Weapons (2025)

Zach Cregger’s Weapons is a better film than Barbarian, though that may not be saying as much as some would think. I did not care for Barbarian, which often felt like a collection of shocks searching for a story. Weapons is more ambitious. It wants to be a horror mystery with structural cleverness and thematic weight. It does not entirely succeed, but at least it reaches for something beyond surprise.

Like Barbarian, Weapons was written and directed by Cregger, and you can see the same instincts at work. He enjoys withholding information, changing tone, and pulling the rug out from under the audience. In Weapons, those instincts are wrapped in a multiple perspective structure. Different characters and timelines reveal different parts of the same central mystery. Some may compare this to Rashomon, but that gives the film too much philosophical credit.

In Rashomon, perspective is the point. Competing stories raise questions about truth, memory, pride, and self deception. In Weapons, perspective is mostly a mechanism. The shifting viewpoints are less about the nature of truth and more about hiding key information until a later reveal. This can be entertaining. It can create suspense and keep viewers engaged. But once the puzzle is solved, the structure feels more like a trick than a necessity. It is clever in the moment, less profound in retrospect.

Still, the film does contain a genuine moral instinct. It understands that evil is real, and that evil often takes the form of using people. The witch in the story is frightening not merely because she has occult power, but because she exploits others for her own ends. She consumes innocence, manipulates weakness, and treats human beings as tools. That is a recognizable evil. It exists in every age, whether dressed in folklore, politics, business, religion, or ordinary personal relationships.

This is where horror can sometimes tell the truth better than realism. By exaggerating evil into monstrous form, it reveals what ordinary evil actually does. It feeds on others. It dehumanizes. It takes what is good and twists it for selfish gain. The witch is memorable because she represents something larger than herself.

Yet the film also suggests something equally true. Evil may be dangerous, but it is not ultimate. The witch appears powerful, but her power is limited. She can terrorize, deceive, and wound, but she cannot create anything lasting. She depends on others. She borrows, steals, and corrupts. That is often the real nature of evil. It looks larger than life until it is finally exposed as hollow. From a Christian perspective, this rings true. Evil is real, but it is derivative. It can only distort what God has made. It cannot rival goodness on equal terms because it has no life in itself.

The ending, however, becomes morally shaky. The witch is defeated by having her own evil turned back upon her. This gives the audience a sense of justice, but it raises an old problem. If evil is overcome by using evil more effectively, has anything truly been defeated? Many modern stories stumble here. They identify corruption clearly, then resolve it through revenge, cruelty, or domination. A stronger ending would have shown evil defeated by truth, sacrifice, courage, or solidarity. Those things do not merely stop evil. They expose it and transcend it.

That is perhaps why Weapons is a good film rather than a great one. It has atmosphere, craft, and some real insight into the nature of wickedness. It knows that evil is parasitic and smaller than it appears. But it does not quite know how to imagine goodness with equal power. Even so, in an era where many horror films are content to be empty exercises in dread, Weapons at least tries to say something true. And that effort matters.