Warning: This post contains spoilers for Weapons.
It’s 2:17 a.m. in Maybrook, Penn., and the parents of Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) first grade class do not know where their children are. Neither do the police, nor the Ring cameras affixed to the facades on several neighborhood homes, though at least the latter capture footage of kids bounding through their front doors, arms splayed like wings, into early morning’s opaque embrace. No other evidence, nary a clue or a hint, of the little ones’ whereabouts or motives is left in their wake. One moment, they’re sound asleep in their beds; the next, gone without a trace or a reason.
Weapons, the sophomore film from Barbarian director Zach Cregger, opens amid the fallout of this awful mass disappearance. The community’s response is intense: panicked and bereaved mothers and fathers turn on Justine, indirectly a victim herself; misguided outrage blinds them to the real menace operating unimpeded in their midst. Cregger deliberately opens his audience’s eyes over the movie’s two hours, allowing them an omniscient view of events unfolding as individual characters experience the plot like gameshow contestants sticking their hands into the same mystery box: it’s a mouse; no, it’s a chinchilla; no, it’s a tarantula.
It’s actually not at all what we come to expect. Cregger constructs a monster that shares DNA (and a fashion sense) with Pennywise the Dancing Clown from Andy Muschietti’s two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s It, but a very different modus operandi; around that monster, he spins a tale that fits right into horror cinema’s broader child-centered niche, where kids punish their parents and subsidiary grownups, or are used to punish them, or are otherwise prey for an eldritch predator the adults are nigh helpless to stop.
What compels movies like these varies, but typically is rooted in children’s vulnerability or their parents’ protectionary shortcomings. The world is a dangerous place. Parents are supposed to shield our young from those dangers. A quick glance at what the world looks like today suggests that we’ve dropped the ball, and horror films like It, as well as its contemporary peers, prod at that particular nerve ending: Jason Eisener’s Kids vs. Aliens (2022), Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents (2021), Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink (2022), Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022) and James Watkins’ 2024 remake, Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb (2023), Roxanne Benjamin’s There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023), David Hebrero’s Everyone Will Burn (2022), and Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks (2023).
Of these, few end on what one might construe as upbeat notes; instances of young’uns overcoming their tormentors come with caveats. Weapons plays along the same lines in this sub-genre’s sandbox, too, denying easy catharsis after wracking viewers’ nerves with its combination of pitch-black humor, abject grief, and superbly conducted jump scares.
Two films into his solo directing career, Cregger has established himself as an artist who uses convention as a whoopee cushion. (Technically, his first directing gig was the dramatically tonally distinct sex comedy Miss March, a joint effort between him and the late Trevor Moore, both of them members of the New York City comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’Know.) Weapons is his version of both/and reasoning: it is bleak, nihilistic, confounding, and deeply frightening, as well as hilarious, empathetic, and, by the end, optimistic, though optimism in horror usually amounts to table scraps. We take what we can get. Compared to Skinamarink, and most of all When Evil Lurks, the decade’s best example of the “kids punish parents” category, Weapons is a feast; there’s light to dispel darkness in the climax, though Cregger adjusts the dimmer slightly to avoid illuminating the whole picture.
Even once the movie’s over, we still don’t understand Gladys (Amy Madigan, terrifying in her cloying sweetness), the fiend responsible for the children’s disappearance and all ensuant bloodshed. We don’t know for sure what will become of them once they’re freed from her thrall, despite the helpful voiceover from Cregger’s anonymous narrator (Scarlett Sher) assuring us that some of the kids recover from the catatonia Gladys inflicted on them. We don’t know where Gladys learned her witchcraft, or why, or from whom, or whether they might go looking for her. All of this is to say that we only have scant confidence that the kids will, in fact, be all right, though grant that Weapons makes no gestures toward potential “what ifs” by the time the credits roll. Cregger maintains the film’s self-containment. There will be no Weapons 2. (Hopefully. If there is: It will be titled Weapon$.)
This is a hard tack away from the type of resolutions seen in movies like When Evil Lurks, which Rugna could just as easily have called When Evil Prevails: as that film draws to a close, brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimi (Demián Salomon) are left alive by the entity they spend the movie hunting, to serve as witnesses to the entity’s birth as well as their own colossal screw-ups—their failure to act quickly enough, to heed common sense, and to listen to experts chief among them. Everyone who dies in the film—and everyone does die, including Santino (Marcelo Michinaux), Pedro’s young son—does so because Pedro and Jimi act without thought given to consequences, much less to rationality. They know, in Rugna’s fictionalized world where demons are real and possession is treated as a public safety issue in the same vein as house fires or robberies, that killing a person who is host to an evil spirit means spreading that spirit’s influence like a virus; but they behave as if ignorant of this common knowledge.
What vile carnage they provoke through their stupidity coheres into a metaphor for the incoming generation’s judgment of the presiding one: When Evil Lurks is about the profound dereliction of duty by society’s adults to properly safeguard the world, and them, from harm. In real-life terms, “harm” could be climate change, gun violence, food insecurity, infectious disease, and trafficking, and Cregger uses Weapons to tap into the same anxieties we feel as parents every single day, because to be a parent is to live with fear.
Mercifully—because that sounds like an awful way to wake up and go to bed every single day—fear is the beam on an emotional sliding scale. What we fear, and how much, and when, ebbs and flows depending on the day, the time, the last soul-corroding headline we read between brushing our teeth and taking our littles to summer camp. Sometimes, fear is just a sudden rush of recollection that you forgot the swim goggles while prepping your child’s backpack—a venial sin rather than a mortal one. Other times, though, it’s an electric arc that spurs our catastrophization: what if the bus flips over on the way to camp? What if he develops heat stroke? What if she slips beneath the lake surface and her counselors don’t notice? What if a lunatic strolls up to the daycare and indiscriminately opens fire with the rifle he bought at Walmart? What if?
The not-knowing that’s intrinsic to parenthood is inverted in Weapons: something has happened to Maybrook’s kids, but there’s no “if,” just “what.” Archer Graf (Josh Brolin) knows that his boy ran away from home, along with his classmates, seen in the film’s opening sequence, a pre-dawn frolic that, deprived of context, reads as liberating, and practically joyful. The film, of course, is no such thing, though we do return to a version of that sensation of freedom in the climax, when Gladys’ spell is broken and Justine’s class chases her down, feral and screaming, an outraged pack of hyenas pulverizing lawns, barreling through window walls, and tearing down fences in their pursuit.
Well before these kids fall upon Gladys, Cregger makes it clear that she has used black magic for the sake of extending her life. She’s terminally ill. Abducting the children abates her illness. (The mechanics of “how” go unexplained, and that’s for the better. It’s magic. Enough said.) But where another movie, like When Evil Lurks, puts the burden of solving the problem on adults, who dramatically screw things up, Weapons gives that task to the youth, or one youth: Alex (Cary Christopher), Gladys’ nephew, the only child in Justine’s class who didn’t vanish. He’s been reluctantly serving Gladys, who holds his parents (Whitmer Thomas, Callie Schuttera) hostage with magic, threatening their lives if he disobeys. In Weapons’ frantic climax, Alex uses her magic against her, reclaiming what she’s taken from him—his mother, his father, his friends—in a moment of righteous comeuppance.
Catharsis is watching as a decrepit fiend is literally ripped to pieces by the same people they’ve subjugated and stolen from. In reality, the majority of us would settle for seeing the billionaires and corrupt elected officials currently driving the worst perils facing us, and our children, locked up and sent to prison; a collective sigh of satisfied relief was heard around the globe the day Harvey Weinstein received his life sentence. Weapons, being a horror film, comes with a few catches at the end, but that alone differentiates it from movies like When Evil Lurks and Skinamarink, where no catch is needed because the monster wins. Calling Weapons’ ending a victory is perhaps somewhat generous, what with the matter of all the dead people left to account for, even Gladys. But the small victory that Cregger’s characters eke out here sets his film apart from its peers in wicked style.
