[Relax. Ye shall find no major spoilers here.]

H

ype. What a devil it can be. As a moviegoer, few experiences sting like exiting a screening room afflicted with the burn of disappointment, your media-moulded anticipation marooned amongst a carpeted tide of spilled popcorn and stale 7UP. As a critic, that visceral aversion can mutate into something quite hideous, your artistic integrity besieged by self-distrust and the smog of alienation. What did my peers see that I didn’t? Are they smarter than me? Am I just a killjoy? Then: Should I sit with this a while, let it sink in? Maybe I’ll feel differently in a day or two. “Critic?” Ha! You’re a fucking fraud, mate.

If I didn’t know any better, I would say that films like Weapons—the horror sweetheart of summer 2025; presently sitting at a behemoth 94% on Rotten Tomatoes—were specifically built to give writers like me a hard time, to call into question our capacity for distinguishing the decent from the dire. To pressure us to bestow plaudits, not poison; turning dissidents into disciples. How much easier—and, I would imagine, considerably more self-serving—it’d be to partake in the enthusiasm; to throw up our arms, shout “me too!”, and bask in the warm, unifying embrace of our associates. “We get it, don’t we? We just get it!”

In most areas of life, I have always considered myself to be a bit of a rebel, so it stands to reason that my taste in movies—and indeed my critical analysis of them—should mirror that. I’m not contentious just for the sake of it; I can spot good art when I see it, and even if incapable of extracting personal enjoyment from something, I’ll readily attest to the prowess on display. When all is said and done, though, I like what I like . . . and isn’t that what really matters? “I’m not proposing objective truth,” said the late, great dissenter of popular opinion, Roger Ebert, “but subjective reactions; a review should reflect the immediate experience”. There are some who would probably maintain there’s a terrific loneliness in habitually finding oneself on the outskirts of mainstream thought, but not me. Those fringes have always been my refuge.

Mark my words: had Weapons been released a decade or two ago, this sophomore feature from Zach Barbarian Cregger would be brandishing a decidedly lower score on the Tomatometer. I say this not as vilification, but rather a comment on the customs of our time. Tastes have shifted, particularly where genre pictures are concerned: take Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025), the vastly adored sixth instalment of a hitherto quite tepidly received franchise, its 93% RT score boasting a 29% jump from the previous (and only other ‘fresh’ certified) chapter. Rewind ten years and this simply would not have been the case. There are several components to consider here, the burgeoning advent of younger, more eclectic journalistic voices for starters: historically an arena ruled by middle-aged white blokes, it is now an unmitigated melting pot of diversity—and despite what the fathomless virulence of Twitter/X et al. would have you believe, film criticism has never been kinder. It’s a sphere now awash with cheerleaders and back patters, a new generation of journos with a penchant for the ecstatically positive. Of the various enduring ravages left by Covid, this current appetite for optimism—to a self-professed grouch like me, anyway—feels one of the more egregious.

So, what do I have to say about Weapons? And is there much point me adding to the discourse when I’m already so blatantly in the minority? Well, there were parts of it I dug: dexterous camerawork, sound performances, and a score that’s teeming with percussion and perturbation. That setup’s a real humdinger, too: grief and suspicion govern a small Pennsylvanian town when seventeen young classmates simultaneously vanish from their homes at precisely 2:17a.m. “The horror version of Magnolia!” cried the pre-release apostles. I can see where they were coming from: between the vignette-y framework, systematic needle drops, and studying of intertwined souls and childhood trauma, there’s certainly a whiff of the Paul Thomas Anderson about it. But where Magnolia’s mosaic design felt intrinsic to its avant-garde scheme, here its serves no real duty beyond juxtapositional window dressing; and where PTA’s intuitive writing perforated the crust of the human psyche, Cregger draws his subjects with the cursory strokes of an aloof spectator, all the while kissing different identities—paranoid thriller, police procedural, cosmic horror, black comedy—without ever meeting his perfect match.

How I’d have loved it to wallow in Josh Brolin’s despair over his son’s disappearance (outside the margin of one requisite, metaphor-laden dream sequence), or for the past misdemeanours of Julia Garner’s schoolmistress—hinted at but never probed—to have made us seriously challenge her assertion that she had nothing to do with any of it. The way that I longed for it to flesh out the cumulative cynicism of a town bulldozed by tragedy, or for the chalky social critique to embroider the story’s grace notes of class, wealth, and race. Damn, could it not have swapped a few of those diminishingly beefy jump scares for sustained, low-bubbling suspense? Did the nighttime portions—and those fugly gunmetal interiors—have to be so dirtily lit? (To be fair, this could’ve been the fault of the cinema screen I saw it on; I’ve heard the IMAX print is splendid.) If only the first two minutes hadn’t spoon-fed the basics of the plot to us—expositional V.O., check!—before the action had even begun. And even though the bonkers final stretch was rather fun, not least for espousing one of my personal favourite subgenres (I shan’t elaborate), its swan dive into oldfangled nuttiness felt like more of a perfunctory “gotcha!” than a purposeful unravelling of the core puzzle.

Have I sat with Weapons a while, let it sink in? Yes. Were first impressions tempered by a good night’s sleep (or six, to be exact)? ’Fraid not. Will I return to it one day with fresh eyes and an open mind? Hey, stranger things have happened. For now, I’m thrilled that most of you appear to be having a wonderful time with it (long live original, non-IP filmmaking!) . . . and proud to opine that Weapons just wasn’t for me.

Gotta run. There’s an empty playground over there with my name on it.