Review: Weapons (Patreon)

A couple minor spoilers ahead.

Weapons is more indebted to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining than any other horror film I've seen in the last five years. The film is replete with Steadicam shots tracking characters from behind in addition to a sometimes quasi-Wendy Carlos score, themes of the rot of American life starting with domestic abuse, and a mad parent sticking their face through a broken door. Zach Cregger understands how to pay homage to a great work: rip it off so forthrightly that the audience has to admire your gall.

Weapons' narrative takes the shape of a character study of an entire town, tracking a series of uncanny events through the perspectives of several characters. We don't see the story of this town all at once — as in real life, we're only given a little bit of information and scads of ambiguity. Weapons effectively conveys the helplessness that children and adults alike feel when adults don't have the answers.

This doesn't always work. Paul's segment drags a little bit, which is an impressive failure of pacing given Alden Ehrenreich's charisma that somehow made bits of Cocaine Bear worth watching (I still quote "you left a dog in the car?" "You left my son in St. Louis"). The James segment is as weak as everyone says, focusing on a sketch of a character and revealing a little too much at once. After the pleasant ambiguity of the first act, the rush of answers at the halfway point is slightly bathetic.

Thankfully, Weapons avoids losing its magic by introducing Amy Madigan as Aunt Gladys, who's so good in the part that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had to award a performance in a horror film (granted Michael B. Jordan also won an Oscar that night, so maybe the Academy was just feeling generous). Gladys embodies a quintessential nightmare of childhood: a strange adult who comes and takes your parents away. It's a lovely idea, well-earned by the first act and worthy of Stephen King or Steven Moffat at their best. Weapons may not be the best horror movie of 2025 (nor the best horror movie nominated for an Oscar this year by a long shot), nor is it the best work of a sketch comic-turned-horror director of recent years (that's clearly Us), but if middle-of-the-road horror is this good, genre cinema is in pretty decent shape right now.