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Weapons: An Appropriately Barbaric Follow-up


A child runs on a dimly lit street at night, surrounded by trees and a few scattered houses. The mood is mysterious and quiet.
Weapons (2025)

Zach Cregger’s 2022 breakout hit Barbarian was a sensation when it first came out. It sold itself on the intrigue of its mystery, with word-of-mouth talking in hushed tones about a shocking swerve the movie takes. This was enough to get me into the theater, even though I’d been pretty unimpressed with the trailer, which I assumed spoiled the entire movie (which was in vogue for trailers to do at the time). Imagine my surprise when I realized the trailer had only covered the first 30 minutes. At this point…well, the film takes a sudden turn, becoming a totally different type of movie for a while before slowly establishing connections to what we’d previously seen. 


If I were more cynical, I would suggest that Cregger’s follow-up, Weapons, is him trying to reverse engineer an even more successful movie by having multiple swerves throughout the entire thing. The whole film does follow one story, in which an entire classroom of children save for one shockingly disappear into the night, running out of their homes with seemingly no explanation, and throwing the entire community into turmoil. The film begins by following the classroom teacher, played by Julia Garner, who comes under intense suspicion by increasingly hostile and desperate parents.


But then, 20 minutes into her story, the film abruptly cuts to Josh Brolin’s distraught father, and we’re locked into his perspective: more specifically, we begin to replay certain scenes we’ve already seen, but with added context this time (Garner’s Justine is vexed when someone graffiti’s her car — we learn in the next chapter that Brolin did that). The whole movie continues this trend. Every 20 minutes or so, the film abruptly cuts away from a character in a moment of high action, and suddenly we’re following a different character on their own journey.


I really liked watching Weapons in the moment, although looking back on it, I do wish there’d been a little more variance. That might seem like an odd thing to say about a movie that constantly switches up perspectives throughout the runtime, but while that narrative choice kept things fresh in the short term, in the long term, it also meant the story couldn’t gain as much overall momentum. It’s the problem with a movie doubling down on itself as much as this does; at a certain point, we are just seeing the same scenes over again.


With Weapons, Cregger seems to be grappling with the question: How do you follow up on a breakout hit? I’d argue even Jordan Peele didn’t manage it entirely successfully — Us was defined by its conscious differences from Get Out, with a story that deliberately contrasted Get Out’s crystal-clear theming by leaving a lot of what was going on up to interpretation. Are the Tethered an allegory for slavery? The working class? Repressed trauma? It could be any of those things, and the deliberate inclarity paints a picture of an artist testing the boundaries of both his output and public perception (for the record, my issues with Us stem not from its interpretability, but its structure; there’s a bunch of instances of information that should’ve been revealed earlier than it was).


By contrast, M. Night Shyamalan famously fell down the rabbit hole of having to end every one of his movies with a twist — The Village could’ve been a great movie if the final reveal was moved to the end of the second act (or even halfway through) so the characters could actually do the interesting work of reacting to it, a similar problem that I had with Us. Meanwhile, the “twist” of Lady in the Water felt totally arbitrary and downright obligatory. Rather than pushing the boundaries of his public persona, Shyamalan seemed to be leaning into it, to the detriment of his directorial output. 


So where does that leave Zach Cregger? Having made two successful horror films, he’s naturally set to be swallowed up by franchise filmmaking: his next two proposed films are set in the Resident Evil and DC comics universes, although I will admit, both projects sound at least interesting: his Resident Evil movie apparently won't feature any characters from the games; it will be "obedient to the lore of the games” but tell its own story, which is a choice that appeals to me very much.


And his DC movie sounds like an adaptation of that one Batman: The Animated Series episode where a nobody henchman seems to, by absolute happenstance, kill Batman, and now has to suddenly live up to his newfound reputation. I’m always down for someone who’s able to work within studio filmmaking restraints while still retaining their artistic personality; it’s how we got James Gunn, after all. Who knows: maybe if these movies do especially well, they might release Barbarian on disc. By the way, why haven’t they released Barbarian on disc?!?


It’s always a bit of a mug’s game to try and gauge a directorial voice from just two entries. I know that after being personally disappointed by Us, I was a little worried that Jordan Peele would turn out to be one of those “one-hit wonder” directors, like Shyamalan was frequently accused of being. Instead, Nope turned out to be a masterpiece, my favorite from Peele so far, which felt distinct from his previous two movies and much more purposeful in its thematic vagueness. Whatever comes next from Cregger, I hope it feels distinct from either Barbarian or Weapons; not every movie of his needs to jump tracks partway through. Although if he found a way to shove Justin Long into each of his films, that’d be very funny.



Edited by Anish Paranjape


Sam Stashower is a recent graduate student and a writer at Political Pandora. He has contributed film reviews and pop culture analysis to The Quindecim (Goucher College) and The Eagle (American University). A devoted media enthusiast, he can—and inevitably will—find a way to connect everything he watches, listens to, or reads back to Star Trek.



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Keywords: Weapons Movie Review, Zach Cregger Horror, Barbarian Explained, Horror Movie Twists, Jordan Peele Movies, M Night Shyamalan Films, Resident Evil Adaptation, DC Comics Film News, Julia Garner Movies, Josh Brolin Film Roles, Best Horror Films 2024, New Horror Movie Review, Horror Film Analysis, Franchise Horror Movies, Upcoming Horror Films


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