In search of seventeen missing third-graders — all of whom rose from their beds at 2:17 a.m. the same night, ran from their homes out into the dark, and then vanished — the desperate adults in Zach Cregger’s chilling Weapons go knocking on strange doors, and creeping down hallways they might be wiser to avoid.
Weapons relies heavily, and fruitfully, on the suspense of “Don’t go in there! Oh no, she’s going in there.” The filmmaker’s thrilling Barbarian similarly showed a penchant for sending characters down dark, winding paths against their better judgment.
That film, a steady descent into the terrors awaiting an Airbnb guest who arrives to find a strange Skarsgård already staying in the house, consistently tops itself with nasty surprises behind every closed door. Yet, the deeper that intrepid guest Tess descends into the hellscape, the more urgently she has to keep plowing forward into the madness, no turning back.
In Weapons, bizarre turns await, and there’s no turning back because kids’ lives are at stake. The strong sense of urgency derived from a classroom full of missing children propels the plot and their frazzled teacher, Justine Gandy (a superb Julia Garner), who is determined to find answers and clear her name as the lead suspect in the mass disappearance.
Weapons – Photo: Warner Bros.
Of all the children in town, only those from Justine’s class vanished into the night. Why? What happened in her classroom, a shouting mob of concerned parents, led by building contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), demands to know.
Weapons doesn’t plow blatantly into politics, but places Justine squarely in the sights of a vicious witch hunt. A seemingly conscientious educator under fire from a community whose children were there one moment, and gone the next, Justine buckles under the pressure of becoming the town pariah.
She hits the bottle, starts racking up reckless decisions, peeking through windows, and stalking the one little boy in her class, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher, also excellent), who did not go missing.
Enveloped in hauntingly quiet atmosphere, the story unfolds Rashomon-style, in overlapping chapters, each told from a different character’s perspective. The successive chapters add further detail to the puzzle until, finally, the full harrowing picture comes into view, the mystery solved.
Cregger and crew mount the mystery, the big picture, and the details meticulously — especially in the crack timing of jump scares and foreboding silences.
From nightmare glimpses of a face in the ceiling, to the creeping anticipation provoked by a front door that opens ever so slowly to reveal only shadow, Larkin Seiple’s masterful cinematography and the taut editing by Joe Murphy (Barbarian) continually amplify the air of dread.
But the movie isn’t just dread and silence. As a child narrator (Scarlett Sher) pronounces at the top, “a lot of people die in a lot of weird ways” in this story, and Cregger doesn’t turn the camera away from the excruciating bodily harm inflicted by blade, bludgeoning, or firearm.
The film gets creative with the kills, and with its references to other films — from Halloween and The Shining to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And, much like Barbarian, the movie constantly tops itself with gasp-worthy reveals.
Robustly funny in its own macabre and gruesome fashion, Weapons marches inexorably, no-turning-back to the edge, saving its most gasp-worthy reveal for a climax that gleefully embraces the chaos.
Weapons (★★★★☆) is rated R and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
People are saying 2025 was a very good year for movies, and we'd agree. In terms of artistic quality -- if not domestic box office, which will finish about half a billion dollars down from last year -- this year gave audiences a varied bounty of films built on strong concepts, mesmerizing performances, and compelling visions of our hectic modern times.
If these cinematic gems share any quality, it's a certain relentlessness that also characterizes life right now. We might have seen in 2025 a good share of quiet, contemplative dramas like The History of Sound and Train Dreams, but the films that dominate this Top Ten tend to reflect the present mood of profound disquiet.
Jodie Foster acts in fluent French but still curses in English as neurotic psychotherapist Dr. Lilian Steiner, an American living in Paris, in the urbane mystery-thriller A Private Life.
To be precise, the movie's thrills are minor -- some light action and peril in the vein of a Murder, She Wrote or Moonlighting. And the central mystery, surrounding one of Dr. Steiner's patients who goes missing, generates too few "a-ha!" revelations in its winding road to an anticlimactic resolution.
Steeped in an atmosphere of suspicion, the film, from writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People's Children), better serves as a drama exploring the emotionally distant doctor being shaken from the stasis of her lonely life. A complicated woman, Lilian Steiner provides two-time Oscar-winner Foster a chance to command the screen with subtle intensity in a context we've never seen from her in fifty-plus years as a leading lady.
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