Weapons is weird, wicked and a little bit overhyped

Zach Cregger's horror mystery racks up the tension, while 'Freakier Friday' milks nostalgia

- Clarisse Loughrey

Horror's in a tricky spot right now.

It's one of the last surviving genres where original material can still thrive, yet only when there's a sense that what we're being sold isn't just a film, but a sensation - an invitation into a truly unmissable cultural It wasn't enough that Longlegs had Nicolas Cage falsetto singing in wild plastic surgery makeup. That 2024 film, we were repeatedly warned, was evil down to its atomic structure, as if it were a bit of satanic coding penned by the Zodiac Killer himself.

Weapons, which centres on the eerie disappearance of a class of schoolchildren, has similarly tried to latch onto the feel and aesthetics of true crime, focused on the conflicting testimonies of a grieving parent (Josh Brolin's Archer) and the class's teacher Justine (Julia Garner). It's a wildly effective ad campaign. Yet I can't help but think audiences are being slightly misled here. Zach Cregger's followup to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022's Barbarian is easily as weird, wicked, and fun - what it's not, however, is the chilly, nightmare headfuck we've been told it is.

Cregger has a background in sketch comedy, having once been in the acclaimed troupe The Whitest Kids U'Know, and maintains an intuitive sense of how a scare should be structured (the same as a joke: set it up, string it out, land the punchline). He also knows exactly when to puncture the tension. When Justine is being chased around a gas station store by something manic and threatening, you hear a cashier's voice in the background yelp, "Get out of my store!" Without a beat, she barks back: "Fucking HELP me."

Weapons is split into chapters, illuminating each character's perspective on the event and its aftermath. Cregger has cited Paul Thomas Anderson's