Tags: blog, film, horror, 2025

Date: Saturday September 13th, 2025

Well Weapon

A dark and overcast night scene, with small children running down a street, away from the camera, with their arms rigid and out to their sides.

Sometimes I think I just have to accept a film isn't made for me. The premise of Weapons, revealed in the trailer and, admirably, laid out within the first few minutes of the film, is that one night, at the exact same time, seventeen children from the same class at school get out of their beds and run away, never to be seen again. Only one boy from the class is left.

The implications are obvious: as inconceivable as those events are, it's equally inconceivable that the classes teacher, Justine, doesn't know something about it. Her class is the only thing connecting all those kids.

And so, in the absence of literally anything in the way of explanation or closure, the parents start to lash out, at the school and at Justine. It's an excellent premise: what happens to a town when an inexplicable tragedy occurs? How do they cope with that? It's a perfect theme for horror stories to explore.

Sadly for me, the film isn't interested in exploring those ramifications at all. It does just enough to make a juicy set up, full of tension, and then instead starts to focus on what actually happened that night.

It does a pretty good job of that. It utilises a structure that keeps switching the character that we're following. Building tension to breaking point with one character before switching to another. Releasing the tension a little before building it right back up again and repeating the process.

The sense of dread is palpable, the jump scares are well done and used sparingly, the violence is shocking and gruesome. Everything works really well...until it doesn't.

After a few time-line switches, we start to receive diminishing returns. As the characters get more and more peripheral, it starts to get frustrating. Instead of advancing the plot we're now following characters who matter less and less to the story. One character could be cut completely and it wouldn't make any difference.

When we eventually do snap back to the core characters it's run out of steam and worse, stops making sense. It turns out that what happened that night isn't all that interesting.

Or at least to me. See, I wanted to watch the film that the opening implied we were going to get. I wanted to watch a film about a small town tearing itself apart with grief and suspicion. I wanted to watch a horror with subtext, that gets under your skin and questions your relationships with your community.

What I actually watched was a reasonably well done, gruesome horror story about magic and scary kids¹. It wasn't for me.

A woman with short, curly blonde hair, wearing a jumper with a heart on it, sitting in a primary school class room.

Poster Credit Where to Watch

1. VERY MINOR SPOILER: If you find kids scary that is. I, for the record, do not. Which meant that the ending was howlingly funny. My wife and I disagreed with the intentionality of this. She thought it was supposed to be funny, I thought it was inadvertent. It's certainly memorable, I'll give it that.
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