I recently saw possibly the most hyped up horror of the 2025 season, Weapons.
There have not been many movies I've been excited to see in 2025. The only horror movies I've seen in theaters this year have been Companion, Heart Eyes, and The Monkey. Other than that, nothing has really interested me enough to spend money on seeing it in theaters. (I do need to watch Sinners; scheduling conflicts kept arising when it came to seeing that one on the big screen.) But I absolutely loved the initial marketing for Weapons, making it look like footage from a real unsolved case, and it has easily been one of my most anticipated movies of the year.
But, sadly, I actually didn't like it.
This is not meant to be a "hot take" post in any way. I'm not here to rain on anyone's parade that did enjoy it, I just have a lot of thoughts about it that I want to unpack for myself, and maybe for anyone else who feels similarly. If you loved the movie, I'm honestly very happy for you. Finding new movies to love and obsess over is so fun. I'm still riding the highs of some newer favorites, some that I know many others didn't enjoy. We all like different things and that's perfectly fine. Don't let this review stop you if you're interested. You may end up loving it. I just wanted to delve into my personal feelings on this. This will most likely contain spoilers, so if you're planning on seeing the movie, you might not want to read further until after you do.
If you've seen any of the marketing, you know the basic concept: Seventeen children, all from the same classroom at Maybrook Elementary School, all run out of their homes at exactly 2:17 AM one morning, and disappear. The voiceover in the trailer promises "a story where a lot of people die in a lot of really weird ways", which, I'm going to tell you straight off, is absolutely not the case. A very small handful of people die, and the deaths are hardly unique. Much of this movie doesn't even feel like horror to me.
The first two-thirds of the movie or so are basically the same day being lived by multiple characters, from their different points of view. A name flashes across the screen, and we see their experience on a particular day, and this gets tiring fairly quickly. Justine, the teacher whose entire classroom save for one boy is missing, I didn't find even remotely likable. The second character, Archer, grieving father of one of the children, was interesting enough, probably because he was the only parent that we really got to know, but most of the other characters, save for the main little boy, Alex, had such repetitive storylines that if this had been a movie I'd been watching at home, I'd either have turned it off or fast-forwarded. At one point, I believe as we shifted to Marcus, the principal's, POV, I actually peeked in my purse at my phone to check the time (which I absolutely never do at a movie theater) and was very unimpressed to learn there was still close to an hour left. It was strange to me that they chose to focus so much on building these characters so intricately. This kind of character development would have would be better suited to a series, not one singular film, in my opinion. None of the characters beyond Archer and Alex really end up mattering all that much, anyway. They all end up playing a role in solving the mystery, sure, but I, personally, would have preferred more linear storytelling, rather than starting the same day over six times. There are a couple of jump scares within this time frame, but so few that I kept forgetting I was watching a horror movie and not just some Lifetime-esque drama about a kidnapping.
Anyway, when we finally get into the meat of the story, we learn the truth about why the kids went missing. The one boy left behind, Alex, recently had his Aunt Gladys move in, and Aunt Gladys is apparently a very powerful witch. She takes personal objects from people, makes a weird talisman out of them, cuts herself with it, adds the hair of whomever she's targeting, and then snaps the talisman in half to make the person whose personal objects she used attack her target. She keeps Alex quiet by threatening his parents, whom she's essentially turned into sleeper cells that sit catatonically all day waiting for her commands, which are usually to either stab themselves or scare away anyone who might come snooping around. Seeing how this affects Alex is really the only emotionally poignant thing that happens in this movie; it feels very claustrophobic and sad. Gladys is also a fairly disturbing character, but for all the backstory we got on characters who turn out to mostly be throw-aways, we really don't know much about her. I'm not even entirely sure what her motivation is, or if she's even related to Alex at all. She seems to feed off the life forces of the people that she puts into a stasis, even telling Alex that bringing her the personal effects of all of his classmates will "make her better", but then what is the point of keeping them around as the titular "weapons"? What is she planning on needing an army for? Just general protection? It's never explained. She never uses the children for anything. The "weird witchy aunt" storyline really comes out of left field, and from the time of Gladys' real introduction, it feels like an entirely different movie from the dragged-out drama that was the first half. It's better than all of the repetitive character building, but still doesn't feel right somehow. It feels more like someone walked into the room and switched channels to AMC FearFest during a crime show marathon.
Ultimately, Alex ends up using the talisman of his classmates to turn them on Gladys, and this results in a chase scene that's so goofy, I actually had tears coming out of my eyes from laughing so hard at one point. This was the only time I smiled once in two hours and eight minutes of this movie. This kids tear Gladys apart and eat her, and the spell Gladys had on everyone...well, I guess it sort of breaks? The kids and Alex's parents are still pretty much catatonic. Archer, who was very briefly under Gladys's control during the "final battle", instantly snaps back to normal, which doesn't really make sense. The child's voiceover from the beginning of the movie, that promised all the weird deaths that didn't actually happen, comes back on and informs that Alex's parents are in some sort of facility, Alex now lives with a different aunt who's "actually a nice lady" (I'm actually very surprised he didn't end up living with Justine, for all the buildup of her character and her relationships with her students.), and the kids all went home, but only some of them, and only very recently, have started to talk again. It's not a happy ending, but it's not exactly a horrifically bleak one either. It just kind of is, and then the credits roll. There's no real payoff. It made no sense to me at all that the death of Gladys wouldn't heal the kids, and Alex's parents, unless her feeding off their life forces somehow made that impossible. But again, nothing about how that bit of the witchcraft worked was ever explained.
I realized once more while I was writing this, that so little actually happens in this movie until the third act. The weird buildup of the characters that, for the most part, turn out to just be random people who happened to be in some of the right places at some of the right times, felt like trying to walk up a huge hill but never seeming to get to the top. It didn't feel at all tense or suspenseful to me, as many people seem to be saying this movie is. It just felt like several different people rehashing the same event, like when a group of people you know have a shared experience and everyone involved wants to tell you all about it. Knowing that Justine and Paul, a police officer, used to date and seem to have occasional flings despite Paul's relationship with another woman, for example, brought absolutely nothing to the story, nor did the fact that James, the drug addict that eventually breaks into Alex's home, broke into a car and tried to sell a stolen iPad that morning. I think it would have been more interesting to learn more about the families of the missing children, or even the children themselves, prior to their disappearance. I know they couldn't have done elaborate backstories on seventeen families, but still. The only parent who's even remotely fleshed out is Archer. We very briefly see him visit the parents of another missing child named Bailey, but that's it. It doesn't do much to make you feel anything for the missing children.
Maybe there's some grand point here that I'm just missing, but Weapons just did not land for me. I've seen some movies that have disappointed me in recent times, but I don't know if I've ever been as bored and fidgety at a movie theater than I was this time. Maybe I just bought into the hype too much. Who knows. I just know that it wasn't for me.
Also, I know this movie has been in the works since 2022, but it reminded me a lot of Longlegs, concept wise. The kids being weaponized, the weirdly significant numbers, the triangle map, the over-the-top looking villain...but that could just be me. (Longlegs is actually one of my favorite movies, and if you're looking for a story where "lots of people die in a lot of strange ways", I highly recommend Osgood Perkins' other recent movie, The Monkey. I can assure you that lots of people die in lots of strange ways in that one!) Gladys is also Sanderson Sister-esque in some ways, and also comes off a bit like a sillier Ellen from Hereditary, and Alex's situation and Justine's concerned relationships with her students brought Cobweb to mind...honestly, the more I think about it, the more Weapons comes off like an experimental mashup of already-existing movies, in a less parody-ish, Scary Movie type of way.
Like I said at the beginning of this, I'm glad that people enjoyed it. But, for me, it absolutely didn't live up to even a fraction of the hype, and I don't understand at all why it's being hailed as some kind of be all, end all horror film. But I hope it lives up to the hype for others who watch it.
Stay spooky, my friends.
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