Weapons

Alongside the body horror Together from Neon, cinemas are now showing a new release from a major studio — Warner Bros. — titled Weapons. Directed by Zach Cregger, who a few years earlier delivered his debut horror Barbarian, the film opens with a truly fascinating premise.

One night, at exactly 2:17 AM, in the suburb of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, seventeen children wake up, leave their homes, and mysteriously run away. No one can find them. A month passes with no answers — no one knows where they are, if they’re alive, or what happened to them. It’s a chilling and unsettling setup. What connects them is that they were all students in the same class, taught by a woman named Justine. The only one who didn’t disappear was the eighteenth student in the class.

Justine herself, though clearly uninvolved in the disappearances from the start, becomes the target of anger from restless parents. At the same time, she’s portrayed as a rather jumbled person in her own right. The film then unfolds in separate acts, following different characters and their perspectives on the events, eventually converging into a single conclusion.

What Weapons does incredibly well is its opening. It creates, on one hand, a light yet creeping sense of horror from the unknown, and on the other, it pushes you to engage your imagination to the fullest — trying to guess what great evil could possibly connect this strange small town, where many seem to be hiding their own secrets in addition to this larger one.

Around halfway through, the nature of that “great evil” becomes apparent. This is when the pacing shifts — it starts to feel less like you’re trying to catch up with the film, and more like the film is trying to catch up with you. It keeps circling back to show, from different angles, why this evil is so evil, how it works, and what’s truly going on. With such a strong setup, the ending doesn’t quite match the same level of power. Instead, it narrows down into something that, within the genre, could be considered rather conventional and not particularly terrifying. The tension that built so well in the first half gradually dissolves into something lighter, even slightly funny.

As for the cast — no complaints at all. Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and Alden Ehrenreich all deliver excellent performances. Overall, it’s a good film, but one that leaves you wanting more given its great potential. This is very much a muted horror — a current trend in the industry, steering away from jumpscares and avoiding yet another exorcism story (though, of course, another The Conjuring film is coming soon — how many more times can they do this?). But despite its grounded and restrained approach, it doesn’t quite land the emotional or shocking punch you might expect from the genre.

Still, it’s worth watching for its great atmosphere, intriguing premise, and strong acting — just don’t expect something completely mind-blowing.

7/10