Warning: Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Weapons.
Rarely does a character arrive onscreen as gay-guy-Halloween-costume-ready as Aunt Gladys in Weapons. Decked out in the kind of bright-red wig and generously applied makeup that a circus clown might describe as “a bit much,” Amy Madigan is nearly unrecognizable as the film’s puppet-master antagonist. She is both a threat — a witch who has kidnapped 17 children from the town of Maybrook and transformed other citizens into bloodthirsty zombies — and also camp. Gladys’s aesthetic and theatrical menace place her within the grand tradition of the “psycho biddies,” the violent women of a certain age who terrorize their way through films like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte; and Strait-Jacket. In layman’s terms, she slays.
Gladys is an instant entry into the canon of contemporary horror iconography, and for that alone, the character is worthy of commendation. But she’s also so much more than the inevitable drag shows that will immortalize her. Underneath the pounds of lipstick, eye shadow, and wig is a thrillingly committed performance from Madigan, a character actor who has seldom gotten the kind of showcase she gets here. Calling Madigan a scene-stealer feels like an understatement when she walks away with the whole movie, even alongside established talent like Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, and newer arrivals like Austin Abrams and Cary Christopher. With credit to those actors and to Zach Cregger’s wickedly clever script and direction, Madigan is the reason Weapons works as well as it does. She deftly navigates the film’s wild tonal shifts, maneuvering between dread-inducing and laugh-out-loud funny, often in the same scene. She’s both over-the-top and completely in control, a remarkable balancing act that results in the scariest and silliest horro-movie villain in years. So why not give her an Oscar for it?
It’s not as far-fetched as you might think. The idea that Oscar voters turn up their noses at the horror genre is both grounded in reality and slightly overstated. It’s true that The Shining didn’t get the awards attention it deserved, but it’s also true that The Exorcist was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. While Madigan could very well be snubbed like Hereditary’s Toni Collette and Us’s Lupita Nyong’o before her, there are a number of examples you could point to as precedent for Madigan’s recognition. Kathy Bates and Anthony Hopkins both took home the gold for indelible horror-villain performances, her for 1990’s Misery and him for The Silence of the Lambs. Even more relevant to this discussion: the aforementioned hagsploitation classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which earned Bette Davis a Best Actress nomination.
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But in this early attempt to foment a groundswell of support for a Madigan Oscar, there’s one bit of Academy Awards history most worthy of attention: Ruth Gordon’s Best Supporting Actress win for 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. Aunt Gladys owes more than a little to Gordon’s Minnie Castevet. Like Gladys, Minnie is a witch who’s partial to heavy makeup, colorful attire, and using her age and perceived frailty to conceal her dark designs. Minnie’s aims are less selfish than Gladys’s are — she serves Satan, while Gladys seems to only serve herself — but both subvert our expectations of how safe we are around little old ladies. The Oscar that Gordon took home for Rosemary’s Baby was an acknowledgment not only of her tremendous performance, but also of her decades of work in the industry. “The first film that I was ever in was in 1915, and here we are, and it’s 1969,” she said in her acceptance speech. “Actually, I don’t know why it took me so long.” While Madigan’s career may not stretch back as far, she’s been a consistent (and consistently underrated) presence on screen since the ’80s. Besides her turn in 1985’s Twice in a Lifetime, for which Madigan received her one and only Oscars nom, she’s played a range of warm to steely across genres in Field of Dreams, Streets of Fire, Uncle Buck, and Gone Baby Gone. And that’s to say nothing of her equally prolific TV work, including a starring role on HBO’s unjustly forgotten Carnivàle. A Madigan nomination — or, let’s shoot for the moon, a win — would also be recognition of a quietly brilliant career.
Thankfully, that possibility feels likelier than ever. Though Madigan would surely be the first acting nominee whose character is torn apart by rabid children, she would not be the first to end her film as a pile of bloody goo: Demi Moore broke that glass ceiling in The Substance, and she came awfully close to Oscar glory for it just this year. That Coralie Fargeat’s horror epic earned five nominations, including Best Picture, could bode well for Weapons’s broader chances, even if Cregger’s twisted fairy tale is a little lighter on Oscar-friendly themes about Hollywood’s youth obsession. In the meantime, though, let’s at least continue to voice our support for making Aunt Gladys more than just a meme by appreciating the high-wire act at her core — finally giving Madigan her due in the process.
