Weapons (2025) Review and Ending | Weapons Explained
- Rob Binns
- Aug 9
- 10 min read
Alright, so let’s get the obvious out of the way: Weapons is an excellent horror film.
But it’s more than that – it’s a harbinger of horror’s increasingly powerful cultural sway. If Zach Cregger’s previous effort, Barbarian, showed that the cinemagoers of 2022 had an appetite for ambitious, provocative big–screen terror, the same director’s 2025 effort – bigger scope, bigger budget, bigger stars – is further proof that horror’s resurgence isn’t merely a spike, but a continued upswing of growth. And that’s exciting.
That said – and despite my opening line above – it would be doing Weapons an injustice to call it merely an excellent horror film, because the truth is Weapons is a brilliant piece of cinema as is: sprawling, jaw-dropping, gasp-inducing, and willing to take big swings in service of shocking, satisfying – and, most importantly, scaring – its audience. It’s horror’s modern Magnolia, terror’s Mystic River. It’s a blood-spattered Vantage Point, a Run, Lola, Run for genre fiends; a putrefacted Pulp Fiction and a Gone Girl for gorehounds.
It’s Cregger back at his hagsploitation best – tapping back into the vein that made Barbarian such a wild hit, but with elements of zombie horror, vampirism, mystery, and – somehow – clown horror thrown into the mix. It sounds like perhaps it shouldn't work, but of course it does, with Cregger’s clear love for the genre bleeding through – sometimes literally – into the many references to both classic and modern genre films scattered throughout.
In short, it's worth every second of your time. Let's find out why!
Read on for my Weapons (2025) review. I’ll briefly recap the plot’s key beats – and yes, that includes spoilers – and explain the ending of Weapons a bit further down.
Weapons (2025) PLOT summary
2025, so far, has been a year marked by some refreshingly high-concept horrors.
The Woman in the Yard (2025) asked “What would you do if a mysterious, black-clad stranger showed up on your front lawn and just sat there, observing your family?” Sinners (2025) was a successful fusion of period drama and vampire horror set in Depression-era, Jim Crow American South. Films like M3GAN 2.0 (2025) and Companion (2025) asked valid questions about our complicated, increasingly inextricable ties with AI, while Drop (2025) took a humdrum aspect of modern technology and stretched it to its logical conclusion: spinning out a taut, terrifying Hitchcockian thriller in the process.
Weapons does a similar thing, opening with the central conceit that its entire plot is built around: all the children of a single classroom at the local school disappear one night. Each bolt out of their homes at exactly the same time – 2:17am – all running the exact same way, with their arms sticking straight out by their sides. The other kicker: it’s not actually all the kids of that one classroom that disappear. There is one, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) who remains – but who professes no knowledge of his classmates’ collective vanishing.
The film follows a shifting narrative style, following each of its main characters in turn. We start with Julia Garner’s Justine Gandy – the teacher of the class that went missing en masse – and explore her life for a while. Garner (in a role that, judging by the initials of her character, was clearly written for her) does fantastic work here: juxtaposing Gandy’s compassionate, kind-hearted nature in her day job with a kind of unhinged, reckless disconnect with the world in her private life.
She’s also, we see, grappling with a long-term affliction with alcoholism, in addition to the consequences of her pupils’ disappearance, with many grieving local parents – most notably Josh Brolin’s Archer Graff – blaming her. We’re also privy to Gandy’s dating life, as she reaches out to an AA acquaintance – Alden Ehrenreich’s Paul, a local (and married) police offer – for some drinks and, inevitably, a one-night stand.
Gandy’s boss is the school principal, Benedict Wong’s Andrew Marcus. He’s portrayed as empathetic yet rule-oriented, and tolerates Gandy’s frequent over-stepping of professional boundaries (such as a desire to talk to Alex after his classmates vanish) with a firm, yet kind, demeanour. The other major player is James – a homeless drug addict played by an Austin Abrams unrecognisable from his role as Ron in The Walking Dead – who becomes a thorn in Paul’s side as the movie progresses.
Narratively, Cregger rotates us through the lives and perspectives of each in turn – Justine, Archer, Marcus, Paul, James, and Alex – exploring and expanding the story while feeding us breadcrumbs. Cregger’s screenplay was inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), and the rotating ensemble cast of audience proxies has a similar effect as they do in that film: helping us empathise with each contrasting point of view, while edging the story’s central mystery along to its thrilling, balls-to-the-wall conclusion.
So, how does Weapons unfold? Here’s where the spoilers start. Read on at your peril!
Weapons (2025) explained: What happens to the children?
Right, so here it is – the kids disappear because they have been turned into the weapons of the film’s title. This involves a witch-like ritual by which people are transformed into a kind of “heat-seeking missile” – robbed of their individualism, their identity, and their free will and turned into mindless killing machines doing the bidding of the person that instigated the ritual. Basically, there are three parties involved to this witchcraft:
The witch (the malicious party that instigates the ritual)
The victim (the person the witch wants dead)
The “weapon” (the person co-opted by the witch to chase and kill – and in some contexts, we learn, even eat – the victim)
In this case, the witch is Gladys Lilly, the aunt of Alex (who, you’ll remember, is the only member of his class that doesn’t go missing). She’s an enigmatic figure, and a mystery even to Alex’s parents (played by Whitmer Thomas and Callie Schuttera), who haven’t seen her in years. (“She didn’t even come to our wedding”, Alex’s father bemoans.)
Turns out, Gladys is on her deathbed, dying of an unexplained illness. Well, Gladys is a witch, and – while it’s never explained outright – it’s implied that the only way she can save herself is through murder: by orchestrating, through the film’s eponymous weapons, a series of killings and harvesting the blood of her victims.
We see the fruits of this begin to bear as the body count burgeons, as Gladys begins to not only look healthier, but appears to be ageing – backwards.
But how is she doing it?
Weapons (2025) explained: How does the ritual work?
Gladys’ ritual in Weapons (2025) involves the use of a stick, a bowl filled with water, and two other things – a possession from someone you intend to make the weapon, a lock of hair from the individual you intend to make the victim, and some blood from the ritual’s perpetrator. The only catch about the item you need from the person allocated to be the “weapon” is that it needs to be able to be wrapped around the stick.
In the case of Marcus, it’s a decorative ribbon Gladys snatches from his office; when Archer is weaponised during the film’s climax, it’s the necklace she rips off him.
Once that personal item is combined with blood and, along with the lock of the victim’s hair, wrapped around the stick – whose provenance or powers the film never explains – all its instigator needs to do is snap the stick. Then, the person they’ve chosen to weaponise will relentlessly pursue – and eventually destroy – the intended target, with no way of tracing it back to the real source of the act. Dropping the stick into the bowl of water ends the ritual.
Another aspect of the ritual in Weapons is that it can deploy the people it has re-appropriated as killing machines into a kind of burglar alarm. At the height of her army-building, Gladys ‘rigs’ the hallway outside her room with a line of salt – Alex’s weaponised parents standing just behind it. When Alex steps across the line (the same thing happens downstairs, when Justine and Archer bumble over a separate row of salt and trigger the James and Paul weapons), he accidentally sets the ritual in motion, and his folks fall on him.
To reiterate, then, the kids go missing because Gladys manipulates Alex into bringing her back one item belonging to each of them. He chooses the labels on each of their individual storage boxes: where they keep stationery, books, etc. Through this, Gladys is able to weaponise them – which is why they all go missing at the same time, and all leave their homes running with the same awkward style as Marcus runs after he’s weaponised to kill Justine. (Incidentally, I’ve had people asking me why Gladys went after Justine – first sneaking into the teacher’s car to lop off a lock of hair as she slept, staking out the Lilly house, then weaponising Justine’s boss to kill her. The answer is that Gladys knew that Justine was too inquisitive; that she was getting too close to the truth. This is also the reason why Gladys went after the principal: because, after Justine asks her boss to talk to Alex’s parents, the principal begins asking difficult questions. Gladys suspected that Marcus had talked to the authorities, which is why she shows up at his house – first commandeering him to kill his husband, then setting him on the other big “problem”: Justine.)
Weapons (2025) ending explained
At the ending of Weapons, things don’t look good for our main characters. Four out of six of the people we’ve been following throughout the course of the 128-minute runtime end up being “weaponised” by Gladys’ evil machinations; three of them die. Only Justine and Alex avoid this fate, but even for them the outlooks don’t look bleak; for example, Alex’s parents remain in a zombified, trance-like state, and he’s sent to live with another family.
But what happens at the end of Weapons? Does Gladys get the justice she deserves?
Yes, she does. The enterprising, quick-thinking Alex – on the run from his weaponised mum and dad, who are chasing him from room to room – snatches up his aunt’s stick, which has already been primed with the belongings of his classmates. Combining it with some of the hair he finds on Gladys’ hairbrush, he enacts the ritual – causing almost an entire classroom of weaponised children to pursue her. After an extended chase sequence (which had the packed-out audience at my local theatre in Melbourne laughing at the same time that, I have no doubt, they were squirming), the kids track Gladys down to the lawn of a nearby house. They rip her to bits: tearing at her flesh with their teeth, and rending her limb from limb until she’s no more than a greasy, grassy puddle of guts and gristle.
DAMN!
Weapons (2025) review: what makes it so effective?
For me, one of the major reasons Weapons is so effective is through its use of silence.
As modern filmgoers, we’ve been conditioned to constant sound from our cinema – be those loud stings or trills of noise, or the quieter, softer susurrations as set pieces build up and blossom. Here, though, Cregger uses long periods of slow, suspenseful build-up to set our teeth on edge – letting what’s unfolding on screen lead us, rather than manipulating us with sound. As someone who smuggled my own (loud) bag of popcorn in, rather than purchasing a (quiet) box of popcorn at the movie theatre, I feel as though I’m immensely well-qualified to talk about this; during those aforementioned periods of sustained silence, I was acutely aware of every crunching sound my mouth was making as I masticated each moreish mouthful.)
Secondly, another of Weapons’ strengths – and, ironically, one many might also consider its greatest weakness – is that it doesn’t bother itself with exploring the emotional depths and implications of all those kids going missing. Other than Archer – plus a cameo from Justin Long – Cregger doesn't really delve into the debilitating psychological impact the vanishing of these children must’ve had on their family members. The furthest that Weapons (2025) really goes here is in some shouting at a school meeting and a scene in which we see that Archer – who runs a construction company – has jeopardised a job by mis-ordering a series of building supplies. Bar a couple of nightmares, the emotional toll of the film’s instigating event on the people left behind is left unexplored – and that’s a good thing.
Why? Because, in today’s parlance, it lets Cregger cook. It frees up the film to focus on the mystery, on the horror; allows it to move with an exciting fluidity, at a speed that never allows the plot to spin its wheels. That said, although the film isn’t as explicit a parable of grief as, say, The Woman in the Yard (2025) – or as effective in reflecting this theme as similarly ritual-based horror Bring Her Back (2025) – Weapons (2025) still makes you reflect. More aptly, Weapons is keener to truck with themes of gun control (it’s hard to accept the empty classroom as symbolising anything other than a school shooting and its aftermath): and here, the film’s title speaks for itself. (Brolin's Graff also has a nightmare in which he sees the apparition of a large, floating AK-47 assault rifle above his own home.)
I also love the way Cregger is a sucker for a good red herring.
Throughout, he teases us with small details, leading us to believe that there is a parasite involved in the unfolding devilry. Both in the classroom – where some notes chalked on the board refer to parasitism – and in Marcus’ home (where he and his husband are watching a documentary about the Cordyceps parasite: the fungus popularised by The Last of Us and The Girl With All the Gifts (2016), and which invades the brain of its host to override its motor skills and control it) – is this concept teased as the central villain.
It’s just misdirection (or perhaps foreshadowing), of course. While Gladys is a kind of parasite, and while the weaponisation process does turn its host into a kind of coin-operated zombie, there’s no actual fungus involved – just some clever stage play, and a film that doubles as a love letter to the horror genre. I counted overt references to The Shining (1980), while Gladys’ end – and the body horror implicit in the reverse ageing process the bloodletting initiates – hearkens back to last year’s The Substance (2024).
As for the slow, inexorable way Gladys builds her army – with one character after another falling to her schemes – Weapons (2025) is reminiscent of The Faculty, or perhaps Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) two decades earlier. And, in terms of the horror being based around a ritual, the closest analogy I can think of recently is the work of the Philippou brothers, with Talk to Me (2022) a notable example.
Oh – and I won’t spoil the specific moment or scene here, but no Weapons (2025) review would be complete without mentioning that it contains one of the most effective jump scares I’ve seen. Ever.
Don’t sleep on this one, and don’t wait for VOD. See it on the big screen (ideally in a theatre that’s filled to the rafters), and enjoy. People will be talking about this one for years – nay, decades – to come, and you’ll want to be a part of that conversation. I know I do.
Enjoyed this Weapons (2025) review? Explore some of my other reviews of films in which people have used weapons: It Feeds (2025), Speak No Evil (2024), and MadS (2024).