Weapons

When all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanishes on the same night, and at exactly the same time, a community is left questioning who or what exactly is behind their disappearance.

Writer/Director Zach Cregger’s first movie was Barbarian, which I loved.

Barbarian is a fantastic horror movie that takes a very basic every day kind of moment, adds in an insane decision, and somehow makes it seem plausible. And from there, it continues to ratchet up the craziness, creating a series of unexpected moments—again, all while making some of the terrible decisions seem somewhat plausible, given the context—during which you are constantly shouting at the tv: “What are you doing? Don’t stay there! You are in danger! Do not go down those stairs, you idiot! What are you doing? Leave! Just leave!” And the best part is, the film is clearly aware of the fact that you can see that there’s danger lurking about the whole time, and it uses that knowledge to surprise and mislead you at every turn. It’s really great. I loved it.

Weapons is Cregger’s sophomore effort.

So I was really looking forward to seeing this film, and I was not disappointed. Described as a "horror epic" that features a much more "personal story" by the filmmaker, Weapons was apparently inspired by multiple sources, including the Paul Thomas Anderson film, Magnolia. This sounds crazy, but once you actually watch the film, you can totally see it.

After the success of Barbarian, where the film eventually grossed nearly $50 million at the box office against a $5 million budget, Weapons caused a “blood in the streets” bidding war between several studios. When the dust finally settled, several people at the losing studios and production houses were fired, and Cregger walked away with an $8 million pay day on the front end, and a huge amount of points on the back end. This was definitely a good move on his part, because even though Weapons was delayed by the 2023 Hollywood Strike, which lead to a huge shakeup in the cast, losing Pedro Pascal, Renate Reinsve, and Brian Tyree Henry for Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, and Benedict Wong, amongst others, the film still went on to gross $268 million against it’s $38 million budget. Even Hollywood can’t hide those kind of profits.

I imagine Cregger will have a blank check for his next project, which is good news for us, because when a studio gambles on a mainstream crowd-pleaser type of film, especially one that is about missing children and the all-consuming nature of grief, and then wins on that gamble at the box office? They remember that, and they do what they can to facilitate a filmmaker replicating that success. So, I’m looking forward to whatever that means for Cregger’s next film.

But in the meantime, lucky us… Weapons is just a damn good film.

In the distant third ring suburban town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, things aren’t going so great for Justine Grady.

Y’see, seventeen of the eighteen children in her third grade class all mysteriously got up at 2:17 am on the same night, and then ran off into the dark, Naruto-style, and vanished. It’s been weeks and there hasn’t been a sign of them. Nothing. Now, with no one else to blame, and with no explanation for why this happened, the town is turning on her. What was going on in her classroom?

This is all too much for Justine. She’s worried about Alex, the only boy in her class who didn’t disappear, but when she pushes too hard to connect with the boy, given the current state of public opinion about her, she is suspended, and ordered to just lie low for a while. But someone is following her, and someone painted “witch” on her car. Shunned, alone, and peering fearfully out through her blinds at home, she starts drinking too much again, and ends up sleeping with an ex-boyfriend, police officer Paul Morgan.

With nowhere else to put her stress, Justine follows Alex home one evening. She is shocked to discover that the windows of his house are covered in newspapers, and his parents sit motionless on the couch in the darkness inside. Alarmed, she calls the school principal, Marcus Miller, and demands that he conduct a welfare check. Later, in the middle of the night, after passing out drunk in her car while watching Alex’s house, Alex’s mom totters out from within the house, slips into the back seat of Justine’s car, and cuts off a lock of her hair.

The next day, Justine is confronted at a gas station by Archer Graff, a father of one of the missing children, but they are interrupted when a bloody, deranged-looking Marcus Miller comes Naruto-running right at them, and attacks.

Archer Graff blames Justine for his son Matthew's disappearance.

Convinced that Justine must be involved with the disappearances somehow, he follows her, he watches her. He is also a constant presence at the Police Station, frustrated by their seeming inability to find the children, or even any kind of clue as to where they went. The question as to what exactly happened consumes him. He’s distracted in his life. He’s sleeps fitfully each night in his missing son’s bed. He’s letting his responsibilities as the owner of a construction company slide. He watches and watches the Ring Cam video of his son Naruto-running off into the darkness obsessively.

But then, he notices the way his son runs straight off in one direction. Finding the house of another missing child with a Ring Cam doorbell, he compares the footage, and by tracing a straight line across a map for both kids’ paths, sees that they both converge in a different neighborhood, but before he can go there to investigate, he sees Justine at a gas station.

He confronts her, but then Marcus Miller attacks.

It turns out, police officer Paul Morgan is cheating on his fiancée with Justine.

He was already having a bad day. During patrol, he arrests a homeless addict kid named James for attempted burglary. But while he is searching James, Paul pricks his finger on a syringe in James’ pocket, so he punches James out in anger. When he realizes that the incident was caught on his dashcam, he releases James, but first extracts a promise that the junkie will stay away.

So, despite being sober, and also engaged, when Justine texts him “hey” out of the blue, he meets her at the bar. When he gets home the next morning, after spending the night with Justine, reeking of broken sobriety and strange sex, he finds that his fiancée got home early from her business trip, and now the gig is up.

His engagement having fallen apart, something that is made all the worse by the fact that his boss is also his fiancée’s dad, so this doesn’t bode well for his career either, this means that Paul is now having another bad day. This also means that, as he’s about to start his patrol shift, when he sees that James is walking toward the police station, an obvious violation of their deal from the day before, he loses his shit, and starts chasing James.

James’ day starts out just like any other day.

He spends his time wandering around, casually panhandling, and trying to scam more money out of family members over the phone—all of whom have clearly had enough his shit—all while checking to see if any cars are unlocked. But when his ill-gotten gains garner him nothing from the local pawn shop, he tries to break into the back of a business, only to get caught by police officer Paul Morgan, who then knocks him out when a needle in his pocket stabs the officer.

In the aftermath, beaten and sullen, wet in the rain, he stumbles across Alex’s house. From the overgrown grass and the newspapers in the driveway, he thinks the owners are out of town, so he decides to break in. Inside, James discovers that Alex’s parents are there, but in a weird trance. Even creepier, in the basement are the missing 3rd Graders, all of them standing down there in a similar trance.

James grabs what he can and runs.

But while he’s at the pawn shop, he sees that there’s a $50,ooo reward for any information about the missing children. Hoping to claim the reward, he decides to alert the police, but Paul spots him and gives chase. James flees, but Paul catches him. James then reveals the children’s location. Paul drives to Alex’s home, leaving James handcuffed in the car, and enters the house.

Hours later, Paul returns and drags James inside Alex’s house.

Alex Lilly, meanwhile, is not doing too well.

His Aunt Gladys, though, she is doing great. Gladys is actually Alex’s aging distant second or third aunt of some kind, a previously unknown elderly relative with no support system, and nowhere to go at the end of her life, so she recently moved in with him and his parents, who have agreed to act as her caretakers.

Gladys is a very odd and off-putting old woman, who is dying of an unknown disease, but now she is somehow Alex’s legal guardian, as both of his parents have mysteriously fallen ill. Is Gladys the one who is ultimately behind everything that has been happening lately?

How could she be? She’s nothing but a sweet old lady.

Weapons is a film all about privilege.

It’s about the expectation of polite society that we allow the privileged to impose themselves upon us and our lives without complaint. It’s about the allowances that society expects us to happily give to the old, to the white, to the privileged, and all despite their toxicity, their greed, their adamantly insatiable entitlement, and their obstinate lack of gratitude, or even the barest acknowledgment of the presumption of their imposition. And it’s about how the end result of all of this is always reliably the same… the destruction of society. Or at least, whatever microcosm it is that they’ve invaded.

Weapons is also about how these people will use “politeness” and “civility” as a shield, all so they can take, and wreck, and force the rest of us to make a space for them, regardless of any harm they’re inflicting. It’s about how, when those same people are then given that space, even if it was clearly done so grudgingly, without fail, there's never any kind of attempt on their part to smooth things over. Instead, they immediately squat down in the center of everything and start wrecking shit.

It’s also about how “nice“ people in this “nice“ country allowed a rot to fester within their midst, in their communities, and not only allowed it, but enabled it. Because for them to do anything about that rot would be considered impolite, it would be them “rocking the boat” and that would upset the people responsible for the rot, which then somehow means that the people doing the rocking are the bad guys. And it’s about how those very societal expectations have now destroyed the "nice" people, destroyed their "nice" communities, destroyed this "nice" country. It’s about how, no matter how sorry these people may or may not be about all that, at this point, it‘s too late to fix. It’s all ruined. Everything is wrecked beyond repair, and all we can do now is try to move forward and try to make something new out of the broken pieces.

It’s also about the helplessness of the next generation, faced with the reality that they have been locked out of power by the insatiable greed of the previous one, and as a result, are now unable to determine their own futures. It’s about how the ones who are still clinging to the reins of power, with their liver-spotted talons, are only bringing about the end of the world. And it’s about how they’re doing this solely for their own benefit, without a care, a concern, or a consideration for what that might mean for those who come after them, because the truth is, it ultimately won’t affect them either way, so they don’t care.

But above all else, Weapons is about a simple truth.… The only way to save the future is to run these monsters down, to destroy the gerontocracy, to rip it shreds, to smear it into the dirt, and wipe it out of existence forever.

So, that was all great. I loved that.

I also really liked the way that the film presents its stories in multiple chapters, each one from a different characters’ point of view, and how some of the events in those chapters overlap, allowing us to see them from different angles. I know some people think of this as a kind of shallow flourish, a waste of screen time, but I felt like it really fit with the themes of the film. In a movie that is all about the hidden secrets inside of your neighbor’s house, the idea that everyone has their own story, each one with secrets of their own, really worked for me. Plus, this time-hopping really amplifies the dread you experience while watching, when the knowledge that you have gleaned from some of the earlier stories is suddenly about to crash headlong into another character’s story.

That was good stuff.

Another reason I loved it, is because Weapons is yet another film I have recently watched—like 40 Acres, and like The Witch: Part 2. The Other One—that I thought was going to be a pretty straight forward splatter-fest horror film, but it wasn’t. I mean, it kind of is, sure, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. Weapons is definitely a horror film, but it’s also a fantasy story, like a modern day version of a classic Brothers Grimm tale, all about the day that something wicked comes to a small town.

With its time-hopping, multiple viewpoint storylines all converging into one explosively cathartic ending, an ending that somehow felt inevitable, and yet also shocking, Weapons is a surprisingly emotional, surprisingly human, surprisingly tense, and surprisingly terrifying film. It’s also surprisingly funny.

That’s the whole film… it’s surprising.

It’s got a great cast, and everyone does stellar work, but Amy Madigan as Gladys is the heart of it. This is an all-timer iconic role. It’s an unexpected performance and she brings such incredible subtly and strangeness to the role.

According to legend, Cregger gave Madigan two options when it came to Gladys's origin: one where she was a regular person dying from an incurable condition and so she was forced to turn to some alternative cures, and one where she was actually something else, that she was some kind of immortal creature, something that was pretending to be a human. But he never asked her which option she decided to go with. That you can see either option in her performance is amazing. It’s absolutely fantastic work. Plus, as a character, she somehow simultaneously looks completely insane, and also like a real person, someone you could see right now, all over this country. Just fantastic stuff. I saw so many pictures of people who had dressed as Gladys for Halloween. Absolutely iconic. Loved it.

Weapons is an incredibly good-looking film, and it features a well-told, very unexpected, and very entertaining tale. This is top notch genre movie-making. Fun, funny, scary, and surprising, it’s definitely worth seeing.

I can’t wait to see what Zach Cregger does next.