Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Weapons.
Weapons is not the kind of movie you should wait to stream at home. As in writer-director Zach Cregger’s previous horror effort, 2022’s Barbarian, the film’s power lies in its ability to keep the audience on its toes. While the plot is ultimately more straightforward here, the third-act escalation is perhaps even more extreme — once Cregger’s foot is on the gas, even the quietest theatergoers become reactive. If you’re not cheering at a vegetable peeler to the face, are you even alive?
In its early scenes, Weapons doesn’t necessarily scream a fun time at the movies. At 2:17 a.m., 17 children from Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) class leave their homes, seemingly drawn into the night by an unseen force. The one student left, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), denies knowing anything about the disappearances. So does Justine, who finds herself a target of the distressed parents’ ire — surely it’s not a coincidence that all the missing children shared the same teacher. Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the lost kids, is particularly driven in his pursuit of Justine, raising hell at a community meeting and later defacing her car with an accusation in red paint: “WITCH.”
The answer to what actually happened to the children of Maybrook is portioned out over the course of several sections, each told from a different character’s point of view. We move from Justine to Archer to Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), Justine’s cop situationship; to James (Austin Abrams), an addict and low-level criminal; to Marcus (Benedict Wong), the school principal; and finally to Alex. As their stories converge, the film’s central mystery unravels. The key figure turns out to be Alex’s mysterious Aunt Gladys, played in full psycho-biddy drag by Amy Madigan. It’s Gladys’s arrival in the story that kicks Weapons into high gear. Once she shows up in Marcus’s office with a garish red wig and makeup that’s somewhere between Baby Jane and Dina Martina, it’s clear who the real witch of this story is.
Indeed, Gladys is the one who’s pulling the strings. She demonstrates her power in Marcus’s kitchen, first turning the principal into a mindless puppet with the ringing of a bell and then siccing him on his husband, whom he brutally murders. (There’s a whole process involving blood, hair, a personal object, and a magic stick, but the method is less important than the results. Her victims are a classic form of zombies — not dead, but in a deathlike trance and subject to her bidding.) We get the full backstory from Alex’s perspective. After arriving in Maybrook to stay with Alex and his parents, Gladys takes control of Mr. and Mrs. Lilly, and swears Alex to secrecy with a demonstration of her ability to incite violence in her captives. Gladys is visibly ill when she first shows up in the town, but she gains strength back by feeding off Alex’s parents. When she decides she needs more bodies to nourish her, she forces Alex to steal personal objects from all of his classmates. That night, she rings her bell at 2:17 a.m. and the 17 children are drawn straight to her. The missing kids turn out to be standing in near-catatonic stupor in the Lilly family’s basement.
By the time Justine and Archer realize that Alex’s house is at the center of the disappearances, Gladys has two more zombies in Paul and James, and the pieces are in place for Weapons’s thrillingly frenetic conclusion. Shortly after Justine and Archer arrive at the house, they’re attacked by a rabid Paul and James. While Archer repeatedly knocks out James — in one of the movie’s funniest bits, the zombie just keeps popping back up — Justine faces off against Paul. He is relentless, even as she peels off strips of his face with the nearest kitchen utensil. It’s only when she can grab his gun and shoot him in the head that she’s able to put him down for good. She then manages to do the same to James (cue audience cheers), and Archer makes his way down to the basement to find his missing son.
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Gladys is waiting for him instead, and when he returns upstairs and begins choking Justine, it’s clear Archer is now under the witch’s thrall. Meanwhile, Alex is running from his parents, who are also in snarling kill mode. He finds his way into Gladys’s room and takes control of her supernatural paraphernalia — he’s seen enough now to know how this works: Wrapping a person’s hair around the stick gives the zombies a target, and snapping the stick rouses them to attack. As his parents begin to break through the door, Alex revives the missing kids and sends them after Gladys. The witch knows right away she’s in trouble, fleeing from the house as an army of bloodthirsty children burst out of the basement. They move en masse, screaming like banshees as they tear through property and run through glass windows in pursuit of their prey. The kids have been turned into weapons, and Gladys has lost her control over them. When the children eventually catch up to her, they swarm her body, grabbing, pulling, and biting with abandon. I wish I had captured the sound my audience made — an audible blend of disgust and delight — as Gladys’s head is quite literally torn apart.
With the witch dead, the spell is broken. Back at the house, Archer stops choking Justine, and Alex’s parents return to their docile but vacant states. But Weapons ends on a bittersweet note as we learn that the zombies Gladys was feeding on don’t regain full consciousness: Alex is separated from his parents, who never return to normal, and it takes years until any of the kids start to talk again. There is certainly some deeper meaning here, if you’d like to find it. As with most horror movies, especially those of the last decade-plus, Weapons has something to say about trauma. But the appeal of Cregger’s film is how determined it is to keep its themes subtextual. This is, in the end, a very straightforward story: a fairy tale with shades of “The Pied Piper,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and Stephen King. The point is not that there aren’t ideas here worth exploring, but that the movie works best as pure popcorn entertainment.
In an era of metaphor horror that prizes “what it all means” over thrills, there’s an added sense of relief to a third act that goes as hard as this one does. There’s no long-winded exposition, no ponderous articulation of the themes, and no punches pulled. Weapons is not brain-dead entertainment; the film is impeccably crafted and filled with fantastically game actors. (In a just world, Madigan would earn Oscar buzz for her go-for-broke hagsploitation performance.) But it is entertainment — a movie that demands to be seen in a packed theater because its driving force is a desire to make audiences laugh and scream. Much like the witch at its center, Weapons can transform an otherwise subdued crowd into a riotous throng, and that is a power worth celebrating.
