I am eagerly anticipating Barbarian director Zach Cregger’s follow-up mystery horror film Weapons, the story of an elementary school class that vanishes. Julia Garner plays a teacher whose students all independently wake up at the same time on the same night and quietly leave their houses, never to be seen again. The teacher is traumatized, upon finding only her classroom empty. The parents are livid terrified. The administrators are frantic. The entire town is up in arms.
It’s a terrifying premise, one which (unfortunately) speaks to our current social reality of school shootings and other mass disasters. It’s also, clearly, many kinds of stories: an investigation, a witch hunt, a tale of scapegoats and blame and grief.
The film, which also stars Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, and Benedict Wong, has debuted with a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film itself releases on August 8th.
I don’t use Rotten Tomatoes as a metric for a film’s quality, because I think it’s impossible to boil down a work of art along a numerical scale (especially an aggregated one). But I was relieved to see this score, because, in this era of rote, derivative studio projects and a listless Hollywood engine, I want any and all encouragement for creative and original stories. I want more movies like this to come out.
The horror genre and (less discussed) the mystery genre, are reliably most cinematic innovations seem to be, throughout history. 2025 has seen some positive showings in both genres, but I’m interested in what Weapons will contribute.
Here’s the trailer:
