Review of Weapons, directed by Zach Cregger

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

Weapons was actually a movie I saw available at my local theaters, but originally I hadn’t paid any mind to it. I hadn’t heard of the movie and despite having AMC A List, which means I can see four movies a week at my local theater, I didn’t end up even looking at the synopsis.

Then cue the Oscar win for the actress in it, and I knew I had to at least look up the synopsis on this one. That’s when I decided to check it out from my local library and sit down one night to watch it on the couch.

Let’s get into the review! Don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

When an entire class except one kid goes missing, it uncovers a series of perspectives from those impacted by this.

This movie is told through a series of interlinked perspectives, as all of these characters are interacting with each other. It’s really about putting together the missing puzzle pieces until we unlock the final mystery of what exactly is going on here.

It starts with this though: two years before the narrator’s time seventeen kids in a town ran out of their homes at 2:17 in the morning. They were all in the same class, taught by Justine Gandy, and camera footage shows them running in a very specific way. Only one kid from the class didn’t disappear: Alex.

Justine is the main suspect at first because of how they were in the same class, but no one has any evidence to show she was involved with this. She’s put on leave, and we see how one parent, named Archer, seems to think she’s involved.

The first story is Justine’s. She chooses to cope with her situation through alcohol, which puts her in a situation where she has a one night stand with her ex. Justine also keeps trying to contact Alex and see if he’s okay, but that’s when she discovers his home in disarray and his parents sitting there motionless. We see how Alex’s mother comes outside when Justine falls asleep in her car and cuts a piece of her hair out.

We then learn more about Archer after Justine is attacked by a possessed version of her boss at a gas station. His son is one of the missing kids, and when the police aren’t able to answer his questions, he decides to investigate what’s happening on his own. He comes to the realization that all of the kids are running in the same direction.

The next story involves Paul, Justine’s ex, and James, a homeless drug addict. He spots James trying to make a burglary and stops him, putting these two into a sort of feud. When James breaks into Alex’s house for money, he discovers the missing kids in the basement and realizes he can collect the massive reward money.

As he heads to the station Paul spots him and chases him down, but not before James spots an old lady in the distance in the woods. James tells Paul about the kids and the house, and they go together. As Paul heads inside, he handcuffs James to his car, but as night falls, he reappears frenzied and drags James inside the home forcibly.

We pivot back to the principal. He tries to perform a wellness check on Alex, but before he can do so, Alex’s mysterious Aunt Gladys shows up and claims Alex’s parents are ill. She insists everything is okay, and things get weirder when she shows up to his home. While there, she cuts a piece of his husband’s hair and performs a ritual where she possesses Marcus to kill his husband. She then sends him after Justine, which leads us back to the POV where Archer and she are at the gas station.

Marcus ends up dying after getting run over a car, and Justine and Archer team up from this point on. Then comes Alex’s perspective: his mother had invited Gladys into their home because she was sick and homeless.

However, when Alex comes home from school that day, his parents are motionless. Gladys threatens him with killing his parents to keep him quiet, and then asks him to bring in objects from his classmates. That’s what causes them to be possessed by Gladys, as she eats their energy, and he has to feed everyone to keep them alive.

In the present moment, Gladys realizes time’s up and gets ready to flee with Alex. Justine and Archer arrive, only to be attacked by Paul and James. As Archer goes into the basement and finds the kids, Justine kills Paul and James, and Gladys bewitches Archer.

Archer then attacks Justine, but Alex, who is upstairs and trying to evade his parents, figures out how to get the possessed people to attack Gladys. He does just that and the kids, who were still in the basement, go to attack her. They end up ripping her apart and ending the spell.

The movie ends with how everyone except Archer are left into a blank, catatonic state. Alex is sent to live with another relative when his parents are put into a home, and only recently, after two years, have some of the kids started speaking again.

Overall Thoughts

While I personally don’t find this movie to be groundbreaking as a horror movie, I thought the POV switching kept it really fresh. I wanted to keep watching throughout because of that, especially as I thought certain scenes were running dry after a certain point.

Despite that, everyone did a great job of embodying their characters. It feels almost like a bedtime story with a warning at the end of it, as the characters who were under Gladys’s spell weren’t fully restored to their normal state.

And, while we don’t explore Gladys’ origins, we can see that she leaves quite the impression over the whole movie. Whether it’s nightmares or a spooky spotting in the woods, her character is larger than life in some ways and quite the person to remember.

Go watch this if you’re interested. I think it’s worth trying at least once.

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