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*Major spoilers ahead for Weapons
Weapons by Zach Cregger is one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2025, with a 94% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes from 315 reviews. The second film from the filmmaker behind Barbarian is about a classroom of children vanishing in the night, leaving behind a teacher (Julia Garner) accused of witchcraft, a father (Josh Brolin) desperate to find his son, and a lone student from the class who didn't disappear.
Weapons has a very promising first half, starting off with the narration of a little girl to set the scene and then following around Justine (Garner) who is being ostracized by her town as she deals with the grief of losing her students, and the strange nature of the things happening to her. There are quite a few tense moments and jump scares until... the chapter ends and we're inserted into Archer's (Brolin) world. This is just one of many perspective changes in the film, a technique Cregger also used in Barbarian. The perspective changes end up feeling irritating towards the end of the film. Right as you’re becoming invested in a character, starting to feel tense, you’re inserted into someone else‘s life, draining all of the tension and requiring it to built back up all over again. This technique is an attempt at cleverness, showing how all the characters are connected and how each respective story leads inevitably to the ending of the film. Instead, it feels like Cregger had a concept for a story but didn’t have enough material to flesh it out for a two hour runtime, using multiple perspectives to drag the story on instead of being tighter and better written.
A good example of this takes place in the early stages of the film; Archer is beginning to find out where the missing children are and he’s going to confront Justine. When he confronts her, another character comes running towards them and attacks Justine. Instead of getting to find out what happens to them right away, or continuing to follow Archer's hunt for his son, we switch perspectives to find out why this man is attacking them. The switch in perspectives here is wholly unnecessary – the attack would’ve made sense and been more effective without it.
Weapons also falls flat in its ending and its villain. The chapter of the film from Marcus’s perspective is when we find out the villain is an old woman named Gladys who holds the power to place spells on people. Her goal is to use the children as a source of energy, in order to make herself younger. The final chapter of the film is seen from the perspective of Alex, the only child in the classroom of missing children to not disappear. Alex’s chapter is nearly a highlight of the film due to its bleak nature but it fails to stay tense and scary because of Cregger's decision to make an old woman the culprit.
Gladys being an elderly woman, whose goal is to steal the youth of children to make herself younger, is beyond misogynistic and the imagery that surrounds Gladys makes the message even worse. Her face is caked in makeup that makes her look like a clown and when we see her for the first time, without her wig and makeup on, the audience is supposed to feel fear and disgust. Gladys' supposed scare-factor is supposed to come from the fact that she’s an old woman – her hair has fallen out and her attempts to make herself look younger (wig and makeup) really just make her look clown-like. Her only desire is to be young again, but why should women have that desire?
It’s disappointing, for a film that could have taken so many interesting paths, to fall into misogyny as a means to an easy ending. The title Weapons along with the plot of missing children and the grief of a small town would tie along much better with an allegory for school shootings or how children’s futures are in jeopardy. Instead of taking a more political route, Cregger repeats Barbarian's ending, only he dehumanizes Gladys even more than the woman in Barbarian.
Overall, Weapons is a let down, especially considering how beloved it currently is, and its extreme positive reception doesn’t bode well for the hope that old women will stop being portrayed as bitter villains. However, the compelling first act of Weapons is proof that if Zach Cregger ever decides to move away from old women as horror villains he could make a very terrifying and compelling horror film.
