I’ve been wanting to watch this movie for a little while now, and wow, what an experience. It has an interesting premise - one specific school class of kids who go missing at the exact same time on the exact same night, where then one kid and one kid only shows up for class the next day. I was into the movie before I even hit play, because of that premise, and I think it delivered on its interesting premise for the most part, though I didn’t think it was as good as I was hoping it would be.

I’ll definitely start with the positives. I mean, this is just crazy from start to finish and fully goes for it the whole time. What makes it such an experience is how exhilarating it is, without you really knowing what’s going on. It was very unpredictable for me, not necessarily with the mystery of the story, but with the way things played out. It’s one of the most interesting horror movies, not only that I’ve seen from 2025, but really ever. Now, I really haven’t seen a ton of horror movies, but it reminded me a lot of Get Out because of how unique and different it was. It’s obviously nothing like Get Out, but it just reminded me of how much it stands out amongst other modern movies.

Being a horror movie, the scares obviously have to be effective, and thankfully, they definitely are. There’s some really creepy imagery that I didn’t expect, and despite how desensitized I’ve become to creepy imagery in horror movies, it actually did unsettle me a little bit. I’m also not a big fan of jump scares, but the way they were used here was incredibly effective and managed to startle me almost every time. The whole film also just has this unsettling tone throughout, where you never know what’s going to happen, because a lot of things happen completely out of nowhere.

With how crazy and whacky it is, it honestly has a sense of dark humor to it that I thought Zach Cregger balanced remarkably well with the horror and suspense. One of my least favorite things in horror or thriller movies is comedic relief, and I was glad that the humor really doesn’t play as comedic relief in the film. It really only elevates the whackiness and craziness of the nature of the story and everything that is happening, and I thought that was brilliant. It’s far from a dark horror comedy, just to make clear.

It also has some really great performances. Everyone is great, but I’ll just talk about the main standouts since I’d be here for a long time if I talked about everyone. I’d heard nothing but amazing things about Julia Garner here, but to be honest, she wasn’t really the standout to me. Josh Brolin, who plays one of the main protagonists, Archer, alongside Julia Garner’s Justine, is probably the deepest character and most relatable. Obviously, I have no experience with losing kids, but he really sells a parent who is psychologically affected by his child going missing, and is dedicated to finding him. He is by far the most compelling of the film. I also thought the child star, Cary Christopher, who plays Alex, was one of the better child performances I’ve seen in a while. He’s very subtle in his performance and how everything that happens to him psychologically affects him, which isn’t often something you see from child performances.

For my only mixed aspect of the film, it’s minor, like a mixed usually is, but has to do with logic. Some of the characters do some things that I didn’t think felt like they were realistic decisions that would’ve been made by real people, despite how much all of this would have affected them psychologically. I just thought it went too far in numerous moments, especially with Julia Garner’s character, and stretched my believability quite a bit. It’s not a huge thing, and honestly, not something that affected my viewing experience, which was why I didn’t note it as a negative, but something I thought I would mention.

Now, there were definitely a few things that held this movie back from being truly great to me, which I found really frustrating. The first one I’ll talk about is the pacing. I won’t dive into specifics for obvious reasons since I don’t want to spoil anything, but for like the first two thirds of the runtime, Zach Cregger chose a method of movie storytelling that hasn’t really worked for me in the past. The reason why it’s never really worked for me is because of how much it affects the pacing. Every time it uses this method of storytelling, the pacing does kind of, not necessarily drag, but almost sort of reset. Again, it’s hard to talk about without spoiling things a little bit, because as far as I know, the trailers and marketing didn’t advertise that the movie would be told in this way.

The other one is the character development, which was really only a problem when it got to the third act. I was really enjoying the slower moments mainly with Julia Garner’s character and Alden Ehrenreich, who by the way, I didn’t know was in this movie (I had only seen him in Solo: A Star Wars Story), but it kind of ignores their relationship the further we go along, and by the third act, it goes for some things that I think could have had some great emotional impact if there was more time put into it. So, it’s not a criticism in the traditional sense, but more of a missed opportunity, I thought.

The last negative I’ll mention, which was probably the biggest one for me personally, was some of the revelations we got, especially heading into the third act. They felt way too simplistic for what this movie felt like beforehand, and honestly, just disappointed me a great deal. It was truly what kept Weapons from being a great horror movie for me, and left me feeling a bit let down by the end. I was really hooked up until this point, but the answers to everything regarding the mystery I thought just kind of took me out of the movie, and made me ready for it to end, unfortunately.

Even though the third act and ending really let me down, I have to say, while Weapons isn’t one of my favorite movies of 2025, it certainly is one of the ones that’s really going to stick with me going forward, making it one of the more memorable ones anyway.