In his ambitious Barbarian follow-up, Zach Cregger weaponizes uncertainty and limits perspectives to reveal that the scariest threats are often the closest
I was one of many who fell for the storytelling sleight of hand in Zach Cregger’s Barbarian—a film that, among its many nightmares, is as much about the very expectations it seeks to subvert in its audience. Like fellow sketch-comedian-turned-social-horror-auteur Jordan Peele, writer-director Cregger brings a finely tuned sense of pacing and payoff to horror, gleefully dismantling assumptions about everything from casting decisions to narrative structure to reveal more primal, disturbing thematic concerns underneath. With his highly anticipated second feature, Weapons, Cregger only sharpens those instincts.
Where Barbarian offered a trio of major Hitchcockian turns, Weapons is more fragmented, more ambitious, and almost defiantly built to frustrate anyone trying to describe it without spoilers. Yet while secrecy plays a vital role in the film’s impact, Weapons doesn’t merely commodify its twists for the sake of spoiler culture. Instead, Weapons builds on Cregger’s now-signature narrative economy to explore the fallout of fractured truths, limited perspectives, and the terror of the unknown–crafting a chilling, emotionally harrowing work balanced between the threats we recognize and the ones we never suspect until they’ve already moved in and made their claim.
The town of Maybrook is shaken when Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) entire third-grade class mysteriously vanishes—each child silently fleeing their home at 2:17 a.m. and disappearing without a trace. The community’s response, like Weapons’ narrative, is fractured. Police quickly clear a traumatized Justine, but she becomes the community scapegoat, led by the fury of grieving parent Archer (Josh Brolin). Strained Principal Marcus (Benedict Wong) places her on paid leave, leaving Justine isolated, battling old vices, and rekindling a risky affair with her married ex, Officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich). Desperate for answers, Justine begins stalking the only child who might know the truth–young Alex (Cary Christopher). But Maybrook’s desperate hunger for answers leaves the town vulnerable to malevolent forces, both from beyond and deep within.
Early chatter during Weapons’ much-publicized bidding war in 2023 pitched Cregger’s Barbarian follow-up as a “horror movie Magnolia,” total catnip blending my favorite genre with my favorite film of all time. But while the film does bear influences of Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic–a sprawling ensemble, tonal whiplash, mustachio’d cops–what Cregger’s turned in here feels much stranger and icier, even compared to his last film. He corrals Magnolia’s crosscut chaos into sharper, more frenzied vignettes, each almost isolated until brief moments of connection cast earlier scenes in doubtful new light. In truth, Weapons feels closer to Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock or, more formally, Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-on: The Grudge, where the certainty of uncertainty becomes even more terrifying when robbed of the comfort of closure. Each sealed-off chapter, named for its central character, seems to bring us nearer to the truth—only for that truth to feel darker and distant. Even after an unseen girl opens the film with a monologue noting the central mystery remains unsolved, Cregger weaponizes uncertainty. Character after character lashes out and reacts without crucial information, while we, as audience members, collect their unrecognized clues into a portrait of a deeper sickness festering in Maybrook. The result isn’t a patchwork so much as an infection: you don’t realize how far it’s spread until it’s everywhere.
It’s a welcome evolution of Barbarian’s eager dissection of expectation and experience–here, individual perspective is a prison more than an opportunity for clarity. Bouncing between a survivor (Christopher), an accused (Garner), a mob leader (Brolin), hapless authority figures (Wong and Ehrenreich), and an unreliable witness (a wonderfully wacked-out Austin Abrams), we each see how certain characters respond to a shared, unexplainable rupture, and how each can benefit from sharing what experiences remain uniquely theirs. But more often than not, that shared pain remains a crippling wedge even amidst the memorials urging “Maybrook Strong.”
It’s in that division that Cregger sows the most dread. As mentioned, Cregger’s comic rhythm pivots on a dime to reveal disturbing things we’ve rarely seen before, made all the more chilling the more inexplicable some elements prove to be. When there aren’t sudden surreal shocks, Cregger indulges in the terrifying length of a moment–notably in a car sequence (you’ll know the one) that wholly plays with what we know must happen and pulls that opportunity away…only to open the door to even more chilling possibilities.
In a country grotesquely defined by the regularity of preventable child murders, I agree that Weapons can be read as a commentary on the fatal grip school shootings hold over the communities they devastate. Without venturing into spoilers, though, it’s a disservice to treat that as Weapons’ only (or even primary) concern, much as it’s reductive to fault the later revelations for somehow limiting the story from the terrifying, expansive unknown suggested early on.
Instead—echoing Ju-on: The Grudge’s split narrative on the ripple effects of a central domestic violence case as much as Magnolia’s recurring cycle of abusive fathers and abused children—Weapons’ tragic use of its characters’ limited perspectives aligns us with those insidious few with the clearest view of what’s happening in Maybrook. It’s a demonically omniscient vantage shared, and exploited, by abusers themselves. The mob mentality whipped up by Josh Brolin’s grieving patriarch, Archer Graff, has as many perpetrators as victims, and instead of steering toward resolution or justice, it becomes a cloak for others to commit misdeeds—petty theft, police brutality, adultery, neglect, and far more sinister acts. While Archer, Justine, Paul, and Marcus lash out at or doggedly pursue the dangers they know, we begin to recognize the looming threats they either take for granted or remain dangerously oblivious to. Overall, Weapons’ fragmentation doesn’t just shape the mystery; weaving through these limited points of view mirrors how real harm disperses, hides, and festers in the blind spots between what’s known and what’s assumed.
Much like Barbarian, Weapons’ Maybrook is a town populated by wolves in sheep’s clothing (and in Josh Brolin’s case, vice versa). Like predators we seemingly never see coming, they thrive when speculation runs rampant, slipping between suspicions and exploiting the precise levers of manipulation. This isn’t a limitation on Weapons’ themes or narrative ambitions–far from it. If anything, it proves how sharply Cregger channels the mechanics of abuse and neglect. If it takes a village to raise a child, Weapons is a bitingly funny yet terrifying indictment of how easily that same village can be swayed to look away from nightmares in plain sight, even as it insists on giving its children undivided attention.
Whether on a parental, communal, or societal level, we convince ourselves that evil comes only from the threats we’re taught are threats, much like in a disturbing dream of Brolin’s that makes the film’s school-shooting parallels painfully tangible. Where Weapons ultimately lands (and it does land, with bloody, powerful screams) is all the more haunting not just for its seeming otherworldliness, but for how seamlessly those elements mingle with the mundane. Like Barbarian, we become so preoccupied with what we want something to be that what it truly is can lurk and act undetected.
Cregger’s masterful Weapons needles a universal neurosis: no matter how well we think we’re protected, or how capable we believe we are as protectors, something in the deep, dark unknown is just as ready to prove us wrong.
Weapons is now playing in theaters courtesy of Warner Bros.
