cregger.