Film Review - Weapons (2025)

Weapons is the new horror movie by Zach Cregger who made Barbarian in 2022 and concerns a class of School Children who’s teacher is Mrs Candy (Julia Garner) and at 2.17am one morning the kids all got up and ran out of the house never to return, Mrs Candy is suspected as being responsible for their disappearance but things in this case aren’t always what they seem to be.

Weapons is a bit of a disappointment for me I’m sorry to say, this isn’t to say it’s a bad movie because it isn’t but its also one I wish I liked more than I did.

Firstly Cregger’s direction is excellent and he makes great use of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, during Mrs Candy’s segment of the film the camera has this unease to it as if at any corner, at any moment something could happen to her that she doesn’t see coming but we the audience can in the sides of the frame, he also does a great job with generating the tension of the film as the film goes on.

And the film also has a lot of good performances, Garner is very good as Mrs Candy but so is Josh Brolin as a local Construction Site chief who’s son is also one of the missing, Amy Madigan is very good as Gladys a mysterious woman who comes to visit the town and Aldren Ehrenreich and Benedict Wong are good in small supporting roles as well.

But where this film let me down was in its storytelling, the film has this fractured story device where the events are told from different character perspectives and after a while it began to work less well with me, one segment would start to get somewhere in terms of the mystery of the missing children and then it would cut to the next character storyline and the tension and suspense would dissipate again and after a couple of times of this happening I began to get less interested and wanted it to stick to one path and one path only.

And also the final payoff felt a little anti climatic for me as much like Barbarian, when all is said and done I thought to myself “Is that all” and wanted something a little more to it all not unlike another horror film Bring Her Back from earlier this year which again had a good setup and premise but lacked a strong enough payoff to win me over and it’s a real shame.

And so that was Weapons and this is sadly my big disappointment of 2025 movie wise, its well directed, has good performances and a good setup but its payoff felt lacking and I wanted that part to be more than it was, 2 and a half out of 5.