Crew
Director/Screenplay – Zach Cregger, Producers – Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, J.D. Lifshitz, Raphael Margules & Miri Yoon, Photography – Larkin Seiple, Music – Zach Cregger, Hays Holladay & Ryan Holladay, Visual Effects Supervisor – Gabriel Regentin, Visual Effects – Ingenuity Studios, Special Effects Supervisor – Wayne Rowe, Makeup Effects Design – Jason Collins, Production Design – Tom Hammock. Production Company – Subconscious/Vertigo Entertainment/Boulderlight Pictures.
Cast
Josh Brolin (Archer Graff), Julia Garner (Justine Gandy), Alden Ehrenreich (Paul Morgan), Benedict Wong (Marcus Miller), Justin Abrams (James), Cary Christopher (Alex Lilly), Amy Madigan (Gladys), Toby Huss (Captain Ed), Whitmer Thomas (Alex’s Dad), June Diane Raphael (Donna), Sara Paxton (Erica), Justin Long (Gary), Mohammed Fahmy (Pawn Broker)
Plot
The city of Maybrook as devastated as seventeen children all from the same class at school get up and walk out of their homes at 2:17 am and completely disappear. The only child from the class not to be affected is young Alex Lilly but he can offer police no clues about what happened. Angry parents target the class’s teacher Justine Grandy, blaming her even though has no idea what happened. She begins to drink and becomes obsessed with finding out the truth, believing that Alex is not telling everything he knows. At the same time, parent Archer Graff begins his own quest for answers. Justine, Archer, Justine’s boyfriend, married police officer Paul Morgan, school principal Marcus Miller and homeless drug addict James all come together in the search for answers to the mystery.
Director/writer Zach Cregger emerged in the late 1990s as a member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, which later became the basis of a tv series The Whitest Kids U’ Know (2007-11). Cregger branched out from there to direct/write two non-genre comedy films with Miss March (2009) and The Civil War on Drugs (2011). He then had a reasonable audience and critical hit with the horror film Barbarian (2022), as well as produced the excellent android film Companion (2025). Weapons premiered to some great word of mouth. It enjoyed a great deal of box-office buzz and has earned some $220 million around the world, which is quite impressive for an original work not based on any IP or prior work.
What I appreciated in a big way about Weapons was how it doesn’t follow horror movie scripting formula in any way. The set up is a captivating and original one – seventeen children all from the same class mysteriously disappear and vanish off the face of the Earth without any explanation, all but for one boy left behind. Mysterious disappearance films always come with a captivating hook – look no further than one of the greatest Australian films of all time, The Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
Any other film would then fall into formulaic thriller plotting that circles around either the police investigation or follows one or other of the missing parents as they conduct their own investigation. We do get the latter for a time in the second section that follows Josh Brolin’s character. On the other hand, the uniqueness of Weapons becomes that Zach Cregger opens it up and tells it from the perspectives of different characters – something he also did in Barbarian. Here the film adopts something of Go (1999) or Vantage Point (2008) or even Rashomon (1950) in telling the story from multiple points of view with each offering a separate outlook on what is happening or fill out an element that was going on in the background, gradually revealing a wider picture of what is happening. The way this is done is unique and contains some clever and adept writing.
In the era of constantly recycled IP where original films are becoming far and few between, Zach Cregger produces a work of considerable originality. The tensions, the cryptic teases and the fascination with answers to the mystery, not to mention some of the abrupt shocks like when Benedict Wong comes running across the gas station forecourt, hold you gripped to the film. It all manages to come together with impressive results in a finale that one could certainly not predict from the start. One that contains a great performance from the overlooked name of Amy Madigan – once the wife in Field of Dreams (1989) – who inserts herself into the latter end of the show with a creepy fascination.
The only confusion the film left me with was the meaning of the title Weapons and exactly what it refers to. At one point, it is said that the children had been ‘weaponised’ so one sort of has to go with that as the meaning of the title. There is also a scene where Josh Brolin is trying to triangulate the locations and looks up into the sky and sees a vision of an assault rifle with a digital readout saying 2:17 am. Quite what the meaning of such a vision was is something the film leaves you unclear about. I was looking for some allegory about gun violence but it is just left a random image of no apparent significance. Zach Cregger has stated that it wasn’t his intention to make a film about school shootings and the image came to him in a dream and even he isn’t clear what it means.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2025 list. Nominee for Best Best Supporting Actress (Amy Madigan) at this site’s Best of 2025 Awards).
Trailer here