Where did Zach Cregger come from? It’s an easy enough question to answer on its face; he was a cast member on the cultishly beloved sketch comedy show The Whitest Kids U Know, then spent the 2010s bopping around a handful of little-remembered sitcoms before making his way into the director’s chair. Little of that, however, could have prepared one for Barbarian. Arriving in the post-summer, pre-Halloween doldrums of 2022, Cregger’s solo directorial debut was a jolt to the system, a shockingly assured horror comedy which came out of nowhere and instantly ricocheted into uncharted territory (so out-of-nowhere was its central twist that I had to write my own review almost entirely in allusions and double-entendres to preserve its surprises). The stakes for Cregger’s sophomore feature are considerably higher now that we know what he’s capable of, but Weapons proves his earlier success was no fluke. Like Jordan Peele before him, Cregger makes the transition from TV sketch comic to big-screen horror maestro look easy.
At 2:17 AM, seventeen third graders simultaneously get out of bed and leave their homes, running into the night, arms outstretched, to points unknown. Stranger still, all of the children share a single classroom, leaving behind just one classmate, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) and a very puzzled teacher, Ms. Justine Gandy (Julia Garner). Guilt-stricken, for all intents and purposes unemployed, and subject to the eyes of a suspicious town (including a particularly irate father played by Josh Brolin), Ms. Gandy takes it upon herself to figure out what happened to her students— and why, exactly, little Alex was left behind.
As with Barbarian, I’m hesitant to describe the plot of Weapons much further than that— not because there is any single plot twist on the level of that film’s notorious gear-shift key change, but simply because so much of the film’s pleasure lies in the way in which the story unfolds. Cregger utilizes a sort of recursive, nesting-doll technique; we spend a couple of days following Justine around, then go back and see the same period through the eyes of Brolin’s Archer Graff, and on outward through a half dozen or so characters, gleaning a little more clarity each go round (smartly, Cregger largely avoids repeating scenes outright, giving us just enough new information to fill in the gaps). The effect is a bit like the novels of Stephen King (a clear influence), which typically spend a few hundred pages on character development before getting to the interdimensional-monster-clown business. It’s a bold strategy for a good-time summer horror flick, and one can imagine a viewer of limited attention span getting antsy during one of the admittedly lengthy scare-free passages. But, like King, Cregger knows what he’s doing, allowing us to get to know and care about these characters before the trap inevitably snaps shut on them.
And boy, does it snap. The audience for my preview screening was packed to the gills with members of the public, and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a crowd as vocal and in-tune with a horror picture: screams at hidden figures and gasps at slowly opening doors, and then waves of nervous, appreciative laughter at the screams and gasps themselves. Here, as in Barbarian, Cregger proves himself a master of seemingly contradictory tones, modulating between offbeat humor and horrifying visuals, and combining the two as effectively as any film since Evil Dead 2. It all builds to one of the most gloriously bonkers horror finales in recent memory, at once deeply unsettling and hysterically over-the-top. Even in a year packed with memorable fright sequences, it’s unlikely you’ve seen just about anything like it.
The comparisons to King will likely, by extension, draw comparisons to Stranger Things, pop culture’s most notable instance of King karaoke. There are, to be sure, superficial similarities, from the idyllic suburban setting to the fairy tale-like child’s narration which bookends the film, but Cregger is playing a decidedly spikier game. For one thing, Weapons is pointedly set in the present day, with Ring cameras and iPads playing prominent roles (as well as what may be cinema’s first fentanyl-panic jokes). The satire here might not be as precise as in Barbarian (which, with the possible exception of Tár, may be the best film yet made about the #MeToo movement), but it’s not hard to see echoes of our nobody-trusts-anybody world in its heated PTA meetings. Eddington may be the most up-front thriller about our current cultural boiling point, but Weapons is very much cooking on the same stove.
If there is a flaw to Weapons, it is that its episodic structure draws the focus away from Garner, who portrays one of the most vivid and likable horror characters of the year. In broad strokes, Ms. Gandy is an archetype we’ve seen before, the concerned teacher so desperate to rescue her kids that she breaks rules and oversteps boundaries. But this character is rarely allowed to be as messy as she is here. Justine is chaotic and funny and just a little immature, undeniably good but prone to plainly awful decisions; the audience is just as liable to yell at her not to hook up with her dirtbag cop ex (the always-welcome Alden Ehrenreich) as to not enter that creepy house. In other words, Ms. Gandy is a real person, with all the charms and flaws that entails. The structure is necessary, and the film would be lesser without it, but it’s still a shame we couldn’t spend more time with its protagonist.
But this is a quibble compared to the pleasures of Weapons, one of the most purely inventive and entertaining horror films in ages (that it arrives the same summer as the equally great Sinners almost feels like some cosmic mistake— we never get more than one of these per year). The pity of writing about it so soon after its release is that there’s so much I want to talk about but can’t yet, particularly regarding the ultimate nature of the film’s evil and one very unexpected performance from an actor you’ve probably seen elsewhere, but never anywhere close to this. But all of that can wait; for now, there is simply the joy of watching something this scary and funny and audacious and new on the big screen with a roomful of people who have no idea what they’re getting into. Cregger, along with Peele and Osgood Perkins, seems to be ushering in a new wave of auteurist horror: audacious spectacles stranger and more personal than the product being churned out of the Blumhouse factory, but more committed to widescreen entertainment than the occasionally dour A24 strain. For those with a taste for the macabre and a thirst for originality at the multiplex, Weapons is nothing short of a delight.
Weapons
2025
dir. Zach Cregger
128 min.
Opens Friday, 8/8 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Capitol Theatre, Apple Cinemas Cambridge, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all local AMCs
