SPOILERS: WEAPONS (2025)

Let me confess: the final showdown in Weapons made me burst out laughing. But here’s the problem. Until then, the film did a decent job of pulling me in as at least a somewhat serious horror version of a “who (or what) done it,” built around one of storytelling’s oldest themes: a group of innocent children disappearing.

Pivoting from creeping tension and genuinely dark elements into sheer absurdity as the punchline was certainly surprising — like watching a typical Hallmark romance abruptly veer into a deadly round of bumper cars. Except that the Hallmark version, with its endless stream of maudlin clichés, might actually be improved by such an ending. Perhaps that’s what Weapons was aiming for: “You worried about these missing children for over an hour, but — haha — it was all just a crazy joke! Enjoy!"

And, certainly, quite a few people seem to have enjoyed it. And therefore maybe the problem is mine. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to take a story about missing children, witchcraft, and violent turns quite so seriously. Maybe the scene where mind-controlled parents stab themselves in the face with forks until their child obeys a creepy old crone was so over the top as to be funny. I should have lightened up! Maybe an entire class of zombie-fied children in a darkened basement, waiting to rejuvenate a wrinkled witch by means sinister and unknown, was intended as camp rather than horror.

It could be a generational thing. I wanted an original ending, but not one so original it felt ridiculous and, ultimately, unsatisfying. Yes, there was a moment of retribution when the Machiavellian crone was chased down and torn apart by a mob of eight-year-olds — though learning that the children were left unable to speak or function normally afterwards was a grotesque punctuation mark. The whole thing landed as nihilistic, juvenile, and unserious. And if that’s the point — if the world is just one big violent joke — then fine. But to me, Weapons squandered the tension it had built and revealed itself as a monumental farce. Like a love story that ends with chest-bursting aliens.