Let’s start here: Weapons is a lot. Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian feels like it’s trying to be four movies at once, and weirdly, it almost pulls it off. If you told me this was a cursed crossover between Prisoners, The Witch, The Ring, and Magnolia, I’d believe you. It’s a sprawling, strange, dread-soaked mystery about grief, missing children, witchcraft, and the way people implode under pressure—and somehow, it doesn’t collapse under its own ambition.
It’s messy, sure. Some of its threads feel looser than they should. But what Weapons lacks in polish, it makes up for in sheer nerve. It’s a horror epic with the bones of a prestige drama and the bite of a very angry fairy tale.
And yeah, it’s really good.
The Premise: Missing Kids, Enchanted Adults, and One Deeply Messed-Up House
Set in the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, the movie kicks off with a surreal and haunting event: seventeen third-graders suddenly run from their homes at 2:17 a.m. and vanish into the night. All except one—Alex Lilly (played with eerie poise by Cary Christopher), who just so happens to be harboring a massive secret in his creepy, newspaper-covered house.
We quickly meet Justine (Julia Garner), the teacher everyone blames for the disappearance, who’s falling apart under public suspicion and personal shame. There’s also Archer (Josh Brolin), a grieving, increasingly obsessed father of one of the missing kids, and James (Austin Abrams), a homeless addict who stumbles into the worst kind of truth.
Hovering above all of this is Gladys—played with pure menace by Amy Madigan—a seemingly frail aunt who turns out to be anything but. She’s the witchy presence pulling strings, draining people’s life force, and conjuring nightmares. If she were just twirling a mustache, this wouldn’t work. But Cregger (smartly) plays it quiet. There’s no cackling, no spellbook. Just a terrifyingly calm woman holding an entire family hostage by the sheer force of her will.
And as you might’ve guessed, this isn’t just a movie about spooky magic—it’s about what people become when control slips out of their hands.
Nonlinear Chaos That Pays Off
The story jumps across time, characters, and tone. It’s segmented into vignettes that eventually snap together, Barbarian-style, but on a much larger scale. It’s not just a gimmick—it’s part of the tension. You’re constantly reorienting, recalibrating, questioning what’s true. That might frustrate some people, but I found it exhilarating. It rewards your attention without spoon-feeding you answers.
Cregger has a real gift for turning mundane moments into portals of dread. A locked bathroom door. A silent house. A patch of woods. The horror here isn’t loud—it’s slow, inevitable. And when the movie finally does go big? Oh, it goes really big. The last 20 minutes are gory, chaotic, and emotionally exhausting in the best way.
Great Cast, Horrible Situations
Josh Brolin feels perfectly cast as Archer, a man whose grief curdles into obsession and violence. Julia Garner is the emotional heart of the film, playing Justine as a woman desperately trying to do the right thing in a world that refuses to let her. Even the minor characters get their moments—Alden Ehrenreich’s unhinged cop, Austin Abrams’s twitchy vagrant, Benedict Wong’s quietly tragic principal—they’re all circling the same drain.
And then there’s Amy Madigan, who walks away with the whole thing. Her Gladys is deeply unsettling not because she shouts or snarls, but because she doesn’t. She simply decides things—and then they happen. Her presence lingers in every frame, even when she’s not on screen.
Flawed, but Fascinating
Look, Weapons isn’t perfect. Some of its themes (grief, trauma, complicity) are hinted at more than they’re fully explored. There are a few stretches where it feels like it’s about to lose the plot entirely, only to yank it back at the last second. It’s also one of those films that leaves some ambiguity not because it’s mysterious, but because it might not have answers.
But I’d rather a horror movie shoot for something bold and miss a few marks than play it safe. And this one shoots with both barrels.
Final Thoughts
Weapons is a brutal, haunting genre-bender that pulls no punches. It’s as much about personal horror as it is supernatural horror. It’s messy. It’s bold. It trusts the audience. And most importantly, it lingers.
Zach Cregger just might be the real deal. If Barbarian was his “surprise hit,” Weapons is his “I meant to do that.”
It won’t be for everyone. But for those who like their horror weird, sprawling, and emotionally loaded? This is one of the year’s best.
And if you ever see someone cutting a lock of your hair in the middle of the night—maybe just run.