Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 6 - Weapons

6. Weapons, dir. Zach Cregger

A few years ago, The Whitest Kids U'Know guys reemerged from a decade of quiet, making a big push to promote their Youtube channel while they were all stuck at home during Covid anyway. As long as people were going to need to watch 'Sam in a Bag' or 'A Gallon of PCP', they might as well be making money off of it. One really cool thing on that channel was the creator commentaries they were doing, where all five of the guys would get on Zoom and remember filming the sketch almost twenty years ago now. Children often appeared in their comedy because they aimed for edge and shock. They guys were amazed by how much leeway they got from parents when it came to the child actors in their sketches. "Oh you'll give us $150 dollars to call our kid 'fuck face'? Sure!", paraphrased Trevor Moore. Makes one wonder if the entire industry of children actors is deeply fucked - I think I know the answer. Perhaps a little bit of that was on the Kids' minds too here too. Weapons is the final and most daring WKUK sketch, where children are put in danger as props, and yeah, it is hilarious.

The guys don't really do too many of these commentaries anymore. The energy just isn't the same with only four of them.

Director Zach Cregger has mentioned in interviews that Weapons came about after the sudden death of his co-creator Trevor in 2021. There's nothing explicitly autobiographical in Weapons (not like other movies I'll discuss soon). Instead we get in-jokes such as seven hot dogs on a plate, or a concerned mustachio'd neighbor looking suspiciously like Trevors' character in the 'Sniper Business' sketch. You could easily have never seen Whitest Kids U'Know and have no idea that one of the hottest horror directors of our day started with comedy. Cregger cut his teeth making embarrassing crap like Miss March. I greatly enjoyed Barbarian from a few years ago, that one was just a solid horror movie. The ending to Weapons is a punchline. This is the scariest horror movie of 2025, a really dark fairy tale, until we get what is pure comedy.

I have a theory about Cregger's writing process. Whenever he hits a wall with his story and doesn't know what to do next, he shifts perspectives, and writes in another character. In Barbarian half the movie happens before we smash cut to Justin Long in a sports car 1000 miles away from anything we've seen so far. This lets him reset the tension after a cliffhanger, build new momentum for another scare, then explore the problem from another direction without needing to answer anything yet. (And who knows if he knows where he's going until he gets there.)

Weapons has six chapters and six POVs, giving us a surprisingly wide view of this unnamed town where our events take place. We bounce back and forth through time, the various pieces adding up to clues to our mystery, until eventually we get the big reveal and you can start laughing after you've been terrified so far. The effect is like one of Stephen King's big town novels, The Tommyknockers or 'Salem's Lot, where something terrible has come into this place and the entire town, with all its flaws and socials divisions, are major elements of the story. This place is Anywhere, USA, sure, a kind of Urban Legend flair, which could be anywhere, even just two towns over for all you. That the narrator is a little girl's voice (Scarlett Sher) gives you the idea that you're being whispered some fable in the back of a bus on the way to summer camp. Everything eventually comes into place, except this narrator, she cannot be one of children, and cannot know what she knows.

What we're told is that seventeen children all ran away from home at exactly 2:17 AM one morning, this makes up the entity of a third grade classroom. The fact that one boy, Alex (Cary Christopher), arrived at school perfectly fine makes it all the more inexplicable. Their teacher, Justine (Julie Gardner) has been targeted by the bewildered and paranoid parents, who are certain she should know something, anything. What do entitled White suburbanites do these days the first second they're made to feel helpless? They target the authority figure in sight and conjure conspiracies theories. But Justine is our first POV, and indeed, she knows nothing at all. Somebody spray painted "witch" on the side of her car. 2:17 is less than 45 minutes off from the traditional Witching Hour. Hmm, something to think about.

One particularly violent and angry father, Archer (Josh Brolin) is tortured by dreams. Terrifying dreams. Some of them of are his son, some of them are of a horrible clown figure (the Future Best Supporting Actress Winner, Amy Madigan). One that goes unexplained by Weapons is a giant assault rifle floating in the sky over his house. This has nothing to do with any part of the mystery. Except the gun is a clue to what is on Weapons' mind as a work. We have decided that every person at every level of society is suspicious and corrupt, and that cynicism and disconnect will protect us. Except it doesn't. Entire classrooms of children do not get erased by the evil witches or the trans agenda or the people who took beef tallow out of your French Fries. They get erased by random terrible chance, one person with one gun. You can atomize society and decide nothing is real except your own individual homestead and your own vision of reality - and you'll be perfectly safe in that bubble until you realize other people have other realities, and nobody is protecting you or your children from the AR-15s knocking at the doors.

All this could have been avoided if just one neighbor looked into one house. The world's problems aren't solved by dividing ourselves. Eventually it will spill into your safe space. And yeah, it will be hilarious in the end. There will also be a lot of screaming.