Weapons [2025]
“Why just her classroom? Why only hers?”
Zach Cregger of Whitest Kids U'Know and Barbarian fame is back, this time with a semi-anthology piece about a group of children that mysteriously run out of their homes and never return. In the ancient days of 2022 I said this about his first horror film [the aforementioned Barbarian]: “I would love a pure horror from Zach Cregger in the future. When this is being exactly that – pure, honest, and present in the moment – it is seriously genius. Unfortunately, that purity, honesty, and presentness only lasts for around the first 20 minutes of the film and in its underlying purposes thereafter. Maybe he’ll get it right next time, and I look forward to trying again right along with him, because I see some truly staggering potential here.” Well, here he is, and here I am, both of us trying again…
Maybe third time’s the charm?
At 2:17 a.m., on a Wednesday like any other, 17 children from Justine Gandy’s 3rd-grade classroom awoke from their beds, left their homes, and vanished into the night. Somehow, the path to finding them is even stranger than their leaving.
Haunted kids, mysterious forces, and a story about the small group of people within a community who care enough to try and figure it all out. What's New, Scooby-Doo?
Cregger’s newest film, Weapons, takes America’s favorite pastime [not baseball… the other one] and tries to transform it into a tale of investigation, spooky happenings, and, ultimately, retribution. In some ways I think that Creggar did an excellent job of this — portraying the way that a community rocked by tragic events will turn on itself, often creating demons out of people who had nothing to do with the issue or even those who are victims themselves —, but in many others the story is told with so little regard to any sense of reality that it’s difficult to connect to the themes therein. While the film certainly isn’t strictly a parable of this, whatever it is that Cregger looks to tackle with Weapons is important and deserves to be taken seriously, which is what makes its strange foibles and obvious unrealities all the more upsetting.
The film opens with a monologue about the disappearance of the schoolchildren that sets the foundation for the rest of the film. In it we’re told, “The night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every [other] kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, opened the front door, walked across the front yard and into the dark, and they never came back.” We’re then shown various images of children running into the night and told about how the cops know it was 2:17 in the morning because of various house alarms and Ring cameras that were tripped. While a spooky setup, this is where the troubles with the storytelling begin. Let’s ignore the line about every kid “walking downstairs”, because there’s no way every kid had a two story house and we don’t need to be that nitpicky, and instead talk about how we’re shown footage from said Ring cameras of the children running off into the night. It’s great and well implemented, but it also raises a question:
If the kids were captured leaving their homes… How is it that they weren’t captured on any other CCTV devices?
They didn’t run past any stores, there didn’t happen to be a single other person out that night, no police patrolling the streets either saw or accidentally caught them on a dash cam… nothing? This isn’t the end of the world, but I would have liked a line or two explaining that this was either investigated or that even the town itself found it strange. Speaking of the town itself, I have another question:
Aside from one, why don’t any of the parents in the film make any sort of effort to find their children?
While the film had many distracting elements that pulled me out of the story time and time again, this was one of the heaviest. In an interview with Letterboxd Creggar says, “…my cinematographer and I watched Prisoners and talked about it a lot when we were scouting. It’s very lived-in… that movie feels very authentic.” While the context of this conversation is about inspiring the look of the film, it still implies that Prisoners was part of the creative process. In some ways, Josh Brolin’s character, Archer, emulates parts of this by being the only parent who even tries to find his kid. In others, my issues around the apathy of the community are doubled by knowing that this film was used as any sort of inspiration by Cregger and his team. How do you study a story like Prisoners, then walk away and tell one of your own where nobody acts in the face of tragedy? Even something semi-light like Stranger Things handles this issue with more believable community action… And both Stranger Things and Prisoners are about 1 and 2 kids respectively… not 17 of them.
And, I know, I know, there will be some that want to pass these things off as part of [avoiding spoilers] whatever force caused these kids to leave: If it was strong enough to evoke this response in them, it’s likely got its claws in the community as well somehow… But that doesn’t fly for me here and it’s things like this that make Creggar’s Weapons a difficult watch, but not in the way that it forces you to face or think about subjects you’d rather not; in the way that you’re constantly left questioning why, despite the obvious danger to her, the teacher of this classroom is left to roam the town without any sort of police presence, or why, after having her car vandalized in an obvious way, she’s both allowed and able to drive around and spy on various people without being noticed, or why nobody questions that a 10-year-old [and not just any 10-year-old, but the only one who didn’t disappear] is buying 20+ cans of soup a day, or even why nobody sees the need to investigate the “stroke” that said 10-year-old’s father is claimed to have had despite there being absolutely 0 medical records of it… Just… Why???
Anyway…
“A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways in this story.”
Weapons is told as a semi-anthology where we start from the perspective of one character, get to a certain point in the timeline, and then shift perspective to another — often returning to some previous timestamp and then roving forwards again [maybe better to call it a “round”, like in music]. This format is really interesting when done well — seeing A-C events from a solo perspective, then seeing the same A-C time-scale from an entirely different character and how they overlap is both interesting and engaging — and, at first, we’re treated to a well developed form of this storytelling: We get to see a linear series of events, then we shift, and get to see the same timeframe in a new perspective [forming slightly different events], then end with a minor forward progression of the timeline as a whole. Oftentimes when this technique is used in film, it’s more to show how differing objectives and lives can conflict with one another in ways unseen or felt by those who’ve incidentally initiated the change [see Amores perros, Babel, or Crash for some of the maybe more prominent examples of this], but in Weapons it’s more used to express the film like a novel, and this is a super interesting way to tell a story… The issue is that the gimmick both goes on a little too long, and stops serving its most interesting function pretty early on in the formatting. As I said, the first few transitions are really neat and give us insight into what X character was doing at Y time, while also managing to pull the story forward in small ways. Where it all kind of goes off the rails is that, the closer the characters get to one another, the less interesting the perspective shifts become and the more banal the film itself gets. While I understand this is also how novels using geographically disparate characters work, they generally tell evolving stories that make the characters coming together and interacting more naturally and directly meaningful or fulfilling… That just isn’t really the case in Weapons. Here, the closer the characters get to one another, the less poignant they become. The more you know, the less you kind of care, and I think that this encompasses what I find to be Weapons’ largest failure, despite my millions of small gripes along the way.
Though the story at first presents some unique ideas and methods of conveyance, it also shoots itself in the foot really early on by simply handing the audience the event in question, instead of allowing us to discover what happened for ourselves as the plot unfolds. This is emblematized in a big way as the first few chapters flesh out characters, motivations, and happenings in an almost “behind the scenes” way that film doesn’t often utilize, and would have been made all the stronger if we, as the audience, were made to learn about what happened to the town simultaneous to being part of the investigation the characters themselves are putting on [check out a movie called Blood on Her Name or, for something lighter, the first Knives Out film for an idea of what I mean]. The further the Weapons goes, the less overlapping narrative it has to tell — the closer to the end we get, the less the beginning matters — and there’s a clear point in the movie where the timeline becomes both mostly homogenous and mostly boring. I’m still intrigued by the attempt here, but intrigue alone is not enough to make an experience, and I think that, similar to my issues with Barbarian, Creggar’s background in sketch-comedy brings some interesting flavors to the horror pot, but how one utilizes those flavors is significantly more important than simply leaning on them being “interesting”.
Along with its method of storytelling, Weapons has some very neat ideas, and showcases a number of them in very neat ways [Highlight to see spoiler<I loved the powerful simplicity of the witch’s magic, for instance>]… It also just has too many of them and doesn’t spend enough time honing any singular one. Lots of things get mentioned or shown, but very few of them are consequential to the story as an entire unit; some of them even serving as comedy [whether intentional or no] and becoming horribly distracting instead. 2:17, an image of an M4, infidelity, violence, magic, evil, grief, anger, retribution, corrupting children; all of these and more are part of Weapons’ story in some way, but almost none of them are given time to grow into things that count in the long run. What does the number 217, especially in the scene where it appears on an M4 rifle, symbolize in a film about a bunch of school-age kids dissappearing? Well, according to Creggar himself, basically nothing at all. Why do we care that the cop is cheating on his partner and/or is a recovering alcoholic? I’m pretty sure just to make [avoiding spoilers] certain aspects of his job super awkward and funny for the cheating aspect, and I don’t know at all beyond blind characterization for the other. During Marcus’ chapter, why does he [Spoiler<puke black bile after being turned by the witch>]? This never happens with any other character and means absolutely nothing as the film goes on so… Why? As I mentioned above, why are none of the parents interested in trying to find their children despite the movie opening with an assembly of “angry” parents? The list of my questions goes on and on, but I won’t belabor them. The point is that Weapons is an idea soup and one that would’ve been made significantly stronger by omitting several of the more meaningless aspects of its own story. As they say: “Kill your darlings”.
Prior to leaving for the theater, I’d just finished Smile 2 [something I hope to also write a full review on] and that film, though it tackles very different subjects, does exactly what I wish Weapons had [it’s also somehow absolutely great despite the first one being pretty mediocre]. Smile 2 is 132-minutes long, Weapons is basically the same at 128, and the difference between the depth of storytelling and theme development between the two films makes them feel like one is twice as long as the other. With its 4 extra minutes, Smile 2 manages to craft an interesting and very meaningful drama that uses horror as a setting in a way that makes Weapons look like a messy student project. Why are these things worth comparing? Both are the second horror work [work at all for Smile 2] by a solo writer/ director, both first films came out in 2022, and both are using the same genre to tell their stories. I don’t know the creative background of Smile’s Parker Finn like I do Cregger’s, but the hope I had coming out of Barbarian is pretty tarnished by the immaturity of much of Weapons, and I think that’s the word I’d use to describe my overarching feelings of Weapons as a whole: “Immature”, but not in the derogatory, insulting way it’s often used. I mean it in the literal one.
With a little more growth and time, Weapons could have come out of the oven as a real masterpiece. Instead, like many films I criticize, Weapons tells a story that wants to say a lot, but ends up saying almost nothing at all because of incomplete ideas, half-formed concepts, and too many in-betweens that obscure the right-heres. Weapons, like Cregger’s first horror, has great ideas when removed from the context of their presentation, but get bogged down and suffocated by too many others that surround them. And Weapons, like the violence it attempts to emulate, has simple solutions that just needed more time and consideration to work out and make meaningful. There’s times it’s serious, there’s times its funny. There’s times it has things to say and says them well, there’s times it uses twenty-six hundred words to say nothing at all. There’s times it has extremely striking visuals and powerful horror elements, and there’s times it just sort of wanders around and accomplishes very little or even less.
At the end of the day, Weapons is a bit of a mess and one that I absolutely do not understand the hype for, despite being glad that it’s getting it. Regardless of how I feel about it, I’m excited to see that a budding creative with interesting ideas is getting praised by the industry as a whole. I don’t think this film is bad perse, and I certainly don’t think it’s damaging or dangerous for either the genre or individuals with wacky ideals. So, ultimately, even though I want either a ton more or a ton less from films like this [I think it would have made a killer short], I’m glad that Cregger is, once again, getting the support to make something else and put more art into the world because, at the end of the day, Weapons is art, all film is, and, in the same way that the children of Maybrook should be valued and celebrated, the vulnerability and courage it takes to put art into the world should be as well.
