I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Weapons since the first teaser dropped back in April—but truthfully, my interest began well before that. Its director, Zach Cregger, made his solo directorial debut with 2022’s Barbarian, which scared me in a way very few horror films have. And I don’t scare easily. From that moment, I knew he was a director worth watching. Then came the kicker: When Jordan Peele reportedly fired his entire team after losing the bidding war for the film’s rights, it became clear this wasn’t just another horror release—it was the one to watch.
Weapons exceeded even my highest expectations! The film is unnerving, frightening, and loaded with layers of meaning that invite endless interpretation. Days later, I’m still unpacking it. (Spoilers ahead.)
Weapons drops us in the middle of the action in its opening scene. In the sleepy Pennsylvania town of Maybrook, at 2:17 AM, 17 of the 18 students from Miss Gandy’s third-grade class rise from their beds, open their front doors, and run into the darkness. The town is wracked with questions, guilt and accusations. There’s no explanation or answers.
Cregger already showed with Barbarian that he’s an expert at building suspense until you feel like you’re crawling out of your skin waiting for the next scare. Weapons dials it way up, as in, my theater was full of audible gasps. There are jump scares, but they are never overused. The film also doesn’t rely on them to frighten the audience. Cregger struck the perfect balance between comedy and horror: one moment the whole theater was laughing, the next we were literally screaming. While I find horror-comedies tend to lean too hard into the latter, Weapons executed its genre expertly.
Like Barbarian, the story of Weapons is told through various shifting perspectives, all of which work to unravel the mystery at the film’s core. We begin the film from teacher Miss Gandy’s (Julia Garner) perspective before transitioning to several others: a cop, the father of one of the missing boys, and a drug addict. While so many shifts in perspective could easily feel jarring, and at times I did think certain storylines lingered a bit too long, it was still fascinating to gain new insight from each character.
Finally, it’s impossible to talk about the strengths of Weapons without mentioning Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys, the film’s antagonist. I wasn’t familiar with Madigan’s earlier work, and I can’t imagine a better introduction to any performer. She plays Gladys with just the right amount of camp without ever losing the menace. Armed with spells, a red wig and clown-like makeup, she still managed to terrify me every time she appeared on screen.
Ultimately, what impressed me most about Weapons wasn’t its scares or even the strength of its performances, but the haunting commentary on the underbelly of suburbia—how a community consumed by grief and blame retreats into isolation instead of solidarity.
We open with Justine Gandy’s perspective, the devastated teacher grappling with the loss of her class. As the common denominator between all of these children, the parents and much of the town deflect their blame onto her, assuming she must have had something to do with it. The impact on Justine is immediate and profound. A recovered alcohol user, she quickly relapses, calls her married ex-boyfriend (Alden Ehrenreich), convinces him to relapse as well, and spirals into a mental breakdown. Yet the townspeople’s hatred doesn’t ease. One morning, she walks outside to find that someone has painted WITCH across the side of her car.
Over the course of all of the film’s different perspectives, we see the way that isolation has seeped into the residents of Maybrook in the wake of tragedy. Halfway through the film, while Archer, the father of one of the students, is angrily confronting Justine at the gas station, the pair sees Marcus, the school principal, who, under a curse from Gladys, immediately begins attacking Justine. As Justine attempts to escape into the gas station, there’s a comical moment where she screams at the gas station worker to “Fucking help me!” This is played for laughs, and it is funny, but what’s darker is what it represents: the unwillingness of suburban citizens to help their neighbors, lest it put themselves at risk. Contrast this with Archer, who immediately begins defending Justine despite confronting her furiously just seconds before. This moment is a split in their dynamic: whereas Archer had previously been against Justine, he unites with her for the rest of the film, finally acknowledging that something darker is at play in their town.
But the biggest indication of this theme comes when we finally arrive at Alex’s perspective, the young boy who somehow managed to avoid leaving his house that fateful night. With Alex, the mystery is finally unraveled: Gladys, his “aunt,” who has come to live with him and his parents, is actually a witch who has orchestrated all of the strange happenings in Maybrook. She places Alex’s parents under a spell to leech off their life force, and eventually convinces Alex to obtain belongings from all of his classmates to lure them in as well. This is what leads the kids out of their houses and to Alex’s, where they stand immobilized in his basement.
What’s interesting about Alex’s perspective is the people who repeatedly fail to notice anything wrong with him. Whereas Alex’s dad had always picked him up from school, following the tragedy, he began taking the bus to and from school. The windows and doors of his house are boarded up. His parents stop attending work and are catatonic when interacting with the police and school officials. Gladys forces Alex to repeatedly make trips to the grocery store, buying canned soups to feed his parents and classmates, and yet no one notices anything odd. While these can seem like plot holes, it’s actually the thesis of Cregger’s critique of suburbia: a refusal to help thy neighbor, or to even notice the signs of anything wrong. If people had been paying attention to Alex, his parents and the children of the town would have been saved before catastrophic damage. The horror isn’t only that a witch has infiltrated the town, it’s that the town was already primed to let it happen, with individuals too wrapped up in themselves to notice.
Weapons works because it’s more than a horror film. Cregger uses witches and basement-dwelling third-graders to show what happens when tragedy drives us inward—when we choose self-preservation over solidarity. Because, ultimately, the real horror isn’t on screen; it’s what happens when we turn away from one another.