Weapons (2025) Review and Analysis: Zach Cregger's Witchcraft Horror Is the Scariest Film of the Year

At 2:17 AM, seventeen third-grade children get out of their beds simultaneously and vanish into the night. Every child from the same classroom. Arms outstretched, running toward something unseen, leaving only one classmate behind: a boy named Alex.

By the time morning comes and the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania begins to understand that these children are truly gone, the horror of Weapons has already taken root in a way that is nearly impossible to shake.

Directed by Zach Cregger, whose 2022 debut Barbarian announced him as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary horror, Weapons arrived in August 2025 to a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a consensus that called it a "sophomore triumph" that "solidifies his status as a master of horror." We covered it on Fear & Wine and the conversation went deep fast, because this is the kind of film that rewards exactly the kind of analysis we love doing.

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The premise: what kind of horror is this?

Weapons is structured around six perspectives, six chapters following different characters caught in the orbit of the children's disappearance, including Ms. Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the third-grade teacher who is left behind with Alex and becomes the town's primary suspect; a father played by Josh Brolin whose grief cracks into something dangerous; and eventually Gladys, Alex's aunt, a dying witch whose magic is the engine behind everything the town is experiencing.

Cregger cites Magnolia, Prisoners, and Jennifer Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as structural influences, and you can feel all three. The film unfolds like a mosaic, withholding information across chapters and then snapping pieces into place with unsettling precision. Watching it sometimes feels like bingeing a season of television, with each segment recontextualizing what came before.

The film was also written as a deeply personal project. Cregger was inspired to write the screenplay after the death of his close friend and collaborator Trevor Moore, and that grief is present in the film's DNA, in its preoccupation with how communities respond to the sudden, inexplicable loss of children, and in the question of what it costs to sustain yourself at someone else's expense.

The witchcraft mechanics: curses, hair, and sympathetic magic

What makes the supernatural framework in Weapons so effective is that it draws on real folklore rather than invented horror movie rules. Gladys's magic is built around sympathetic magic, one of the oldest documented systems in witchcraft traditions worldwide: the idea that a personal item, a lock of hair, a piece of clothing, a borrowed object, creates a living link between the witch and her target. Once she has that link, she can bend a person to her will, compel them to act against their own interests, even use them as instruments of violence.

The curse is deliberately relational. Gladys is Alex's aunt. The magic runs through family connections, through intimate proximity, through the things that people leave behind when they trust someone. Hair is the central motif here, both for its folkloric resonance and for what it represents thematically: something you shed without thinking, something you leave on a pillow or in a comb, that can be used against you without your knowledge.

The film also introduces a recurring tree motif that functions as a physical focal point of Gladys's power, a supernatural anchor for the enchantment that holds the curse in place. It is one of several details that rewards a second viewing once you understand what you are looking at.

Gladys as a villain: desperation, not pure evil

One of the most interesting choices Cregger makes is to give Gladys motivations that are recognizable rather than cartoonishly monstrous. She is dying. She is using her magic to drain vitality from others in order to sustain herself. Her methods are horrifying, but her underlying condition, illness, fear of death, the desperate wish to keep existing, is entirely human.

Amy Madigan's performance in the role has been called award-caliber by multiple critics, and it earns that description by making Gladys magnetic and unsettling in equal measure. She is not a cackling movie witch. She is someone who has made a terrible bargain and is now caught in its logic, needing more victims to sustain the spell, consuming the people around her to keep herself alive.

The film's moral complexity deepens considerably when Alex, the one child left behind, eventually discovers he can replicate Gladys's enchantment using her own hair. It is a classic horror question delivered with real weight: when you learn the tools of the monster in order to fight the monster, what are you becoming? Is protection that uses the same mechanics as harm still protection?

What Weapons is really about

The 2:17 AM premise went viral before the film even opened, with theaters hosting special screenings at that exact time to lean into the lore. But the film is doing something more substantive than a clever marketing hook.

Critics noted its resonance as a school shooting allegory, an interpretation Cregger has neither confirmed nor denied, and the film is careful to leave that reading available without forcing it. The image of empty classrooms, of children running into the night with arms outstretched and no visible reason, of a teacher who survives when her students do not and then becomes the focus of community suspicion rather than compassion, all of it is weighted with a very specific contemporary dread.

The town of Maybrook is also complicit in a way that feels accurate and uncomfortable. When something this catastrophic happens, Weapons argues, communities often find a convenient human target to blame, whether that is the teacher, the outsider, or whoever is easiest to accuse, because looking at the real source of the darkness requires confronting things that are far harder to name. As Charles Pulliam-Moore of The Verge put it, the film meditates on how communities conjure convenient scapegoats rather than confront the things that actually endanger children. That observation hits differently depending on where you are sitting when you watch it.

The cast and craft

Julia Garner is the film's emotional anchor as Justine, and she is exceptional, all nervous energy and genuine warmth that makes her vulnerability feel earned rather than functional. Josh Brolin delivers some of the film's most volatile and uncomfortable scenes as a grief-destroyed father whose anger has no healthy outlet. Benedict Wong and Alden Ehrenreich provide depth and one of the film's most discussed action sequences. And Cary Christopher as Alex, the surviving child, carries the weight of a performance that has earned him several Best Young Actor nominations.

Cinematographer Larkin Seiple gives the film a gorgeous, gliding visual language, precise compositions and steadicam work that creates unease through beauty rather than conventional horror grammar. Cregger also co-composed the hypnotic score alongside Ryan Holladay and Hays Holladay, and the sound design throughout the film is as carefully considered as its visual storytelling.

Weapons grossed over $150 million on a $38 million budget and is now streaming on HBO Max. If you have been waiting for something that earns the word "original" in mainstream horror, this is it.

We talked about all of it on Fear & Wine

The four of us had a full episode on Weapons, covering the witchcraft folklore, the multi-perspective structure, the grief at the film's core, and whether Cregger sticks the landing better here than he did with Barbarian. There is a lot to dig into with this one and we did not hold back. Come find us on Spotify and let us know where you land on the ending.

And if possession and witchcraft horror is your thing, make sure you check out our episode and post on possession in horror, covering Undertone, Ghostbusters, and the Days of Our Lives possession that broke daytime television in 1994. The two posts are in direct conversation with each other. revealing.

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