Warning: This post contains spoilers for Weapons.
When all but one of 18 children from the same elementary school class inexplicably get out of bed, leave their homes, and vanish into the dark at exactly 2:17 a.m. one night, the small town of Maybrook is plunged into a swirling vortex of chaos, grief, paranoia, and anger.
This premise is what drives the dread-inducing action of writer-director Zach Cregger’s buzzy new horror Weapons, the follow-up to his breakout 2022 solo screenwriting and directorial debut Barbarian. Told from the perspectives of six different Maybrook residents—including struggling teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), tormented father Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), and troubled beat cop Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich)—Weapons slowly pieces together the horrifying events surrounding the kids’ disappearance before boiling over into an unrelenting third act that provides some disturbing answers to the mystery plaguing the community.
Boasting a near-perfect approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Weapons, now in theaters, is projected to open to upwards of $25 million—and potentially claim the top spot at the weekend box office. But the anticipation for Cregger’s sophomore feature was building long before the week leading up to its release. Back in early 2023, it was reported that horror maestro Jordan Peele and his production company Monkeypaw had lost a bid to produce Weapons when New Line Cinema purchased the rights to the film for $38 million, a sum that was around $7 million higher than the offer put forward by Monkeypaw production partner Universal Pictures. Around the same time, Peele parted ways with his longtime management team, leading to speculation that the split had been caused by fallout from the Weapons auction.
Although there has been no confirmation the two events were correlated, that narrative (combined with the movie’s hefty price tag) generated significant buzz among horror fans. “You know this film is going to be something real special if the auction for its screenplay was THIS serious,” read one viral tweet.
Now, viewers can finally decide for themselves whether Weapons and its wild ending are worth the hype.
What happened to the missing children?
We know midway through Justine’s POV (the first one we see) that something strange is going on at the home of the only kid from her class who didn’t disappear, Alex (Cary Christopher). But it’s not until we get the perspectives of school principal Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong) and, ultimately, Alex himself, that we find out who is behind the sinister happenings in Maybrook.
After Justine reports what she saw through the window at Alex’s house—i.e. his mom and dad frozen on the couch in a catatonic state—Marcus agrees to call the parents in for a wellness check. But the person who arrives at his office is instead a woman who claims to be Alex’s Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) and just so happens to appear to be the same creepy and clownishly made-up old lady that several of the characters have been catching sight of in haunting flashes.
Marcus insists that he needs to speak to one of Alex’s legal guardians the following Monday, a declaration that prompts Gladys to turn up at his home that weekend and show him and his husband Terry (Clayton Farris) what she’s really all about. After asking for a bowl, not glass, of water, Gladys proceeds to pull out a strange thorny twig that she has wrapped Marcus’ school ribbons around and brutally slice open her hand with it until her blood drips into the bowl. When Terry tries to help her, she snips off a piece of his hair with a hidden pair of scissors and also wraps it around the twig before snapping it in half. It’s then that the horror really gets going, as Marcus falls completely under her control and begins brutally attacking Terry. After Marcus smashes Terry’s head in with his own, Gladys drops the twig in the bowl of water to put an end to his violent frenzy. She then repeats the process with a strand of Justine’s hair that she had Alex’s mom collect earlier in the movie and sics Marcus on Justine, leading to the gas station attack we saw from Archer’s POV earlier in the movie.
After a seemingly unstoppable Marcus is hit by a car and splattered onto the road while chasing Justine, Archer realizes that Justine isn’t the villain he thought she was and the two band together to try to figure out what’s really going on. Cut to Alex’s POV and we learn that a terminally ill Gladys arrived at Alex’s home several weeks earlier with a potted tree growing the aforementioned magical twigs. She then used her little ritual to put Alex’s parents into their catatonic state and threatened Alex into collecting the name cards of every child in his class so she could summon them to Alex’s home and keep them in the basement. We don’t get a ton of explanation about her motives but it’s suggested that she’s some sort of witch who is able to keep herself alive by slowly feeding off the life-force of those under the control of her curse.
Knowing that the walls are closing in on her, Gladys prepares for Archer and Justine’s arrival by putting all the adults she has taken as mindless prisoners—Alex’s parents, Paul, and drug addict James (Austin Abrams)—in place to act as her attack dogs when Archer and Justine enter Alex’s home. A gruesome showdown ensues but Alex ultimately saves the day by using Gladys’ own magic against her to sic all of his classmates on her. The kids proceed to chase her through town before mercilessly tearing her apart. A closing voiceover then reveals that all of the children were finally returned to their homes and, in the two years since the incident, some have even begun to speak again. However, Alex’s parents never recovered and he was sent to live with a different, and much nicer, aunt.
Is there a message behind Weapons?
Weapons, like any film, is up to the interpretation of those consuming it. But if you’re interested in what Cregger intended to convey with the film, the writer-director has said it wasn’t his goal to explore the “core of communal trauma” or “[mock] suburban life” or create a “school shooting allegory,” as some have suggested.
“I wasn’t trying to comment on or even tap into collective societal tragedies,” Cregger told the Playlist. “I was purely writing from a personal place. However, with art and especially storytelling, the individual is universal. So I’m more than happy if anybody relates to what I went through and what this movie is examining, but I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, America,’ at all. I was thinking, ‘Oh, Zach.'”
Instead, he has said Weapons was his attempt at processing the death of a close friend. “I had a tragedy in my life that was really, really tough,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “Someone very, very, very close to me died suddenly and, honestly, I was so grief-stricken that I just started writing Weapons, not out of any ambition, but just as a way to reckon with my own emotions.”
Even the movie title itself, which seems to be reference to all the ways we, as humans, can be weaponized against each other, was apparently meant to be ambiguous. “I’ve heard a couple of people articulate why [it’s called that], and I think they’re all right,” Cregger told Vanity Fair. “I think it’s all legal.”
