When to take a bathroom break during Weapons

Weapons is an acclaimed new horror movie that also happens to be particularly long for the genre, so just in case you need to go pee during the film, we’ve figured out the best time to hit the rest room.

Writer-director Zach Cregger’s first movie Barbarian was a critical and commercial success, and his follow-up Weapons is already the former, thanks to a Rotten Tomatoes score of 95% (at time of writing).

We concur with that number, awarding the horror movie five stars, and writing in our Weapons review that the film “does everything a good horror movie should, delivering chills and scares via a story that gets under your skin, before concluding two hours of tense set-up with a truly wild pay-off.”

That story concerns a group of kids disappearing at the same time on the same night, and lasts for 2 hours and 8 minutes, so if you need the loo during the investigation that follows, here’s when’s best to go. Meaning mild SPOILERS ahead…

Head out when the ‘James’ story begins in Weapons

Ideally you’ll sit through the entirety of Weapons, as it’s the kind of movie where you don’t want to miss a minute. But if nature is calling and won’t shut up, we recommend going when the ‘James’ portion of the story begins, which is about 1 hour and 29 minutes into the action.

That’s because the scenes that follow feature information we already know or should have figured out. It starts with him living in his tent in the woods and trying to cook up, breaking into a car, failing to get money over the phone, and trying to sell the stuff he found in said car.

None of this is surprise thanks to meeting the character – who is played in scene-stealing fashion by Austin Abrams – earlier in the movie during an altercation with Alden Ehrenreich’s policeman Paul.

We see Paul chase James from the latter’s point-of-view this time around, followed by him trying to break into a house that appears to be abandoned. But which we know to be where Alex Lilly is living – the one boy who didn’t disappear from his class.

This all takes about five minutes, by which time you should return, in time for James finding Alex’s parents in the trance we’re already aware of, then endeavoring to steal their stuff. At which point the movie kicks back into high gear, meaning you need to be back in your seat.