Zach Cregger’s first horror feature Barbarian (2022) was a superb, visceral, and consistently inventive work. His much-hyped follow-up Weapons (2025) demonstrates a growing talent for screenwriting and direction, yet the end result – despite remaining hugely impressive – lacks the overall punch and impact of the earlier film. It is great, cleverly written stuff, but it is worth going in with the understanding that the hype machine has been running overtime. The best horror feature of 2025 is probably still Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Weapons will have to settle for ‘just’ being excellent.

One night in Marybrook Pennsylvania, seventeen third-graders spontaneously rise from their beds and run off into the night – never to be seen again. Months later the lives of a teacher, a police officer, a grieving parent, and a drug addict coincide in the search for where the children have gone.

Cregger employs an inter-woven, non-linear approach to the story. The film is essentially divided into chapters – each named after a key character – that follow a particular story thread. Each tends to end with unexpected plot developments and cliffhangers, with subsequent chapters filling in detail and revealing how each development came to be. While the approach provides a great opportunity to flesh out and develop characters, as well as build the overall mystery, it also acts as something of a double-edged sword. In practice it feels as much a technique to complicate an otherwise straight-forward narrative as it does to achieve those other results. While the characters are absorbing and the central mystery very evocative, it is also the case that – for its first hour at least – Weapons drags terribly, and tests one’s patience. More than once I hoped intensely for Cregger’s film to get to the point. The climactic payoff, when it occurs, is tremendous. Whether or not it fully satisfies one’s time investment is open to debate. This is a well-developed, smart, and effective horror film, but a tighter edit honestly would have pushed it to a higher level.

In all honesty, the film’s marketing is as much to blame as the edit: Warner Bros has pushed this aggressively as a horror film, and while it certainly fits that genre in the end it spends much of its first half as a non-fantastical thriller-come-drama, and that can frustrate a viewer expecting something more immediately terrifying or supernatural.

Well-developed characters benefit further from a generally very strong cast of actors. Julia Garner and Josh Brolin essentially play dual leads, with other good performances from Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, and other. Amy Madigan is a particularly effective member of the cast, in a role that Warner Bros has smartly kept well out of the film’s marketing and promotion.

Minor flaws and a slugging pace stand in the way of Weapons achieving its full potential. It is still a generally strong picture, but it could easily have been a little better. All things considered, however, Cregger’s ‘difficult second album’ has a great deal to recommend – just try and avoid the hype before you see it.