Zach Cregger’s Weapons, like his previous subterranean nightmare Barbarian, examines the suburban rot quietly eating away at America from within. While the film isn’t exactly shy about its horrific premise1, the way it all plays out offers some fascinating avenues for discussion. What’s really going on in Weapons? Why is it even called Weapons? Do I have even a snowball’s chance in hell at answering either of these questions? Who knows? Let’s find out!
As the film opens we’re told that at 2:17 AM seventeen children, all from the same elementary school class, got up out of bed and ran out the front door of their homes never to be seen again. The following day, the police bring two people in for questioning: their teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), and Alex (Cary Christopher), the only kid in the class who didn’t go missing. While concerned parent Archer (Josh Brolin) conducts his own investigation, assuming Justine knows more than she’s letting on—not to mention full-on branding her a witch—Justine seeks solace in police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), who winds up stumbling upon the truth, along with the town junkie, James (Austin Abrams), whose only real crime was breaking into the wrong house.
This, of course, is the vaguest of plot descriptions without jumping headlong into spoiler territory.
[SO HOW ABOUT WE JUMP HEADLONG INTO SPOILER TERRITORY?]
Okay, so right up front Weapons kinda seems like it’s going to be about the communal trauma and tragedy surrounding violence in schools. Early on, the parents of all the missing kids assemble at the school, where Justine is forced to speak, and right away everyone assumes she’s responsible. Obviously she must have done something or said something to brainwash seventeen children, right? If Occam’s Razor holds true, then the simplest explanation is that the only survivor must have something to do with it, right?
Well… yes and no. The film is broken up into distinct chapters where we follow a different character’s perspective through the same couple of days. Justine is our first focal character, and we see enough of her dealing with this traumatic event that she can’t possibly have been the culprit. With no class to teach, Justine is dismissed from school, ordered by her principal (Benedict Wong) to stick close to home. Her only recourse is to stock up on vodka, close the blinds and get completely hammered, I assume to keep her from making any more stupid decisions.
We then see the same circumstances through Archer’s point of view. Here’s a dad whose child’s disappearance has so destroyed his mental state that he’s given up on his actual job to follow a crackpot theory about retracing the kids’ trajectory through home security footage. Archer definitely seems like the kind of adult who ‘does his own research’ and assumes he knows better than the professionals. (The professional, in this case, is legendary character actor Toby Huss, whose chief of police asks Archer point blank what more he thinks they could or should be doing.)
I can’t shake the feeling that Weapons is partially about the collective insanity that COVID lockdowns spread upon America. For one whole year, our communal spaces just vanished. Families were asked to shelter in place; kids were forced to login to school through Zoom and Teams from the safety of their own homes. And a whooole bunch of other folks lost their minds trying to figure out how to fill their days. Personally, I was sent home from work for six months, forced to spend the summer of 2020 learning to bake bread, refinishing furniture, and binge-watching more seasons of Survivor than I’m frankly comfortable admitting.
And that’s just the dumb shit that went on at home. Oh, sure, you could get in your car and go somewhere, but nowhere was open to the public. And the sorts of places that were open to the public were almost certainly filled with the types of people who thought the whole pandemic was a conspiracy, and that ‘germ theory is still just a theory, ya know’. It’s almost like the virus actively made people dumber, made people hallucinate nonsense in the middle of the daytime. I can’t tell you how many videos I saw of people throwing screaming tantrums at doctors and restaurant workers alike for the crime of being asked to put on a thin paper mask. But I digress. I spent most of that summer livetweeting every Steven Spielberg movie (I only made it up to Hook). Ya gotta have priorities.
All I’m really saying here is that I see where Archer’s coming from. With his normal routine and family life ripped away, his grief and panic over the loss of his son drives him so crazy that at one point, he dreams a vision of a giant assault rifle floating above his house. What’s that supposed to signify? That Archer can’t help but assume the worst? That he’s giving himself the okey-doke to grab a gun and go on a rampage? The sad reality is that either of these seems likely. The film is titled Weapons, after all.
The title snaps into focus a little better once we begin to follow young Alex home from school. We learn that Alex’s aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) is staying with him and his parents. Aunt Gladys is… funky looking. Caked in pale white makeup, lipstick smeared across her face and sporting a comically bright tracksuits and dresses, the moment she enters the film it’s like a bright neon alarm starts flashing and ringing in your face. WHATEVER’S GOING ON HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH HER! And then the movie shifts gears, delaying that gratification as it shows us the story from a different angle that all but confirms Gladys ain’t to be trusted. I mean, just fuckin’ look at her. In any conventional reality, it would be unfair to suspect someone of foul play just from their looks. But we know what kind of movie we’re in here, you don’t show up looking like the Joker’s grandma unless there’s a good goddamn reason.
So yeah, let’s just rip the band-aid off now: Gladys is the witch. When Gladys shows Alex how her spell works, the movie wants you to think Alex is the culprit and that he’s doing it to get back at his bullies at school. I was all ready for Weapons to suddenly become a treatise on violence in schools, and how ‘hurt people hurt people’, but the movie skirts that line and then dips right back into The Evil Witch’s Evil Witch Shenanigans. So now we’re in some kind of gonzo A24 version of Rumpelstiltskin where instead of spinning straw into gold, she turns human bodies into running, zombie projectiles. (OH SHIT LIKE WEAPONS I GET IT NOW)
And once we get to that point, the movie has completely played its hand, leaving us nothing left but to watch the insanity play out from there. All our focal point characters finally meet up at Alex’s house for the final showdown and shit gets very silly, very fast. But not necessarily in a bad way, as the battle between our main characters and all the weaponized victims is equal parts comic and disturbing.
It’s a great looking movie, often playing out in long tracking shots and steady, deliberate motions. The way Cregger builds this community feels tangible and real. One film I can’t help but compare this to: Last year’s Longlegs, especially given the look and feel of its antagonist. And, ya know what? I’ll go ahead and say it: Amy Madigan plays that type of character with so much more gravitas and candor than Nicolas Cage could. In Longlegs, it was little more than stunt-casting. In Weapons, it feels like a natural choice; this witch with decrepit skin, desperately trying to mask her unnaturally deteriorating body. And Amy Madigan plays Gladys with such a warped sense of glee. She’s fantastic in this film. She’s the reason to see the movie, for sure.
If I have any true complaint with this film, it’s that the ending is such a wacko release of tension that I’m not entirely sure what the film’s trying to say with any of it. Weapons is one of those horror films where you can ascribe whatever meaning you want onto it and you’ll probably be right. Violence in schools, anti-bullying, COVID hysteria, suburban rot… I threw a handful of themes at you just now, and I’m sure you could watch this movie and come away with a few of your own. Not saying its intentional vagueness makes Weapons bad, exactly, but I’d have liked maybe one more good nudge in any direction. Something to bring it home, ya know?
FINAL RATING
4 stars (out of 5) S’good.
- Posting this down here in the footnotes, beneath the spoiler alert: A witch did it. ↩︎
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