Weapons is Zach Cregger’s much-anticipated follow-up to his 2022 hit, Barbarian. Preceded by a series of brilliant and enigmatic teasers and trailers, it tells the story of the strange disappearance of seventeen children from the small town of Mayfield, Pennsylvania: at exactly 2:17, they all simply run out of their front doors. All of the children are in the third-grade class of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) – and she walks into her classroom the morning after to find only one student at his desk, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). Needless to say, Mayfield erupts in grief, anger, and suspicion, much of it directed at the only person left whom it seems possible to blame – the teacher who taught all of the missing students. Unable to go out without being accosted, and driving around in her car on which a furious father has spray-painted ‘Witch’, Justine decides she has to try to get answers herself as the police are getting nowhere. Justine’s search serves as a through-line for the film.
One of Weapons‘ enigmatic teasers:
One of the interesting decisions Cregger makes in this film is to tell his story through the overlapping points of view of several inter-related characters: Justine; Archer (Josh Brolin) – the father of one of the missing children; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) – a police officer and former boyfriend of Justine; James (Austin Abrams) – a local drug addict who has an unfortunate and fateful run-in with Paul; Andrew Marcus (Benedict Wong) – the principal at the children’s elementary school; and, finally, Alex, the lone remaining third-grader. The point of view shifts occur at moments of overlap, moments when two characters’ stories intersect – and, while different sections of the film sometimes repeat an event from a different point of view, each point of view takes us closer to the central mystery of the film: why did the children run away and where are they now? As the film goes along, we start to learn that the answer to that question lies in a house, a house on which all of the stories converge – Alex Lilly’s house, the house of the one child who did not run out of his front door that fateful night.
Weapons has some similarities to Barbarian – and reveals some preoccupations of Cregger’s filmmaking. Both films shape a horror that is predominantly realistic – that stays in our familiar world with only the occasional cracks revealing sudden and shocking disruptions. Both are narratives composed of different characters’ fragmented stories, with intercut transition points when the narrative changes course, goes in a different direction, becomes something else. Both films center on houses – houses that look ‘normal’ but turn out to contain layers of strangeness and outright horror. Both films (spoiler alert here) lead back to a monstrous old woman – ‘Mother’ in Barbarian and ‘Aunt Gladys’ in Weapons.
It’s certainly possible to raise some objections with Cregger’s centering of both horror films on abject old women: in both films, the camera lingers on grotesque bodies that are in part grotesque simply because they are old and female. Weapons, though, significantly advances the power given to its central horrifying woman. Barbarian’s layered narrative gave us the backstory of Mother – how she was the product of incest due to a man’s paranoid retreat (literally underground) from a changing Detroit suburb. The central ‘monster’ of Weapons is much more interesting. We know literally nothing about her origins: she just appears and begins exerting her power. Moreover, she’s by no means a victim (as Mother was) but a witch who practices ritual magic to get what she wants. Adding to the exponentially more interesting plot of Weapons, it’s actually unclear what Gladys wants: she tells Alex that she’s trying to cure her illness, but it’s hard to believe anything she says. And the title – and how she uses the victims of her magic – suggests she has a more aggressive goal in mind. Gladys in short, is an enigmatic and unexplained source of darkness at the heart of Weapons – a much more effective antagonist in every way, in my view, than Barbarian’s Mother.
Indeed, Weapons is in pretty much every way a more suggestive – and thus eminently better – film than Barbarian (which, in the end, explained everything). Again, this suggestiveness could be seen as a flaw: why is so much left unexplained? It’s unclear to me exactly what the title means, for instance. Certainly, Gladys’s victims are ‘weaponized’ – but to what end? ‘Weapons’ implies purpose. Why is Weapons the title at all, as it doesn’t seem to be the most important thing about the narrative? What is the significance (if any) of 2:17? Who is the unidentified child whose voiceover begins and ends the film? Where did Gladys from and why is she in Maybrook? That she is a witch suggests a larger cult or coven – but we don’t see it. Will we? Weapons definitely evokes Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Jordan Peele’s Get Out, with its sinister character exerting a malign influence on the world built by the film – an influence only slowly revealed as the narrative unfolds. Weapons begins and end and with Gladys, but there are hints that there’s more to come, that Weapons is building a world that Cregger intends to develop.
I heard rumors before seeing the film that Weapons intersected with the world of Barbarian. Indeed, in the viral website, created for Weapons’ marketing campaign, there’s a link to a story about the events in Detroit – leading with an image of Tess (Georgina Campbell) at the top of the basement stairs. This shot is directly echoed in Weapons, as another character stands, backlit, at the top of a different set of basement steps. And a character in Weapons measures and maps in the way that AJ (Justin Long) was measuring the basement in Barbarian. (Plus, Justin Long makes an appearance in both.) But intersecting worlds? I didn’t see it. Weapons does, though, seem to be a more open narrative than Barbarian – and there feels like there’s ample room to expand the story, which I, for one, certainly hope Cregger does.
So, yes, Weapons pretty much lives up to (some of) the hype, in my view. No, it’s not one of the best horror films ever made – as some have claimed. Time will tell where it lands in that particular canon. But it’s a slow-building, dread-inducing and eerie narrative that frames its characters and story with care and complexity.
