AUGUST 9, 2025
GENRE: THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)
I never wrote a review for Barbarian, because so much of that film’s strength relied on its constantly surprising, chronologically jumbled narrative. So writing about it seemed counterproductive - literally everything I said, despite how positive it would have been, would just weaken the reader’s experience (given that this site started as a way to discuss movies after seeing them, with no regard for spoilers, I find that evolution kind of amusing). But Weapons has a bigger marketing push behind it (since its studio actually believes in it, unlike Disney for Barbarian), so its premise is more widely known and in turn it’s easier to talk at least a LITTLE bit about how good it is.
(That said, if you haven’t seen a trailer yet, I’d still encourage seeing the movie first, with the knowledge that I am jealous of you! If you HAVE seen the trailer, I will only be sticking to things that they show, with one minor exception that I will be noting again when it comes up.)
But even if you're still unaware of any details whatsoever, the movie doesn't take long in spelling it out-the premise is explained through voiceover in the first scene, more or less the same as it is on its poster. One night, at 2:17 am, all but one of the children from a particular elementary school class walk out of their homes and run off into the night to some unknown destination. Naturally, given the only thing the kids all have in common, suspicion falls on both the teacher for their classroom (Julia Garner as Justine) and, to a lesser extent, the one child who kept on sleeping (Cary Christopher as Alex). As you might expect, the movie spends its remaining runtime (just over two hours, most of which races by) solving the mystery of a. Where they went and b. Why it happened in the first place.
Obviously you won’t get the answers to those questions from me. At least, not here. (I’ll tell you at the bar or something if you ask, sure.) What I WILL say is that writer/director Zach Cregger has publicly cited Magnolia as an influence on his story, and it’s pretty apt. The film is broken up into chapters that are titled after a particular character, including the two I mentioned along with Archer (Josh Brolin) as one of the fathers of the missing children, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) as a local cop who had a previous relationship with Justine, etc. Each new segment usually answers a question about the previous one while adding new mysteries of its own, and occasionally we see events happen again with the new context that we didn’t have before.
It’s the sort of thing we’ve seen in other genre movies (Strange Darling comes to mind), and I love it because it seems to be a giant F U to the unfortunate trend of movies being written for people who are barely paying attention to them. Creator friends have told me about producers demanding they modify their scripts/edits to remind viewers (“viewers”) of information that was already explained in earlier scenes, so that the people who are only half watching while they look at their phones won’t get too lost, and it depresses me. But there’s no such hand holding here - it’s not exactly a complicated story, but if you’re not paying attention, you won’t understand why the movie works. Many of the reveals and payoffs aren’t even spoken aloud; there’s a shot of a paint can that explains an earlier scene without anyone actually commenting on it, and that’s the sort of thing that makes this movie such a rewarding experience.
I also loved how these characters aren’t bad people by any means, but all have some kind of flaw that makes them targets for those who love to criticize anyone who isn’t as perfect as they believe they are (kind of like Magnolia!). There’s an alcoholic, a cheater, a drug addict… the self righteous among us will deride these people as “unlikable” or “hard to root for” or whatever, but I didn’t see any of them that way. And the one that comes closest to being a traditional "bad person" is the same one who does more to help the missing kids than anyone else has up to that point in the narrative. Finally, a modern horror movie that doesn’t equate “trauma” with “interesting character” as so many others have done!
Another thing that worked in its favor, at least for me: it almost seemed like it could have been a period piece. The suburban setting (Pennsylvania somewhere) gives it an Amblin/Stephen King vibe, which of course speaks to the '80s and '90s, but a handful of Ring camera shots (of the kids running away) and a Fury Road poster clearly establish that it’s set in the modern day, more or less. Even cell phones barely appear; there’s a few texts between Justine and Paul and I think that’s about it for their usage. I can’t even remember any computers beyond scanning the Ring-cam videos; hell, Brolin’s character is an architect and uses a printed out map and a ruler to figure something out, same as anyone would have done in a 1987 film. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some version of this script that was indeed set 20-25 years ago and the subsequent rewrites simply failed to erase all of that DNA.
On the flip side, there are a few things that nagged at me a bit, and the second one is a spoiler concerning a character death, so please skip it if you haven’t seen/are sensitive to such things! One is that there are around 20 kids missing but we only meet the parents of two of them, and if you take away Brolin the others’ combined screen time is maybe four minutes. This might just be my own overactive protective parent gene talking, but it felt a little weird to me that the movie barely even mentions what is likely to be a group of very upset people. Since the King vibes were so strong, it almost felt like this was adapting a book that DID include all those other folks in supporting roles, and the movie version opted to trim them out to compress time. (SPOILER WARNING AGAIN!) I also found it somewhat unfortunate that the story introduced two gay characters and then gave them the most graphic deaths other than the villain or villains’ own demise(s). Not that the movie felt homophobic or anything, but it gave me that same feeling I get whenever I see a movie where the Black Guy does indeed die first, like “Can’t we do a little better, here?” Especially considering the body count wasn’t as high as the “lot of people die” trailer promised.
But neither of them were crippling flaws, and for the most part it got everything at right, at least for my sensibilities. It’s very funny at times (a reaction to a Willow DVD damn near killed me, and the climax is the sort of thing that will have revival audiences giving standing ovations for years to come) and the constant give and take of reveals kept it far more engaging than I’ve come to expect from a lot of modern horror. The actors are all great (always nice to see Ehrenreich; damn Solo for derailing what probably would have been a bigger career by now), there are a couple of jolts that got me good, and Cregger’s established “no one is safe” approach to his horror films meant it was tense down to the last moments. An ideal horror film, and another winner for WB, who hasn’t exactly been the favorite studio for filmmakers in the Zaslav era, but between this, Sinners, and FD6 are certainly on a roll with the scary stuff.
What say you?
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