Zach Cregger has a knack for taking something everyday and sharpening it into a blade. Barbarian was a small and vicious surprise that started with a double booked rental and ended in a place you could not look away from. His new film pushes a similar idea but stretches it in unexpected ways and it earns the comparison to those directors and films that seem to come from their own corner. It reminded me of that strange swirl of empathy and doom that Paul Thomas Anderson conjures in Magnolia. It also brushes up against the apocalyptic pulse of George A. Romero. That is not a claim I make lightly. The thing is, Zach Cregger does not make everyday movies.
On its face, the premise of Weapons is simple enough to repeat. One night a small town is shattered by something that does not fit into any words that the adults can find. Seventeen children climb out of their beds at 2:17 in the morning and slip into the dark. They move with their arms out as if they are pretending to be airplanes. It is eerie because it is so innocent and so wrong and so precise. That one image haunts everything that follows. You can feel the way it tears into a neighborhood, shifting the way people look at one another, at themselves, at teachers and police and anybody who might have touched this mystery.
When news of such a thing hits the real world it is often framed with brutal lines about parents putting children to bed for the last time. And your mind goes there because we live in a country where certain nightmares repeat. It is easy to read the event that sets this story in motion as echoing the shape of a school shooting. It is also possible to see cobwebs of a pandemic fable in the way people retreat into blame and suspicion and fear. But the director resists the urge to dampen the screen with messages. He lets the circumstances breathe. He refuses to draw lines in red marker. He lets you lean in and he trusts you to connect what you will and leave the rest alone.
The center of that first stretch is Justine Gandy, a teacher played with nerve and ache by Julia Garner. She arrives at school the next morning and finds her classroom empty. A child sized silence sits at every desk. Except one. A quiet boy named Alex is still around. He did not leave his house. He did not run. Why him. What spared him or stopped him or chose him. In a different movie that would be the thread we follow with a determined reporter or a detective who cannot sleep. This is not that movie. The town takes a different turn. The pain curdles. People turn their fear into a spear and they point it at the person they can reach. Justine becomes a symbol. A whisper target. A witch. Surely she did something. Surely she knows something. They decide to believe it because it gives their panic shape. Garner plays the anger and the confusion with a crackling control. She is prickly but never false. You believe this is a woman who tried to be good at a hard job and woke up to a world that wants to eat her.
Cregger lays out the story in chapters that belong to people rather than to a tidy timeline. It is a structural choice that fits his subject. After we have lived in Justine’s fear and fury for a while the film slides back to a man named Archer Graff, played by Josh Brolin. He is the father of one of the missing children and he carries himself like a house after a storm. Windows broken. Power off. He is not a mystery to be solved so much as a person who cannot figure out how to continue being the person he used to be. Brolin knows how to play a man who is both large and fragile. The film shows us glances of Archer that link to moments in Justine’s story. You begin to reframe things you already saw. It feels like memory at work. Some viewers may look at this choice and call it a trick. I did not. The way the movie loops and intersects is part of what it is trying to say. It is about the competing stories we tell when reality breaks. It is about secrets tucked in basements and in back pockets. It is about the hidden thing that might leap out. So the narrative design is not decoration. It is the bones.
After the teacher and the father the film tilts again. It lands on Paul, a police officer played by Alden Ehrenreich. It then spends time with a young man named James who is wrestling with addiction, brought to life by Austin Abrams, and with a school principal named Marcus played by Benedict Wong. Every time the movie shifts, the cast brings a different current. Ehrenreich gives Paul a wound that is always open. He drinks too much. He is cheating on his partner with Justine. He does not need more problems yet they find him anyway and they stick to him. He is trying not to drown and cannot even name the water. Abrams plays James without pity and without showboating. You see the small ways he ruins his own chances. Wong makes Marcus feel like a man who carries a school on his back and knows that some burdens are private. None of these roles feel like devices inserted to push the plot. They feel like people the camera has decided to honor for a while.
It might have been a decent and forgettable horror film if it had picked a single heart to follow from beginning to end. Instead the film folds into itself. You are asked to hold a few perspectives in your head at once. So the information you have keeps sliding. This is an old trick when it is done to be clever. Here it lands differently. The form underlines the chaos of what happens when a town tries to digest an impossible night. The crossed signals, the suspicion, the human tendency to fit new facts into an old story. All of that lives inside the way the movie is built.
There is another engine humming beneath the performances and plotting. It is the film craft. Larkin Seiple is behind the camera and he brings playful energy to the way scenes unfold. I worried at first that the style might elbow the story aside. It never does. The camera finds places most cameras would not. It rides a car door that slams shut. It hugs the shoulder of someone sprinting. It goes where a body goes when it hits the ground. It is not showing off. It is translating impact. The images have a clean sense of purpose. They move. They carry us through the altered state this town is living in. Editor Joe Murphy works in complete sync with that eye. Cuts are crisp when they need to be sudden and they breathe when the moment demands space. The rhythm is alive. You can feel the editorial choices guiding your attention without smothering it. A lot of horror these days leans on somber color and attention grabbing angles as a substitute for feeling. This movie dodges those traps. The style serves the story rather than dressing it up in black.
For all the dread the film builds, it understands that people who are terrified also laugh. There are beats where someone can only say what the audience is thinking. A quiet what on earth is happening. Those small releases do not undercut the fear. They make it believable. They humanize the ride. You will still squirm, especially as the final movement presses down on you. The last chapter does not shout. It glides into a mood that made my skin try to climb off. The comedy in earlier sections warms you up and turns out to be a kindness. You need that breathing room to manage the climb.
I keep turning over the title. Weapons. It is easy to list the obvious ones. Guns. Knives. Fists. The movie has room for those, sure. But the more time you spend with it the more you notice the other weapons. Gossip as a weapon. Doubt as a weapon. Grief sharpened into accusation. Institutions that were built to protect becoming blunt force instruments when fear is steering them. Even the structure becomes a kind of quiet weapon. It aims you at one conclusion then forces you to reconsider. It is a movie about the power of the story you pick and the damage it can do when you clutch it too tight.
The film is full of mirrors. A parent looks at a teacher and sees an enemy. A cop looks at a problem and sees only a place to pour his own pain. A principal looks at a school and sees a wall he cannot hold up because his hands are tired. A kid looks at the night and hears a call that the rest of us cannot hear. The more the town tries to find a neat answer the more the fractures show. That is what rings true to the world outside the screen. We are living in a time where communities are often one loud incident away from breaking down into teams. The movie is not wagging a finger at us. It is not writing an essay on the blackboard. What it does is invite us to watch the way people react when reality refuses to behave. It shows the currents of anger that run under the surface and how easily they find a place to erupt.
Cregger is confident enough to let ambiguity sit in the room. He knows that horror curdles when it is explained to death. He would rather you leave with a question you cannot shake than a thesis you can quote. That is why the film holds echoes of Magnolia for me. It is not that they look the same. It is that both films believe in a chorus of voices. They let hurt people sing at the same time and they refuse to decide for you which voice is the lead. The connection to Romero sits in a different place. Romero always cared about the way a community breaks down when pressed. He was as interested in the social panic as he was in the monster in the field. This movie keeps that spirit alive.
There is also a streak of Pulp Fiction in the way the narrative keeps meeting itself from another direction. That classic shuffle serves a purpose here beyond being cool. It lights up fresh meanings in scenes you thought you understood. And with Larkin Seiple on the camera there are images that carry the zip and invention he brought to Everything Everywhere All at Once, without adopting that film’s wildness. The playfulness is tethered. It belongs to this story.
Let me circle back to the acting for a moment because this cast deserves that space. Julia Garner anchors the early going with a nerve that lands like a burn. She makes Justine’s outrage righteous and also messy. You see the bruises forming as she walks through the day. Josh Brolin brings that heavy stillness he can do better than most. Archer is dangerous at times but mostly he is hollowed out. He is a father who lost the map and the map was his kid. Alden Ehrenreich gives Paul texture instead of archetype. Lesser films would let him be the bad cop who drinks. Here he is a person made of contradictions. Austin Abrams does not plead for your sympathy and that makes his presence feel honest. Benedict Wong adds a weight that steadies some of the stormiest scenes. These are not cameos. They are full inhabitation. The split structure lets each performer fill a chapter rather than elbowing for space in one long march.
There is another pleasure worth naming. The film has jokes. Not cheap shots, but human flashes of absurdity. The characters are allowed to be funny sometimes because real people are. It is rare in a horror film to feel the sense that you might want to hang out with someone if death was not around the corner. The humor never becomes a wink that says do not take this seriously. It functions as a release valve and as a reminder that life is still going on even when the sky feels wrong. That balance is harder to maintain than it looks. If you put too much weight on either side the ride tips over. The film stays upright.
The last act left me unsettled in a way that did not evaporate with the credits. It is not a trick twist. It is not a jump scare parade. It is a deepening of the mood the movie has been building. The camera becomes patient and the sound of your own breath gets louder. You are asked to sit with the possibility that not everything can be made tidy. That is a brave place to leave an audience. It respects the viewer. It respects the form. It trusts that we came here for more than easy answers.
I have seen the phrase elevated horror tossed around so much that it has lost meaning. The worst version of it often wants to be taken very seriously and then practically apologizes for the genre. This film does not do that. It loves the genre. It goes for the jolts and the chills and the late night oh no and also reaches for something older. A community story. A series of linked lives. People trying to hold on to their sense of self while the world filters into static. You can ride it as an experience and laugh and gasp. You can sit with it afterward and think about how we handle sorrow and rage. Either approach is welcome.
As for Cregger, I came away thinking that he has leveled up. Barbarian was crafty and mean and a memorable calling card. Weapons feels larger in ambition but also more controlled. He sets up a clean pitch. He builds a world around it. He populates it with people who feel stubborn and flawed and specific. He collaborates with artists behind the camera who know how to translate an intention into a look and a cut. And he leaves just enough unsaid that you lean forward on the way out. That is the path to making a film that sticks.
If you want me to boil all that down. The movie begins with a single image that could keep you up at night. It splinters into a handful of lives that are all lit by the same dark light. It looks good and moves well. It is acted with fire. It is scary in the way that makes your shoulders tight and your mind race. It is also funny in the way that makes a character feel less like a pawn. It is a horror film that is also a portrait of how fear becomes a tool. It is a thriller that knows when to speak and when to stay quiet. I think it will hit different people in different ways and I like that.
There are critics who will want to map every symbol and turn the movie into a puzzle that unlocks our times. There are fans who will want nothing more than a night in the dark that punches. The beauty here is that both groups can leave satisfied. Bring your own baggage. Bring your own reading. Or simply bring popcorn. The ride has hills and valleys and the brakes do not always work. That is part of the fun.
So yes, get ready. The film may remind you a little of Magnolia and a little of The Crazies and a little of the chopped and shuffled storytelling that made Pulp Fiction sing. But it mostly feels like itself. A work from a filmmaker who cares about the beats that you feel in your gut and the questions that keep your mind from switching off. The town on the screen might be fictional but the emotions have dirt under their nails. I walked out buzzing. I kept seeing those small arms held out like wings. I kept hearing the way people reached for someone to blame because blame is a weapon and weapons are everywhere if you look. That is the movie. And it lingers.
