Weapons (2025) Reviews: What Critics Said

Editorial note: This is a roundup of published criticism of Weapons. Celluloid has not screened the film for this piece, and it carries no Celluloid rating. The critics are named and linked under Sources.

Is Weapons worth watching?

Most critics say yes: Zach Cregger’s second horror feature was widely praised as a tightly built, darkly comic mystery that improves on his debut, Barbarian. Reviewers admired its chapter structure, its ensemble cast and a final act that several described as hugely satisfying. The main reservation, voiced most strongly by one critic, is that the explanation behind the mystery is less frightening than the questions that come before it.

What is Weapons about?

When all but one child from the same school class vanish on the same night at exactly the same time, a small community is left asking who, or what, is behind their disappearance. Zach Cregger wrote and directed the film, which was released in 2025 and runs 129 minutes. Julia Garner plays Justine, the children’s teacher, and Josh Brolin plays Archer, the father of one of the missing children. The cast also includes Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan and Cary Christopher. Release details and where to watch are on the Weapons film page.

What critics praised

In Empire, John Nugent called the film a significant step up from Barbarian. He admired a script that tells the story in six chapters, each following a different character across roughly the same stretch of time, and he found Julia Garner excellent. What impressed him most was the balance: a film that takes grief and addiction seriously while still delivering scares and gallows humour, building to a finale he found cathartic and outrageously well staged. In his view it is the kind of film that should not work but does.

Phil de Semlyen of Time Out was the most effusive. He suggested that if Weapons was not the best horror film of the year, ahead even of Sinners, it might be the best comedy. He reached back to Get Out for a horror film with a comparable level of playfulness and invention, and he singled out the final half-hour as the most satisfying closing stretch he had sat through in a long time.

Tim Grierson of Screen Daily thought the multi-perspective structure even more ambitious than Barbarian’s and felt Cregger handles it with real self-assurance. He noted that puzzle-box films risk a payoff that disappoints, and concluded that this one avoids the trap, with a superbly orchestrated climax. He praised Brolin and Garner for playing ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, and enjoyed the grim humour in the story’s more absurd extremes.

Writing for The A.V. Club, Jacob Oller described a thrilling and pleasingly nasty film, and a more satisfying riddle than Cregger’s debut. He liked the energetic camerawork, which changes character along with each chapter, and was struck by the film’s interest in how a senseless tragedy pushes a town towards magical thinking and conspiracy theories.

Where critics were divided

The clearest dissent came from William Bibbiani at TheWrap. For roughly its first hour, he wrote, the film threatens to be the scariest of the year. He praised the layered work of Garner and Brolin, the commitment of the supporting cast, and Larkin Seiple’s cinematography for finding the eeriest possible angle in almost every scene. But he felt that none of the answers Cregger eventually supplies are as frightening as the possibilities he raises, and that the film drifts from ominous to merely strange and, finally, to silly.

Others raised smaller doubts. Oller warned that viewers who demand strict internal logic may leave dissatisfied, a charge that was also levelled at Barbarian. De Semlyen expected some horror fans to grumble that the film is not frightening all the way through, though he argued that the sharper focus on family life in the suburbs more than compensates.

Who is it for?

The film suits viewers who enjoy mystery structures, shifting points of view and horror laced with black comedy. It is rated R in the US and 18 in the UK, so it is not one for younger teenagers. Anyone who found Barbarian’s swerves frustrating should bear Bibbiani’s and Oller’s caveats in mind. More titles are gathered under horror.

The critical verdict

Most of the critics here regard Weapons as a confident, inventive horror film that balances dread, grief and laughter, and several single out its final act as a high point. Garner and Brolin were widely praised. The main point of disagreement is whether the solution lives up to the mystery, with Bibbiani arguing firmly that it does not. For most reviewers, though, the film delivered on its promise.