What frights await those who closely watch the panning camera in Zach Cregger’s 2025 horror movie, Weapons. The director of 2022’s terrifying and unexpected Barbarian is back again, and he’s picked up some nifty lessons in the intervening years. With his camera and his story, Cregger drags us along toward another hair-raising destination where there are plenty of scares, punctuated with jokes just funny enough for us to let our guard down before the next terrifying image grabs us.

Weapons operates in the space between comedy and horror. Sometimes to great effect, like with the Shawn of the ᴅᴇᴀᴅs and Evil ᴅᴇᴀᴅs of the world, and sometimes to ruin, like with Piranha 3DD or Bride of Chucky. The key to finding a good middle ground is obvious: include “ᴅᴇᴀᴅ” in your тιтle. However, if your film just has to be тιтled otherwise, then take a page out of Weapons and make sure that the jokes are strong but brief and scant.

Weapons Hints At Frightening Real World Tragedies, But Doesn’t Go Far Enough

The Creative Construction & Terrific Mystery Still Make For A Satisfactory Ride

While there are certainly moments of tension-relieving humor, Weapons never stops being a horror movie, more Scream than Cabin in the Woods. For all the comparisons, Weapons is a singular film. At 2:17 AM, one night in a quiet town, 17 children suddenly disappear. The only clue to what happened comes from videos taken by doorbell security systems. Grainy, silent playback recordings show children exiting their homes and fleeing into the woods, their arms outstretched as if they were birds ready to take a leap of faith on their first flight.

It’s a clever twist. Those ubiquitous cameras designed to protect inhabitants from menaces outside the home can only watch helplessly as their tiny wards flee out of frame. For all our fences, doors, cameras, and other security measures, can we do anything to protect our children? It’s an idea that swims quietly through Weapons, though a bit too quietly. For all Cregger’s exceptional ability to conjure scares in any setting, what is most disquieting is the sight of a lone boy sitting in an empty classroom, with an adorned memorial to his missing classmates outside.

It’s an image that’s strikingly horrifying and dishearteningly familiar. This sinister metaphor is later punctuated when a gigantic ᴀssault rifle slowly appears out of the clouds above the home of one of the missing children. Cregger does not explore school violence in such a head-on way for the rest of the film. He instead chooses to focus on the effective scares and the mystery of where the kids have gone, which proves to be a properly disturbing web.

Weapons tells its story in vignettes following different inhabitants of the sleepy town. Each tale is introduced with a тιтle card and the character’s name, beginning from around the same point in time, save in one notable case. A later “chapter” weaves around a previous one until the stories collide with a startling crash. It’s a good way to color in the neighborhood, and gives the excellent ensemble, which includes Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, and Benedict Wong, a chance to make us care before they face their fates.

Weapons Features Some Truly Startling Scares & Excellent Lead Performances

Josh Brolin & Julia Garner Needed A Bit More Time Together For Us To Get Wrapped Up In Their Story

Brolin and Garner are the ostensible stars as Justine Gandy and Archer Graff. Archer is the grieving father of one of the lost children, and Justine was their school teacher, whom the entire town views with unveiled suspicion and rage. The only child who did not disappear that night is Alex Lilly, played with heartbreaking timidity by Cary Christopher. While Justine and Archer have the chance to make amends in some exciting sequences, I never quite got the feeling it was their story.

Instead, Weapons is more Alex’s film, and he’s the only character who seems to undergo any sort of change. We hear and see the problems with Justine and Archer. One’s a troubled alcoholic, and the other is so bereaved he can’t even say goodbye to his wife, but neither feels reconciled by the end. The “chapters” in Weapons separate us a bit too far from our characters, and I would have enjoyed more Scooby-Dooing by Archer and Justine. The sad, confused old dad and the sad, confused young educator make for a fun couple.

What we get instead is still quite great and quite gory. It’s not called Weapons for nothing. Cregger’s camera pivots robotically, rotating around rooms to escape a horror in the den, only to be confronted by another in the kitchen. There’s a madcap, kinetic energy to Weapons that is wonderfully displayed in the preponderance of chase scenes in Weapons. We go under table legs and through shared bathrooms. It’s like we’re kids playing tag, and you don’t want to be “it”.