Weapons (2025) Spoiler Free Review
Zach Cregger’s debut horror film Barbarian (2022) was undoubtedly a success with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 92% and a world-wide box office of $45 million on an estimated budget of $4.5 million. Beyond both of these arbitrary markers of success, Barbarian should be considered a success based on how Weapons (2025) came into the world.
Barbarian started as a writing exercise while Zach Cregger was reflecting on the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. He came to the realization that he doesn’t need to be as consciously aware of red flags that women must override in their daily life, which can often lead to their own peril. Cregger started by writing a scene about a woman entering a double-booked Airbnb with a man she does not know while encountering little red flags throughout. This laid the foundation for the original script of Barbarian!
“Weapons was like me vomiting” is a quote from Zach Cregger in an interview with RollingStone magazine. In writing for his most recent film, Mr. Cregger put the pen to the page without any clear direction this time. He wrote from a place of grief to process the unexpected death of Trevor Moore in 2021.
Mr. Moore had worked with Mr. Cregger as co-director on Miss March and within the sketch comedy group The Whitest Kids U’Know. While the sketch comedy show ended in 2011, the COVID-19 pandemic brought the group together by streaming to Twitch and YouTube. They used the funds made while streaming to work on a new comedy animated film they had written called Mars.
On January 22, 2023, the script for Weapons was sent to Hollywood studios to be optioned for production which subsequently started a bidding war. Universal and Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw bid $31 million to produce against New Line’s $38 million bid. According to a Deadline article from February 2023, Mr. Peele eager enough to produce the film he was prepared to “kick in part of his contractual back end” while Universal was “uneasy about the budget as a business proposition”, which ultimately led to New Line winning the project and Mr. Peele cut ties with longtime managers from Artists First as a result.
If you’re even vaguely familiar with any of the Weapons marketing material then you’re most likely aware of the film’s premise. Seventeen children from Ms. Justine Grandy’s (Julia Garner) class woke up at 2:17 AM, “got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark, …and they never came back”. This is the establishing incident of the film explained through narration before we are introduced to the ensemble cast of characters.
Weapons is a horror film that is allowed to breathe. The viewer never feels as though there was a pressure to put in a jump scare every fifteen minutes out of fear of losing the audience within the film’s structure. Weapons character vignette approach is a delightful novelty for unraveling the red string mystery at the center of the story and holding back on scares for just the right moment. From a filmmaking standpoint, Cregger’s structural approach allows this ensemble of actors, fresh faced and veteran, to dive into their roles to deliver stand out performances. By giving these actors individual chapters with overlapping sequences a viewer might expect to see subjective reruns of previous sequences. Instead, not a moment is wasted within these chapters, always delivering new objective moments which allow the viewer to unravel the mystery of Weapons.
Viewers may be familiar with the detective stories of Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes where the famous detective may get ahead of the viewer for one arbitrary reason or another. In the case of Weapons, the film makes it clear it would like the viewer to get a head of the characters. Even the conclusion alludes to the idea that the town may never fully understand what happened.
The film that reminds me of Weapons the most is Jordan Peele’s sophomoric feature US (2019). Zach Cregger has stated that maybe he doesn’t understand everything he penned to the page and neither do I. Weapons is a film I’ll find myself revisiting from time to time to continue to digest as I knew I would after watching US on opening night. A filmmaker capable of putting himself into his work in such a raw fashion while being unafraid to show off his influences is exactly the type of filmmaker horror and all of Hollywood need right now.
ChapHazard 