Weapons

Some movies ease you in gently. Weapons kicks down the door at 2:17 a.m., kidnaps 17 third-graders, and leaves one kid behind to stew in a boiling pot of trauma. The setting is small-town America, which of course means a handful of people will take it upon themselves to solve the crime instead of letting, say, the FBI handle it.

The plot unfolds in six overlapping perspectives: a guilt-wracked teacher, a hollowed-out father, a detective with questionable coping skills, a child who’s probably going to need five therapists, and a couple of other locals whose main contribution is walking ominously through bad lighting. Critics have called it The Shining meets Prisoners, with a dash of Magnolia if Magnolia had a voodoo tree and a human soul-sucking aunt named Gladys.

Gladys—played by Amy Madigan—might be one of the most bizarre horror villains in years. Part PTA chair, part ancient evil, she’s the kind of neighbor who bakes you cookies while plotting to absorb your life force. The kids eventually fight back in a scene that reviewers describe as “equal parts cathartic and holy hell.” It’s gruesome, weirdly funny, and apparently set to a pounding techno score that makes you question your own heartbeat.

Praise online has been loud: Rotten Tomatoes sits in the mid-90s, with some critics calling Zach Cregger’s direction “masterful” and “a thrilling mystery that shouldn’t work but does.” The structure jumps between characters and timelines, each revealing another unsettling layer. The score by Larkin Seiple has even been called “a character in itself,” which is one step away from someone giving it its own SAG card.

But not everyone’s buying it. The Guardian dismissed it as “stylish but hollow,” some Letterboxd reviews accuse it of leaning on tired witch-lore tropes, and Reddit threads have gone deep on whether the ending is genius or just lazy. One user summed it up as, “Best horror of the year, and I still wanted to throw my popcorn at the screen.”

Whether it’s high art or high-gloss horror nonsense depends on your tolerance for metaphor, grief-porn, and kids committing ultra-violence. Either way, Weapons seems to have hit its target—just not everyone’s sure if they wanted to be in the line of fire.

4 out of 5 haunted PTA bake sales.