After Barbarian shocked audiences on its way to becoming one of the surprise hits of 2022, writer-director Zach Cregger’s sophomore horror feature, Weapons, became one of the most anticipated releases of the genre in recent memory. News of an intense bidding war for the screenplay in 2023 and the film’s viral marketing campaign helped fuel the hype and intrigue surrounding Cregger’s follow-up ahead of its release last week. And in Weapons, Cregger has delivered a bold, ambitious successor to Barbarian that builds on the filmmaker’s exciting debut and cements his status as a rising star in the industry.
Barbarian was so successful, in part, due to how well it deployed the element of surprise. That stemmed from the fact that Cregger’s career had been firmly entrenched in the comedy world before his pivot to horror. Cregger was a founding member of the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U’Know, acted in a number of comedy films and sitcoms, and codirected and cowrote 2009’s Miss March—a sex comedy that earned a brutal 5 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes—alongside his troupe mate Trevor Moore. Barbarian is imbued with those comedic roots; the film injects dark humor into a disturbing tale of an Airbnb booking gone terribly wrong. The marketing around its release leaned into the film’s unexpected twists and shifts in tone, with one trailer playfully promoting it as Justin Long’s New Movie and being from the studio that brought you Alvin and the Chipmunks before it begins to reveal some horrors of the sort that were lurking in the basement of Barbarian.
With Weapons, Cregger makes great use of a significantly larger budget to tell another twisted tale that is just as refreshingly unexpected as its predecessor, yet more polished. The film’s fragmented narrative, told through the perspectives of six characters, is prefaced by a chilling narration by a young girl whom we never meet. She describes the forthcoming saga as a true story that the local authorities in Maybrook, Pennsylvania, have tried to hide from the public before recounting the film’s mysterious, indelible hook: One night, at 2:17 a.m., 17 children—all of whom were in the same third grade class—suddenly vanished into the darkness of the night and never returned to their homes.
Weapons features a star-studded cast that includes Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Benedict Wong, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, and Amy Madigan, all actors who perfectly balance the story’s thrilling (and sometimes devastating) drama with much-needed doses of comedic relief. Even more so than Barbarian, Weapons is as funny as it is scary, and it’s laced with chaotic energy that releases the tension created by its unnerving, suspenseful moments. The culmination of this symbiotic relationship between horror and comedy arrives at the climax of the movie, as Weapons sticks its landing with a truly wild and unhinged conclusion that can only be described as absolute cinema.
(Last warning: spoilers ahead.)
For further context before we dive deeper into the ending: Weapons is effectively told in six parts, with each chapter focusing on one of the characters who gets caught up in the strange happenings in Maybrook—whether they intended to or not. Each subsequent section adds new insight into what happened to the missing children, and every narrative thread converges when the film focuses on Alex (Cary Christopher), the sole third grader in Justine Gandy’s (Garner) class who showed up to school on the day that the students disappeared. We discover that Alex’s aunt, Gladys (Madigan), is the central, mysterious figure at the heart of the story. More importantly, we learn that she’s a witch.
Earlier in the film, Gladys’s ability to enchant and weaponize her victims is put on full display as she sics Principal Marcus (Wong) on his unsuspecting husband before sending him after Justine. Through Alex, we get a closer look at Gladys’s witchcraft and learn that she’s preying on Maybrook in an effort to cure herself of a sickness that is killing her. Weapons is at its most devastating as it shows how Alex is forced to care for his parents, who both get put under Gladys’s spell. After struggling to open a can of soup to feed his catatonic parents, he purchases cans with tabs that can be more easily opened. And soon, he’s feeding his classmates, too, as his wicked aunt uses Alex to lure the other kids into his home on the threat that she’ll kill his parents if he doesn’t comply.
More on ‘Weapons’
When Justine and Archer (Brolin)—the father of one of Justine’s missing students—finally arrive at the house that Gladys has transformed into her lair, the film’s interconnected story lines clash, and the action ramps up. The unlikely duo faces off against two of Gladys’s latest spellbound victims, a police officer named Paul (Ehrenreich) and an addict named James (Abrams), with Justine using a vegetable peeler on Paul’s face as Archer (seemingly) knocks out James a comical number of times. Meanwhile, Alex is forced to fend off his parents as Gladys hides in the basement, where she’s keeping all of the children. There’s a laugh-inducing gag on the heels of every jump scare or grotesque image as the film’s shock factor climbs through the roof. And just as Archer falls under Gladys’s curse, with Justine and Alex facing their imminent doom as well, Alex performs Gladys’s spell-casting ritual himself, replicating what he watched her do time and again and turning his classmates against their captor.
After we witness Alex’s heartbreaking new reality and see so many prominent characters die in awful ways, there’s a sudden, striking shift that occurs when Gladys—along with the audience—registers what’s about to happen to her. All 17 of these kids spread their arms as they fly through the neighborhood in broad daylight, breaking into houses and sprinting past gawking neighbors in pursuit of this fleeing witch through the stillness of suburbia. And when they finally catch up to Gladys, the outcome is even more gruesome than you anticipate: The children savagely claw, bite, and dismember Gladys before decapitating her on a lawn. It is at once shocking, disgusting, and oddly cathartic to see the witch subjected to this twisted bit of mob justice at the tiny hands of these terrifying, barbaric third graders.
In the aftermath, Justine finds Alex as he reunites with his parents, who are no longer trying to kill him but are still in a stupor. Archer wakes up from his own brief spellbound daze and retraces the steps of the vengeful third-grade horde to find his son, who, like Alex’s parents, is still in a trance. Gladys may be dead and her spell may be broken, but some of its effects seem to remain. Weapons concludes with our young narrator returning to provide more details about what happened to Gladys’s victims—and yet many questions are left unanswered as the credits begin to roll.
What separates the ending of Weapons from the similar WTF finale of Barbarian is the restraint shown in the storytelling, as Cregger avoids wrapping up the film in a neatly tied bow. While Barbarian goes to great lengths to explain too much of its monster’s origins, Weapons ends in a shroud of mystery—and it’s all the better for it. As the little girl explains in her concluding voice-over, only some of the kids resumed speaking after their traumatic experiences. Alex got his parents back, but they had to be institutionalized, and he had to live with another aunt thereafter. All the answers as to who or what Gladys really was, and whether there’s anything that can be done to help her victims, died with her.
The dearth of explanation in the face of a supernatural event is satisfying in itself, as an eerie, unsettling feeling that good horror movies often instill fills the void created by that absence of clarity. Weapons has received some criticism online for introducing too many ideas without any substantive messaging behind them, such as the striking—and unexplained—image of a floating gun that emerges in a dream sequence. Although the naysayers have a point, the film’s thrilling closing act ties its many moving parts together to make the unraveling of its central mystery feel well worth it. And what shines through perhaps most of all in its bittersweet conclusion is that the trauma of these events will have lasting consequences for the citizens of Maybrook—and that some tragedies can never be rationalized.
Between Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger has now helmed two horror hits that feel inventive and unpredictable in their own ways. Next, the filmmaker will be taking on the task of rebooting Resident Evil on the big screen, and he told The Hollywood Reporter that the new installment in the video game adaptation franchise will feel “fresh and edgy and weird” if he does his job as intended. It’s hard to say what that might look like, but I’d imagine that’s exactly the way that Cregger would want it.
