Weapons (2025) Review

“Are you watching?”

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

The scariest thing about the world around us is that anything or anyone can transform into Weapons.


PLOT


Narrated by a little girl played by Scarlett Sherr, The 2025 film is an interconnected story takes place in suburban Maybrook, Pennsylvania, so bear with me as I cross over various moments more than once. One night at 2:17 am, 17 children went missing playfully running out of their homes. They shared the same school teacher, Justine Grady, but one boy, Alex Lilly, is the only one to have not been part of whatever happened. With the neighborhood suspecting her to be responsible, she is placed on leave by Principal Marcus Miller until everyone can get past her grieving period. As she copes with the situation by relapsing into alcoholism and sleeping with her ex boyfriend, Officer Paul Morgan who’s now married to Donna (June Diane Raphael), the daughter of his Captain Ed (Toby Huss), she grows paranoid as days progress. Her car is even vandalized by one of the grieving parents, Archer Graff, who vandalizes her car, labeling 
witch’ with red paint. Still worried for Alex, she follows him home to see through the covered windows that his parents are sitting motionless, giving her good reason to beg Marcus to perform a wellness check. When she tries watching the house for a night, she falls asleep but Alex’s mom sneaks into her car to cut a lock of her hair. When she gets confronted by Archer at a gas station, wanting her to take responsibility for what happened to the kids, but they reach common ground when being attacked by Marcus who appears possessed. In Marcus’ perspective, he met Alex’s maternal aunt Gladys, claiming she’s been caretaking his parents for falling ill. Unable to convince him to drop the wellness check, she commits witchcraft to possess him, confirming she’s responsible for the kids going missing. She grabs a branch and tie it with a school ribbon of his, covering it in her blood to establish the bond she has over him. She then rings a bell of hers to further establish it. When she mixes it with the hair of his husband Terry (Clayton Farris), she breaks it; It instructs Marcus to kill him. Once he does so with fatal head-butts, she then breaks another branch connected to Justine’s hair, instructing him to kill her as she was close to figuring out the truth. As he left to do so, Gladys covers her tracks on the way out. This backfires however because when he chased Grady out of the station, he got fatally ran over by another car. After getting checked out of the hospital and realizing she’s not a threat, Archer shares with Grady his own investigation that based on the collected doorbell footage, that all the kids had to have gone to another house. Based on the map of the neighborhood and her recent experiences, Justine confirms it to be true. In Alex’s perspective, Gladys has been taking over his home to siphon his parents’ life force, enchanting them for that very purpose. She forced the boy to continue as normal and even go out of the way to feed them or make them kill each other. With their life force proven insufficient, she then targeted Alex’s classmates to siphon next, which she pulled off thanks to having Alex siphon next. Her cover would soon be blown due to also being discovered by Paul and a homeless addict named James. In their combined perspectives, Paul put his career at risk when being caught on dashcam punching a handcuffed James for being pricked by a used syringe. He instructs him to stay away from town until the footage gets wiped, but he forgets due to finding the kids in the Lillys’ home and wanting to collect a $50,000 reward. When they go together, it leads to them both being enchanted. Because of this, Gladys declares to Alex they must flee. They don’t get to do that when Archer & Justine return to the house. They get attacked by both Paul & James who relentlessly do so when others cross a line drawn by Gladys. After a lengthy fight, Archer kills them both with Paul’s gun. He finds the kids downstairs like James did, but this time, Gladys sneaks up ok him to possess him as well and kill Justine. As that happens, Alex crosses a line that kept his parents at bay, hoping to replicate Gladys’ spell and use it against her. He gets a strand of her wig and ties it to a branch. When he breaks it, all the kids chase Gladys all over the neighborhood until they pin her down and literally rip her apart. This frees them from her control including the adults in the house, but they remain catatonic except Archer who wasn’t possessed as long as them. When he finds his son Matthew, the film ends with confirmation that long after this incident, Alex now lives with a different & nicer aunt out of town while his parents recover and the kids are slowly starting to talk again.

THOUGHTS

Everyone respects the comedy era Zach Cregger went through with Miss March and The Whitest Kids U Know, but he ended up shocking the world with an artistic mind he had with Barbarian and the rest was history. The same year of producing Companion, he’s able to find the right balance of either giggling or being stunned of the chaos that ensues as a writer and director, arguably making his equivalent to Magnolia due to how well paced each perspective is put together, thus remaining interested the longer it goes. In one case, you could be laughing to Austin Abrams impulsively living off of greed and desperation as James due to how fast he’s willing to save the kids for a reward money he’ll obviously use for drugs. Then again, I remember the theater I went to had audiences laughing their asses off with the kids chasing Gladys all over the neighborhood, because you couldn’t imagine anything like that before, but then the laughter stopped once she hit the ground and got ripped apart, reminding us what kind of movie this is. Heck, I’m pretty sure you can call it a mix of both when James stabs Paul in the face with his dirty needles, risking him of HIV exposure that he’s not even sure of having. In the midst of it all, Larkin Seiple’s cinematography and the score Cregger composed alongside Ryan & Hays Holladay make the tension all the more compelling for scenes like that. Even a simple scene of seeing Benedict Wong sprint with his arms open as a possessed Marcus, a guy who was  most emotionally balanced before his loss of control made him completely demented, is impressively unsettling to witness. This movie is given such a title because it represents how we have access to so many things that we have so much control over, and we can lose it in the blink of an eye. When seeing the machine gun appear in Archer’s dream, you can assume it’s the metaphor of how traumatic gun violence has always been, but because Cregger never intended that, you can say about anything and everything can take away what you identify as safety. In this case, the most dangerous kind of parasite that can do so is a person that disguises true intentions until they can’t any longer. Amy Madigan is a fantastic villain as Gladys because like a lot of past iterations of witches, she is manipulatively calculated with their intent to live together and cover her tracks as long as she could. She truly was the neighborhood’s parasite off of the fact she was interfering in people’s dreams, whether or not she intended to do that. Lord knows where she got the tree that would be the source of her power, but it’s clear she’s so excessive with the use of it that she needed to use Alex’s classmates shortly after using up his parents’ life force. It would almost seem she’d remain in control due to how she forces little Alex to keep secret of her presence. When she started getting sloppy however, she would assume running away from her problems would  rather than surrender. Little did she expect anyone would pay attention to how the basics of her power function to defeat her. Enter breakout Cary Christopher who portrayed Alex as the introvert who was forced to live in fear when seeing his parents lose their free will, thus waiting the right opportunity to save them and his classmates. The fact he didn’t have a grudge towards Matthew who was bullying him before & after Gladys entered his life proved how pure of heart he always was and it’s a shame the latter child will never understand that. Although Alex got to live a more safer this after freeing the neighborhood from his aunt’s control, I hope he’s able to overcome the trauma that came from it. While he definitely had his hands full, it was nice to know there were others that shared the determination in finding a solution. Julia Garner was amazing as Justine because although everyone notes how flawed she was, she remained kindhearted and refused to let such a crisis define her. She was someone who had an outlet through her line of work. Garner said the kids she taught gave her purpose and without them, she was directionless which is so true because she chose to cope with alcoholism as she was trying to figure out whatever she could. And despite being down on her feet, she was able to keep it together when the real horror came her way, having to face her friends that weren’t themselves anymore. When you look back at Alden Ehrenreich, you can easily say he made Paul a guy who was incapable of finding any control. Because he’s trying to remain sober, he tries so hard finding anything else to control only to fail spectacularly each damn time. Every action he takes, you want to say you can’t blame him, but still can’t condone him betraying the morals he’s supposed to stand by as a cop and a man who’s pretty wound up with life. So when he bites the bullet, it’s safe to say he was put out of misery like James. A big difference you can differ Justine from Archer was that she was prey and he was a predator according Cregger. She always had to scan the area due to being blamed for what was going on and the latter would leave things all front faced, which made him more successful in narrowing down where to find the kids. Josh Brolin made him so interesting because he’s the modern Every-man who has deep regret in not showing unconditional love inside he had for his son and choosing to be stoic outside the whole time, feeling like it’s his fault what’s happened, which could explain Matthew’s behavior towards Alex. At the same time, it doesn’t make him a bad person because his actions always spoke louder than words, hence having Justine’s back after Marcus’ attack proved she wasn’t the problem and never stopped looking when others were giving up. Once he found Malcolm, there’s no doubting he’ll continue doing better doing right by him even if he doesn’t speak again. Even if the whole town and their kids can recover from this shocking turn of events, it’s hard to know if the trauma will ever let them forget happened. I’ve given this movie a fair amount of credit, but there are still some things that don’t make the most sense upon rewatching. Like for instance, not one parent was awake when the kids left, nor was there any camera that picked up they went Alex’s home? I mean that’s big of a coincidence & convenience for Gladys. I also am aware Gladys said she’d know if Alex would tell anyone what she was doing, but I do wonder how the boy never wondered about trying to leave a note to Justine. Then again, not one adult got curious of him buying cans of soup for days on loop with whatever money his parents had. Gladys may have had the cover story to Marcus, but it’s not like everyone else knew that like their bosses to whatever jobs they work for. I’m telling y'all Gladys got sloppy with her plans and she was bound to fail for not thinking it through completely. Hell, they don’t bother explaining how she took Marcus’ ribbon without him noticing. While it was one thing Arxher never had an isolated confrontation with Justine sooner as in before he vandalized her car, but it’s another that he never shared the details he picked up on watching the camera footage on loop. Hell, he and Justine are very lucky they didn’t get held up at a police station after what happened to Marcus. And if not Justine, someone else should’ve investigated the mess at Alex’s home before James broke in. Also, how the hell did Paul know where to find James in the woods? James was pretty damn ahead and I doubt he asked around where his tent was. I then wonder if Archer ever took time off work to cope with his son’s disappearance? If he was already making so many mistakes once the school reopened, that should’ve been the time to also cope with what happened. Lastly, how did Donna know where to find Justine to confront her for sleeping with Paul? He didn’t say a thing to who he slept with, so she leaped really high with narrowing it down who he was with. Other than that, this horror movie will remain timeless to me. In conclusion, Weapons is the most fascinating horror movie you’ll ever see from 2025 due to leaving you guessing and simultaneously be pleasing to see all the pieces get out together. If those are the kind of movies you’re into, see this now.