‘Weapons’ - Review

Seventeen kids get out of bed at 2:17 AM, run into the night with arms outstretched like they’re trying to fly, and vanish. Zach Cregger’s Weapons spends two hours circling that moment. Not abstractly. Not symbolically. It just sits with it. There is something so beautiful about a modern horror movie that refuses to spell out its trauma metaphors or decode its grief symbols, that doesn’t need to be an explicit map or parable on trauma. Weapons delivers a captivating narrative, some great bits of humor, and some really grisly imagery — all while trusting you to find your own meaning and conclusions. The mystery resolves, the emotions don’t, and it trusts you to be okay with that.

Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian is weirder, sadder, and much more oblique. After losing someone close during post-production of that film, he wrote Weapons in isolation. Not to process anything, not to teach or illuminate, but because there was nowhere else to put the grief. The script wasn’t trying to become anything. It just needed to exist. And that comes through in the film, in the way characters carry their sadness. They don’t narrate it. They just exist inside it. There’s no flashback showing Justine’s (Julia Garner) life before, no collapse that explains everything. She spirals quietly, becomes withdrawn, drinks alone, avoids confrontation. Her guilt is visible in how little she fights back. The film lets her break without giving her a reason to explain herself. Bad things happen. People don’t give monologues about it. They cope, or they don’t. 

Weapons arrives in a landscape where horror films come with built-in dissertations; each film feels like it was constructed around its metaphor. Every monster is a detailed map of trauma. Every scare symbolizes late-stage capitalism or something similar. We’ve been trained to decode rather than experience, to solve rather than feel. But Weapons feels like the rejection of that whole model. What if trauma doesn’t reveal itself in tidy symbols? What if pain doesn’t rhyme?

Lately, horror has taught us that grief needs to be articulated. If a film doesn’t spell out what the pain is “about,” it hasn’t done its job. We’ve reached a place where every traumatic beat is expected to align with some larger metaphor. As if meaning has to be instructive to matter. But Weapons doesn’t operate on those terms. It feels like a shift away from didacticism and back toward something older, more instinctive. A reminder that not everything needs to be explained to be true. That feeling something deeply, without knowing why, can be the whole point. That maybe the way we talk about grief has been warped by our need to tidy it up.

The film kaleidoscopically centers the resolution to its mystery across a few overlapping lives: Julia Garner’s alcoholic teacher, drowning in guilt. Josh Brolin’s father, clinging to desperate logic. A lone surviving child, disoriented and unsure of what memory even is. Each of them circles their own drain, trying to impose order on chaos. But Cregger barely gives them, or us, the satisfaction of understanding. And when the truth does arrive, it doesn’t explain anything bigger than itself. Is it about school shootings? Collective trauma? The death of innocence? 

Those kids running into the dark mean whatever you bring to them. In a nightmare sequence while trying to find his son, Archer (Josh Brolin) sees a giant rifle in the sky. It lingers just long enough to provoke, then vanishes. Like a dream, or a threat, or both. There’s meaning to it, but it’s never spelled out. Cregger doesn’t decode. Weapons never panders. Never drip feeds you an interpretation. But it’s not withholding either. It’s generous in a different way. It gives you something real, even if it doesn’t come with a headline or an argument. It was written from grief, about grief, and for grief.

Its relationship to comedy lives in the same space and feels equally unforced. Laughter comes up from genuine absurdity rather than scripted relief. Parents turn paranoid. Kids stare into space. Everything’s horrible and hilarious at once, oscillating wildly between registers without warning. In a decade where horror has been apologizing for itself, justifying its existence through social relevance and sophisticated metaphor, Weapons feels startlingly unguarded. It doesn’t beg to be understood. It barely even asks. 

Sometimes horror has no cause. Sometimes things break and no one knows why. Even the one child who doesn’t disappear, Alex, is handled quietly. He doesn’t explain anything. He’s not turned into a guide for the audience or a symbol of survival. He just exists in the aftermath. The film doesn’t ask him to speak about what that means. It just shows us how he moves through it.

Cregger trusts his audience with uncertainty. Not as a puzzle to solve but as an experience to endure. This willingness to not know feels revolutionary. We’ve spent years treating horror films like homework assignments, dutifully underlining their deeper meanings. Weapons reminds us that cinema’s highest calling might be to capture life’s essential wtf-ness. That confusion isn’t failure but fidelity to how existence actually feels. 

Cregger has called parts of the film “legitimately autobiographical,” but there’s nothing performative here. Rather than a fixation on tidy catharsis, it’s more of an experience. The way we process grief doesn’t need to be cinematic. It doesn’t need to resolve. Sometimes it just needs a shape to pour into. That’s what this movie is. Weapons provides something more exciting than answers: permission. Permission to not understand. Permission to laugh at horror and scream at comedy. Permission to experience rather than interpret. Permission to admit that life resists our attempts to make it mean things, and that movies don’t have to pretend otherwise.