Weapons Movie Review (2025): When Horror and Mystery Collide in Maybrook’s Suburban Nightmare

If you told me a few years ago that Zach Cregger—yes, of Barbarian fame—would follow up with a horror movie that is part suburban waking nightmare, part community breakdown, with children vanishing in the dead of night, I would’ve said: “Cool, but also: blockbuster popcorn, please.” Weapons doesn’t quite give you popcorn—it gives you the popcorn bowl full of creepy whispers, trauma, and moral ambiguity that you didn’t know you craved.

On what seems like a perfectly normal night (except for the weird timestamp: 2:17 a.m., don’t sleep on that number), 17 children from the same classroom in the fictional town of Maybrook vanish. All of them leave their beds, their homes, walk into the dark—arms outstretched, like something out of a surreal photo. Except one kid, Alex, stays behind. And the teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), is left in the middle of the storm, between the grief of parents, angry townsfolk, and her own guilt/doubt.

From there, Weapons weaves together a tapestry of perspectives—Josh Brolin as a father who refuses to accept silence, Alden Ehrenreich as a flawed cop, Benedict Wong as the school's principal, and others whose lives intersect around the central mystery. The storytelling is chaptered, shifting POVs, so we don’t just get clues—we get emotional echoes, messy human reactions, grief, fear, accusation.

Cregger doesn’t shy away from blending horror, mystery, psychological dread, and dark comedy. There are moments where the tension is so thick you feel like you could choke on it—and then a small absurd gesture or character beat punches in that “WTF?” laugh. It helps avoid the movie becoming grim spectacle, and keeps you off-balance. You never quite know whether to expect a scare or a social commentary—or both.

 The cinematography is excellent. Quiet halls, school rooms, garages, the suburbs—all look like places you might drive past without thinking. And then Cregger (and his team) tweaks something: light too soft, a door creaking, shadows that don’t align. It turns the mundane into the menacing. The silence in certain scenes is powerful. The absence of sound becomes sound. You’re leaning into every echo, every footstep.

 Julia Garner anchors the movie with a fragile intensity. As Justine, she’s both victim and suspect; able and broken. Josh Brolin’s grief-wracked father, the fury and the denial, those scenes land. Alex, the kid who stayed home, played by Cary Christopher, brings a quietness—haunting, not just because he survived, but because he’s now a kind of witness. The supporting cast (Wong, Ehrenreich) are strong, each with their quirks, flaws, moments of desperation.

 The non-linear, multi-perspective structure is one of its biggest strengths. We get character backstories, moral compromises, and community whispers. We see how suspicion spreads. We see how parents, teachers, even law enforcement cope—or fail. Some information is held back; some threads are teased rather than fully explained. And man, that ambiguity works—if you like your horror with questions, not neat solutions. Weapons isn’t content with cheap scares. It peels back suburban placidity to reveal grief, guilt, blame, the “what could I have done” questions, and how people assign blame in tragedy. It’s about performative grief, rumors, and community paranoia. About what it means when a society fails its most vulnerable— and what anger does when directed at uncertainty. There’s something especially resonant here in 2025: when so many people are grasping for answers, often angry, often without resolution.

 Without spoiling much, the “monster” (in whatever metaphorical or literal form it appears) gets a bit undercut once it's fully visible. Some of the scariness built up by mystery and suggestion loses power when you see too much. A few moments feel almost laughable—not because they aren’t trying, but because once you've built so much dread, there’s always a risk that the reveal doesn’t match the imagination.  Because the film divides its time among many characters, some arcs get less screen time than they maybe deserve. For instance, the connection between Archer Graff (Brolin) and his disappeared child is powerful—but you feel there might have been richer emotional payoffs if you'd gotten more scenes of their life before. Some characters remain more a function of the mystery than fully fleshed people in their own right.

 There are stretches where tension dips. Between revelations, the shift from POV to POV sometimes slows things down. If you're not paying attention, some of the mystery threads can feel a bit loose or meandering. The final act is intense, but getting there requires a patience that not every horror fan will have. The ambiguity at the end is intentional, and many will love it. But it means some of the themes, some of the setup, don’t get full resolution. The questions you carry out of the theater aren’t all answered; some mysteries remain mysterious. That’s fine, but it’s going to frustrate folks who want clean endings.

In a market crowded with predictable jump scares, it trusts quiet, slowness, characters. When many films try to scare by shredding you with noise, Cregger often scares you by showing you a quiet street at 2:17 a.m., with shadows in the wrong place. It doesn’t pretend to have every answer. It leans into moral ambiguity—people are messy, motives aren’t clean, fear makes people cruel. It’s visually audacious without being overstuffed. It doesn’t need CGI terror or extreme gore in every scene. It uses what’s off: off time, off tone, off light, off expectations. It balances moments of emotional impact and human sorrow with genuine horror. You cry, you jump, you feel uneasy—and also sometimes you laugh or cringe in recognition.

Weapons is not just a horror movie. It’s a social thriller, a suburban nightmare, a moral horror piece disguised in a missing-kids mystery. It’s probably not for everyone—if you want your horror spoon-fed, with every twist neatly tied up, this might stir your frustration. But if you like the kind of film that sticks in your bones, leaves you thinking about the dark edges of families and communities, then Weapons is among the best horror films of 2025.

Weapons Final Grade: B A great horror film indeed, but it can drag at times.