Weapons

First off.. seeing this in IMAX? HOLY. FUCK. There’s something so deeply unsettling about Weapons that it slowly disorients your sense of what a movie even is. It’s like watching a machine dream about its own death, strange, disconnected, but somehow painfully human. I walked in knowing almost nothing, and even after watching it, I’m not sure I know much more. And yet… I feel it. Still. In my stomach. In my teeth. I was holding my breath the entire time. Directed by Zach Cregger (Barbarian), Weapons trades the tightly coiled structure of his previous film for something looser, bolder, and far more abstract. Where Barbarian thrived on sharp pivots and big shocks, Weapons is patient. It’s a slow invasion. Even its moments of humor (and there are some) feel like someone laughing in the dark to convince themselves they’re safe. This isn’t a linear story, it’s a collision of stories. A series of narratives that feel like fragments of a much bigger truth we’re never fully allowed to see. Cregger trusts the audience’s nervous system more than our appetite for explanation, and that trust is bold. It’s why the film lingers. This is less a movie and more a fever dream stitched together from grief, conspiracy, violence, and grief again. The film unfolds in loosely connected vignettes orbiting around a single event. Each story introduces a new perspective, a new character, even a new genre. It’s fractured storytelling as a reflection of a fractured culture. On the surface, Weapons is about gun violence. But calling it a “school shooting movie” is a massive disservice. It’s about the aftermath.. the cultural rot that festers in its wake, the people who mythologize it, the way trauma loops through media, family, memory, and the internet like a virus that can’t be contained. Cregger isn’t chasing answers, he’s chasing disorientation. That gut wrenching moment where you realize you’ve been part of the problem. That you forgot the victims’ names but remembered the killer’s manifesto. The cast is phenomenal, though the ensemble nature means we never stay with any one character for too long. Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, each makes the most of their brief spotlight. Visually, the film is stunning in the most alienating way. Each segment has its own distinct visual language. There’s one extended tracking shot that might be one of the most anxiety inducing sequences I’ve seen in years, not because of what does happen, but because of what might. The score is pulsating, unpredictable, and often too loud in exactly the right way. It doesn’t guide you, it attacks you. The editing takes huge risks: smash cuts, abrupt endings, sudden shifts. But emotionally, it works. It works too well. You feel trapped in the trauma with no way out. Weapons isn’t a movie you recommend to your friends, it’s a movie you warn them about. It’s ambitious, polarizing, and frequently confusing. There will be walkouts. There will be think pieces. There will be people who call it genius and people who call it garbage. Honestly? They’ll probably all be right. For me, Weapons is one of the most important horror films of the decade, not because it’s “about” gun violence, but because it forces you to confront the stories we build around it. The horror isn’t just what happened. It’s how we watched it. And how we keep watching. It’s not perfect. It’s messy, overwhelming, and arguably too ambitious for its own good. But it hollowed me out in a way few films ever have. It crawled into my brain and whispered, This isn’t fiction anymore. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I don’t think I will for a while. And I honestly can’t rate it. Not because it’s above critique.. it’s absolutely going to divide people, but because trying to slap a number on it feels like rating a panic attack. Or a nightmare that meant something, even if you didn’t fully understand it. It’s an experience that changes depending on who you are and when you see it. Some will leave thinking it’s a masterpiece of mood and metaphor, others will see it as needlessly opaque. Reducing that polarity to a single digit erases the conversation the film is trying to start. For a movie that deliberately asks questions instead of handing out answers, I’d rather describe what it did to me than pin a number to it. I can really only say: I saw Weapons. And now I feel different.