Weapons Review

Credit - Warner Bros.

Zach Cregger became the most recent comedy-to-horror pipeline success story with his horror debut and surprise 2022 hit, Barbarian. While he’s a long way from the days of fare like The Whitest Kids You Know and Miss March, there’s still a way to go before mentioning Cregger with the likes of Jordan Peele and Danny McBride – guys who took and mastered the comedy-to-horror path. Cregger’s follow-up, Weapons, not only skips the sophomore jinx, but it puts him well on his way to the Peele and McBride conversations.

Weapons tells the story of a community struggling with the vanishing of 17 children from the same classroom on the same night at the same time. While that sounds pretty straightforward for any work in horror, Cregger makes sure Weapons takes your expectations and makes them vanish as quickly as the kids in the movie.

Cregger tells the story of Weapons through six interconnected chapters. Think Pulp Fiction or Love Actually with heavy doses of Twin Peaks’s missing person investigation instead of their original plots. It causes the film to move more slowly than most in the genre, but that’s something that works to Weapons’s benefit in a couple of ways.

The first is allowing the film to be a well-executed slow burn. The gift and the curse of Weapons is that you have no idea what’s going on until near the end of the second act. Even then, there’s still plenty left to figure out or learn. Most films’ attempts at this end in disaster and with the audience bored out of its mind.

Thankfully, Cregger uses the slower pace to insert humor, character studies, and sporadic yet well-placed jump scares that entertain and keep your curiosity at bay until the film’s climax, similar to Barbarian’s blueprint. It does make Weapons feel more like a thriller instead of horror, but it also makes the movie more unpredictable as it veers away from where typical horror tropes typically appear.

The other is the space it gives the film’s ensemble cast to operate. Julia Garner, who plays the embattled teacher of the missing children, and Josh Brolin, who plays a concerned parent of one of the missing children, are excellent in their portrayal of the main parties at the center of the mystery. Although from different sides of the matter, both Garner and Brolin do a fantastic job making their characters people you empathize with, despite their undeniable flaws.

However, the less heralded ensemble members shine in the additional room to showcase their talents. The trio of Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, and Benedict Wong carries the bulk of Weapons through the extended lead-up to its frenzied culmination. All three actors are primarily responsible for the humor that gets Weapons through its “dead” periods.

Weapons is the kind of horror-thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat due to what you don’t know and can’t wait to find out. Cregger skillfully manipulates the fact that you have very little information, and while it gets annoying at times, it makes the resolution worth the wait. If more traditional or quicker-paced horror films are more your thing, Weapons may not be your lane. That said, Weapons definitely pays off if you’re willing to be a little patient.