Weapons
Warner Bros. | Release Date: August 8, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
81
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 48 Critic Reviews
Positive:
43
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Original-CinThom ErnstAug 7, 2025
Cregger’s film is a standout — unsettling, odd, and wickedly fun. Weapons might just be the horror movie for people who don’t do horror. Read full review
100
The TimesKevin MaherAug 7, 2025
Where to start with this utterly gorgeous, commanding, terrifying and masterful suspense thriller? Firstly don’t believe the hype — it’s not a horror. It’s bigger than that. Not a slasher, a creeper, a spooker or a demented killer movie. It’s better than that. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleBob StraussAug 6, 2025
An innovative and intriguing plot, credible characters with edgy relationships navigating increasingly insane situations, plus jokes and scares built up with care or blasted out of disruptive nowhere with equal effectiveness — it’s all here, and even better. Read full review
100
EmpireJohn NugentAug 6, 2025
A hugely accomplished horror achievement, and a significant step up from Barbarian: tense, sad, hilarious, unsettling, ridiculously entertaining, and ultimately oddly uplifting. Read full review
100
Time OutPhil de SemlyenAug 6, 2025
There’ll be moans from horrorheads that it’s not scary throughout, but in deepening his exploration of family life in the ‘burbs, Cregger sharpens his twisted scares to a dagger point. And the frights, when they come, really land. Read full review
100
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezAug 5, 2025
Weapons underscores how in command Creeger is of his entire movie, the mise-en-scène, the craft, tone, mood and sweaty, ominous, dread-inducing atmosphere. Its final act is batshit crazy and climaxes in a jaw-dropping wave of exhilarating, terrifying feeding frenzy of satisfying comeuppance. Weapons will leave you thrilled, aghast, horrified and wowed. Read full review
95
The AtlanticDavid SimsAug 28, 2025
The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzSep 2, 2025
My interpretation is that it’s a scary, funny film with a lot beneath the surface. And it’s certainly preferable to watching the news. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonAug 7, 2025
A former sketch comic, Cregger knows how to work a crowd. The combination of his assurance and his characters’ confusion is wonderful in the moment, as though you’re listening to a spiel from someone who sounds crazy but might be making all the sense in the world. Read full review
90
Film ThreatBradley GibsonAug 7, 2025
It is a short jump from laughing to screaming. There is no safe space. Cregger has a refined sensibility for identifying the core irritations in ordinary life and amplifying them into anxiety, escalating to terror. Read full review
90
LooperAudrey FoxAug 7, 2025
Its narrative structure keeps Weapons continually engaging, while its talented cast of actors brings depth to each character, making this one of the best horror films of the year.  Read full review
90
The Daily BeastNick SchagerAug 6, 2025
Escalating at a mad rate until it tips into outright lunacy, it’s a higher and more hellish brand of nightmare. Read full review
90
Screen DailyTim GriersonAug 5, 2025
Like the filmmaker’s 2022 feature Barbarian, Weapons takes its time laying out an elaborate story, repeatedly shifting perspectives and main characters until the myriad strands come together in immensely satisfying fashion. Read full review
90
Total FilmMegan GarsideAug 1, 2025
Overall, Cregger’s twisted fairytale is not only the best horror movie to come out of an already impressive year for the genre, but Weapons is a positively terrifying, heartwrenching look at a struggling community. Read full review
90
IGNTom JorgensenJul 30, 2025
Weapons is a righteous, fully actualized genre-bender in which writer-director Zach Cregger hones Barbarian’s blend of unbearable tension and dark humor to a new level of razor-sharpness. Read full review
90
SlashfilmChris EvangelistaJul 29, 2025
A wonderful mixture of bad vibes and macabre fun, Weapons is one of the best horror movies of the year, and further confirmation that writer-director Zach Cregger is one of the most exciting voices in the genre right now. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerAug 7, 2025
Weapons is such a deliriously twisted blast that, as soon as it’s complete, you’ll want to shake up the box and do it all again. Read full review
89
Paste MagazineJarrod JonesAug 6, 2025
In many ways, Weapons is a topical ensemble drama; thrillingly, it has darker, more genre-driven ambitions beyond that. Cregger mixes all this despair, cynicism, and brutality into an impressively wicked and heady brew—and a ferociously entertaining horror movie, besides. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 8, 2025
Weapons is a step up for writer/director Zach Cregger from his promising horror debut, Barbarian – funnier, more unsettling, and ultimately more satisfying when taken as a whole. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenAug 7, 2025
You might say that it’s inappropriate for a gory horror movie about missing children to nod toward such real-life tragedy. And I’d tend to agree. Yet I must admit that during Weapons’ bonkers climax—a darkly comic, insanely sustained sequence of violent comeuppance—I felt something closer to catharsis. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoAug 7, 2025
In the end, [Cregger] wants to take you on a ride, and so he’s got to provide both hills and valleys, producing a horror film that’s equally hilarious and chilling. Read full review
88
Washington PostTy BurrAug 7, 2025
Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked. Read full review
88
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiAug 6, 2025
The experience is akin to being blindfolded and thrown into a trunk — except fun! Read full review
83
ConsequenceLiz Shannon MillerAug 7, 2025
It all leads to a cinematic experience that’s powerful, scary, disturbing, and often quite funny. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubJacob OllerAug 6, 2025
Weapons rudely disrupts the illusion of suburban safety with impish delight and a fully stocked horror arsenal. It also addresses some of the magical thinking that incomprehensible tragedy can inspire in people who would otherwise never engage in it. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichAug 6, 2025
The non-linear shape of its story doesn’t just allow Weapons to disguise the age-old genre pattern of tension and release, it also allows Cregger to condense it until he’s completely elided the distance between horror and comedy, terror and relief, self-control and surrender. Read full review
80
PolygonJesse HassengerAug 8, 2025
Weapons is masterfully entertaining and far more ambitious than Barbarian, and it feels more personal in the abstract. It more closely resembles a collage of nightmares than the expertly calibrated rollercoaster ride of Cregger’s previous film. But there’s something elusive about Weapons, too, meaning that — to stick with Fincher comparisons — the movie lands somewhere between Seven’s blunt-force didacticism and Zodiac’s sophisticated ghostliness. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriAug 8, 2025
Is Weapons scary? It certainly has its moments, and the oblique structure enhances the gathering dread. But more than anything, it’s a twisty-turny hoot. Read full review
80
ColliderRoss BonaimeAug 7, 2025
Cregger shows with Weapons how perfectly he can balance horror and comedy in equal measure, always walking the line between these two in a film that is both unsettling and deeply funny. Because of this, Cregger has made what might end up becoming the best horror film of 2025. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyAug 7, 2025
Zach Cregger’s follow-up 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 headf**k we’ve been told it is. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyAug 7, 2025
Weapons manages to keep its powder dry – a feat of crafty editing by Joe Murphy – for a knockout finale that’s twisted, hilarious and savage, all at once. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearAug 6, 2025
This is a tale that’s carefully crafted as much as told, with hints hiding in plain sight and surreal touches that add more to the vibe than the momentum. But you never feel like you’re in the hands of someone who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeAug 6, 2025
When the macabre does fully show itself, no concessions are made to taste or restraint. Though Weapons is lavishly shot and expensively acted – Amy Madigan is deliciously gamey in a role we won’t spoil – it ultimately settles into the rhythms of premium-brand pulp. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeAug 5, 2025
Regardless of how you feel about the ending (and many will happily embrace the movie’s darkly comic finale), Cregger has achieved something remarkable here, crafting a cruel and twisted bedtime story of the sort the Brothers Grimm might have spun. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 8, 2025
Cregger, like Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers, knows that smart horror is the best horror. And that any horror movie that starts arguments and conversations the moment the credits roll is a winner. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsAug 7, 2025
Some of Cregger’s swings between straight-up horror, missing children mystery and deliriously gory comedy may lead to mass audience whiplash. But it’s pretty gripping, fiercely well-acted and — paradoxically, given its devotion to pitch-black cold creeps — one of the bright lights of a generally disappointing movie summer. Read full review
74
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzAug 7, 2025
Quickly and efficiently, Cregger sets up his world and its impossibly high stakes with style to burn. Finally, we have a horror movie director who knows how to properly light a nighttime scene. But once Cregger’s narrative threads are laid out, the writer-director has a helluva time stitching them together. Read full review
70
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 7, 2025
Weapons may not be about anything much other than Cregger’s talent, but the guy knows how to slither under your skin — and stay there. Read full review
70
Screen RantZachary MoserAug 5, 2025
There's a madcap, kinetic energy to Weapons that is wonderfully displayed in the preponderance of chase scenes in Weapons. We go under table legs and through shared bathrooms. It's like we're kids playing tag, and you don't want to be "it". Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyAug 5, 2025
In many ways, this is an expertly crafted chiller. . . A strong cast and an intriguing chapter structure also work in its favor. But ultimately, it’s not really about anything much. Read full review
67
The Film StageAlistair RyderAug 5, 2025
It’s an entertaining film, but not a particularly resonant one considering the charged subject matter; it’s structured like a parlor trick, keeping one at a deliberate remove until working out how its constituent pieces fit together rather than caring about the people within them. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineTaylor WilliamsAug 5, 2025
For every moment of electrifying horror, Whitest Kids U’ Know alum Zach Cregger cleanses the palette with equivalent comic relief. Read full review
63
The Associated PressMark KennedyAug 5, 2025
If “Barbarian” came out of left field three years ago and heralded an exciting new voice in filmmaking, “Weapons” doesn’t disappoint but it doesn’t have the advantage of surprise. It will, at the very least, make you feel a little dread when the clock hits 2:17 a.m. Read full review
60
The New YorkerRichard BrodyAug 8, 2025
Weapons is essentially a mystery, and a good one, if conventional...yet Cregger’s storytelling is slick and textureless, featuring characters whose personalities are reduced to their plot functions and a town that has no characteristics beyond its response to calamity. Read full review
60
Little White LiesHannah StrongAug 8, 2025
It’s a shame that the film falls back on old ideas, because Weapons’ first half is genuinely intriguing and some of the film’s scares are effective in both shock value and bewilderment. It’s clear that Cregger has a cinematic spark, and his sick sense of humour is most welcome in these trying times, but two films in, it’s time to find a new boogeyman. Read full review
60
The GuardianBenjamin LeeAug 6, 2025
Cregger might be expanding and improving his arsenal, using his skills more effectively than he did in Barbarian, but there’s still something crucial missing. Something sharper. Read full review
55
TheWrapWilliam BibbianiAug 6, 2025
What [Cregger]'s getting at seems a lot less frightening, and a lot more contrived, than it would have had he not invited us to ponder more powerful possibilities for over an hour before tipping his hand. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesAug 7, 2025
Once Mr. Cregger starts to let loose his revelations, though, disappointment creeps in, and the scale and soul of the film shrink before our eyes. It’s impossible to say how without getting into spoilers. But the movie’s potential richness, kept in play by its ever-circling narrative style, is finally brought crashing to the ground by its denouement. Read full review
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