Weapons
Zach Cregger (2025)
Writer-director Zach Cregger immediately announces his film’s mystery. A child’s voiceover, accompanying images of the elementary school that she attends, describes the simultaneous disappearance of all but one of the pupils of a third-grade class there. These seventeen children rose from their beds one night at 2.17 am and left their homes, the time confirmed by residential surveillance systems that also recorded the eight- or nine-year-olds running, all with arms rigidly outstretched, towards woodland into which they disappeared. They’ve not been seen since. The voiceover goes on to say that the local authorities, including the police, have tried to hush up the mass vanishing. The start of Weapons certainly gets you interested in what’s coming. After that, the film strays from its main business for a while, marking time until Cregger sets to solving the puzzle of the lost children. By this point, he’s into full-blown horror-movie territory – in which, for better or worse, he’s more comfortable.
He divides the narrative into six episodes, each focusing on a single character. First, Justine (Julia Garner), the class teacher concerned. Then Archer (Josh Brolin), whose son is one of the missing children; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a police officer and Justine’s ex-boyfriend; James (Austin Abrams), a homeless hophead and petty criminal; and Marcus (Benedict Wong), the elementary school principal. Last but far from least, Alex (Cary Christopher), the only member of Justine’s class who didn’t vanish. For a while, it seems Cregger means to show the effect of the children’s disappearance on various citizens of Maybrook (a fictional small town, supposedly in Pennsylvania) – as if Weapons were sober social commentary, which it isn’t. Besides, what has happened is far too big a deal for that – and too sensational to try to keep under wraps. I didn’t understand why the never-identified child voiceover (Scarlett Sher) mentioned an attempted cover-up, except to give added spice to the intro. It’s true the local police don’t appear to be working flat out to find the kids, but they’re not keeping things secret either. How could they, when the story’s all over the press and TV news?
Individual episodes sometimes move back in time, so that a sequence featured in one character’s story is reprised in another’s, even though shot from different angles and, thanks to the second episode, seen in a larger context. For example, Archer’s section ends when Marcus attacks him at a petrol station. In the Justine section, Marcus was decent and sane; when he launches himself at Archer, he’s become a monster; over the course of Marcus’s own episode, it’s made clear what transformed him. A problem with the episodic structure is that some featured characters are tangential to the disappearance story – Paul especially, James too, until he breaks into Alex’s family’s house and makes a crucial discovery in its basement. Also, we sometimes learn things about characters in what feels like the wrong order. Justine’s own story presents her as emotionally erratic – ‘a troubled person’, in Archer’s phrase – in her professional and her private lives. In a meeting at the school, she’s furiously censured by the missing kids’ parents, who are understandably suspicious that only Justine’s class has disappeared. Justine’s daft responses – ‘I feel just as bad as you do’ – make matters worse. Subsequent flashbacks in which she’s a capable, caring teacher arrive too late to matter much.
A more important instance of Cregger’s impatience to show who people really are, comes in the case of a character that doesn’t even get her name on a chapter but who, once she arrives in Weapons, not only compels interest but virtually takes over the film. Alex’s elderly relative, Gladys (Amy Madigan), is glimpsed in Justine’s and Archer’s nightmares, then by James, as he runs through the woods where the children went missing. But her first full appearance comes at the school, for an interview with Marcus who, at Justine’s insistence, has asked to meet Alex’s family to check on how the boy’s doing outside school hours. Gladys tells Marcus she’s looking after Alex because his parents are unwell. She next turns up on Marcus’s doorstep, claiming she’s exhausted and pleading for water. It’s his partner, Terry (Clayton Ferris), rather than Marcus, who agrees to let her in. Once over the threshold, Gladys embarks on a ritual involving bloodied twigs and human hair that changes Marcus instantly into a homicidal maniac. He kills Terry, hideously violently, before heading for the petrol station to do the same to Justine, who has bumped into and is arguing with Archer there.
As Marcus launches himself at Justine, Archer intervenes and the men’s struggle gives her time to drive off. Marcus runs after the car and – arms straight and stiff, like the disappearing children – into moving traffic, with fatal results. Marcus and Terry were too polite to ask Gladys why she looked like someone out of a horror movie: Amy Madigan’s fright wig and thick lipstick scream Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, with a whisper of the clown in It. The wig is explained by the terminal illness from which Gladys is suffering; by the time the illness is revealed, though, Cregger has already proclaimed her the villain of the piece. At the start of the ‘Alex’ episode, he flashes back to Gladys’ first arrival at the boy’s home. Alex’s father (Whitmer Thomas) explains to his apprehensive son that Gladys, somehow related to Alex’s mother (Callie Schuttera), is coming to stay because she’s dying and has nowhere else to go. Alex’s parents’ normality would be very effective if Gladys were introduced as innocuous, but Cregger couldn’t wait to expose her as a witch.
‘Alex’, by far the film’s longest episode, is dominated by Gladys. De-wigged and without her garish make-up, as she sometimes is, Amy Madigan is expressive. According to Wikipedia, Zach Cregger gave her ‘two options as to Gladys’s origin: one where she was a regular person using witchcraft [to] prevent her dying from an incurable condition, and one where she was instead an immortal creature performing an approximate simulacrum’. What’s more ‘he did not ask her which one she chose’ – the implication being that Madigan makes it impossible to tell. There’s no doubt that she blends malignity and mortal fear successfully: her integrity as an actor probably impelled her to fuse Cregger’s options in favour of an either/or interpretation, and Madigan deserves the plaudits she’s getting for her work in Weapons. The options are phony, even so. Cregger’s plotting, building to Gladys’ grisly comeuppance, doesn’t allow for her to be anything other than an evil hag. Once she is destroyed, life in Maybrook can return to normal, albeit very gradually according to the closing voiceover. There’s no way, as things play out, that you can wonder if Gladys is just a ‘regular person’ trying her best to cheat death.
Her bell-book-and-candle-plus-twigs routines turn people into puppets, whether missiles of destruction like Marcus, or zombies like Alex’s parents, whom Gladys threatens to make kill themselves if Alex spills the beans about what she’s up to. She makes the boy steal from each of his classmates one of their belongings, which she uses to cast a spell on the children, drawing them from their homes, via the dark woods, to the basement in Alex’s house. The idea seems to be that Gladys needs multiple ‘hosts’ on whose life force she can feed to counteract the disease eating away at her own body. But since the children are being held in the basement, bewitched and benumbed, it’s hard to see how, unlike the unfortunate Marcus, they can be described as the ‘weapons’ apparently central to the whole set-up. Cregger would presumably justify this in what the stockpiled children finally do to Gladys. Using her own spells, Alex manages to turn her into the target. His classmates pursue Gladys and eventually tear her body apart.
Cregger’s first feature, Barbarian (2022), which I’ve not seen, was also a horror movie; his third feature, due out this year, will be the latest cinema reboot of the Resident Evil franchise. He clearly has an excellent understanding of what his audience wants. Barbarian, made for under $5m, earned over $45m; Weapons, which cost $38m, has so far taken $269m. That compares proportionally well with even Ryan Coogler’s Sinners which, at the time of writing, has made around four times its production costs ($368m, against a budget of $90m-$100m). Someone like me can complain all they want about the dramatic defects of Cregger’s instant-impact approach, but it’s being commercially vindicated in a big way. Even in the ‘Paul’ and ‘James’ episodes, which hardly advance the story, he keeps the mayhem and injury detail coming. As I usually find in horror cinema, Weapons has more images that are physically repellent than ideas that are psychologically horrific: Cregger has a particular penchant for flesh being pricked or scraped or ripped open.
Still, Weapons is entertaining, and Amy Madigan’s isn’t the only good performance in it. Josh Brolin’s Archer is quite a persuasive aggressive hero. Cary Christopher’s Alex is believably an outsider among his classmates (some of whom bully him). As the local police chief, Toby Huss brings a leavening air of sanity to proceedings. That Weapons has received one Oscar nomination (Madigan as Best Supporting Actress) and Sinners a ridiculous, record-breaking sixteen, has plenty to do with the latter’s scope for politically significant interpretation. (Cregger’s cast, except for Benedict Wong, is all white.) Watching Weapons also made me realise that to be impressed by scary supernatural films, I nearly always need to read them as allegories. There are rare, fine exceptions – Dead of Night (1945) and The Innocents (1961) come instantly to mind – but I tend to find stories in this genre too silly to be taken neat. Perhaps this one is allegorical, though. Zach Cregger has said that the Weapons children’s outstretched arms are inspired by the young Vietnamese girl, burned by napalm, in that notorious Vietnam War news photograph. You’d think he would have kept quiet about this inspiration for what’s an undoubtedly striking image, yet Cregger has suggested, outrageously, that, by making use of the photograph, he’s evoking ‘trauma, innocence lost, and horror’. It seems to be de rigueur for every Hollywood filmmaker today to make claims, however bogus, that their work has moral and political ‘meaning’.
21 January 2026