Horror has long been fertile ground for exploitation cinema, but it has also served as a playground for filmmakers to smuggle in sharp social commentary, tucked between jump scares and visceral set pieces. Weapons (2025), the latest from Zach Cregger, confidently walks both paths. It’s a taut, impeccably crafted genre film and, at the same time, an unsettling meditation on violence and its chilling presence within schools and in the lives of children.

Cregger’s turn toward horror is no surprise. We saw it in Barbarian (2022), where he explored the genre with a blend of tension, unpredictability, and thematic bite. Here, the approach is more refined. While Barbarian used its narrative to probe themes of gendered violence and toxic masculinity, Weapons weaves a more expansive tapestry, telling its story through an ensemble structure that not only subjects the viewer to almost unbearable tension but also forces a confrontation with the deep roots of violence embedded in modern society.

Children Vanished Into the Dark

The premise is deceptively simple yet deeply unnerving: 17 children vanish on the same night, each leaving their home at exactly 2:17 a.m. They run into the darkness and disappear without a trace. The most disturbing detail? They all came from the same classroom. From this hook, Cregger builds a slow-burn nightmare, using uncertainty as the entry point to a tense psychological horror that rattles the viewer to the bone—before offering fleeting relief with perfectly timed bursts of dark humor.

It’s easy to take Weapons at face value, appreciating its meticulous production design, razor-sharp soundscape, and deft deployment of genre tropes to deliver satisfying scares—and stop there. But doing so would miss the core of Cregger’s vision. Beneath its skin of horror lies a cutting social critique that sharpens as the film progresses. The narrative brims with metaphor and allegory, from its recurring imagery of parasites to its portrayal of a society rotting from within, embodied by adults entrenched in rigid, ineffective institutions that, in the end, turn children into weapons themselves.

While the story is told from multiple perspectives, three characters anchor the film’s dramatic weight. Justine (Julia Garner), the teacher caught in the eye of the storm; Archer (Josh Brolin), a grieving father consumed by his obsession to find his son; and Alex (Cary Christopher), the boy who holds the key to the mystery. Their interwoven arcs, along with others in the ensemble, form the twisted puzzle at the heart of Weapons.

From its ominous opening of children sprinting through darkened streets, to the devilish glare of Aunt Gladys, the suffocating tension of the climactic house sequence, and the shock of a finale that blends horror and humor with surgical precision, Weapons seduces and traps its audience in a world as disturbing as it is enthralling. Every frame feels deliberate, every silence loaded. This is a film with the scope, craft, and bite to cement itself as a modern horror landmark.