Horror Wednesday: Weapons

 

There are two moments in Weapons that will stick in my mind for a while. They have nothing to do with finding broader themes in Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian, or assigning any kind of political positioning to it, an undertaking that seems doomed for a film that escapes simple interpretation. One is young Alex (Cary Christopher), the only remaining child in Justine’s (Julia Garner, again great after The Americans and Ozark and her films with Kitty Green) class after seventeen other kids have disappeared into the night, returning to his home that has been occupied, overtaken, by a witch who might or might not be his aunt (a spooky, great Amy Madigan). His parents, previously portrayed as loving and supportive if completely ignorant of the bullying Alex faces from the other children in his class, are now motionless, stunned. They are puppets, put on hold by a spell. Alex is tasked with feeding them soup, caring for them in a desperate attempt to keep them alive. The soup cans at home don’t have pull tabs, and so he learns how to use a can opener. It’s a task too big for a very young kid, and yet he does his best to master it. He is determined to save his parents, because he loves them and they are all he has. He will do whatever this stranger is asking of him to get them back, but at the same time this kid who has been terrorised at school is gathering the strength and resources to fight back, and eventually defeat the evil that has moved into his house. 
The other vignette – and the film unravels its story through following different characters, assembling a puzzle not unlike Pulp Fiction – follows the school’s principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong), and his attempt to balance the demands of the lost children’s parents against Justine’s journey in proving her innocence in what is, ironically, turning into a witch hunt against her. Justine has staked out Alex’ home and glimpsed his parents, and realised that something is very wrong. Marcus, doing his due diligence although constantly conscious of his own legal limitations, has attempted to contact his parents, which has put him in the pathway of Aunt Gladys. The fact that Gladys outwardly presents as an eccentric older lady with clown make-up and wig throws him off his game, but the situation escalates when Gladys, seeing him as a threat to her scheme, visits him at home. There isn’t much space in Weapons to develop characters deeply, but the little screen-time they get convey a lot about who they are. In this domestic scene, Marcus is settling down for a quiet weekend with his partner, looking forward to a serving tray of hot dogs and a documentary (again, ironically, about Cordyceps, that zombie film mainstay). These two seem lovingly settled, well-matched, the kind of couple that has been together for a long time and developed rituals of care that translate even in the shortest glimpses of their domesticity. Gladys’ spell turns Marcus into a monster: his first act is to kill his partner. It’s a horrifying, deeply disturbing scene, and it occurs in a film that doesn’t just share its format with Pulp Fiction, but also its gallows humour: objectively, we are seeing a man kill his partner after just intimately witnessing how devoted they are to each other, but something about the tone of the film still finds something satirical about Marcus’ blind, unstoppable drive to kill him, the way that the spell can set this regular man on a target like he’s the Terminator. Gladys functions like the Cordyceps, taking over an ant and driving it like a vehicle without a will of its own: none of the humanity, the emotion, the care and love, remains, it is destroyed in a terrifying instant. There is almost an alienating effect here between the horror of what is depicted and the tone of the film, which invites you to laugh at the bumbling cop who does a horrible job at attempting to arrest someone and manages to stab himself with a hidden needle (and then finds himself stabbed by multiple needles later in a fight for survival, in a film where all kinds of sometimes mundane objects are weaponised). It’s funny – darkly, but still – that Archer (Josh Brolin), a dad to a kid who disappeared, gets obsessed with Justine’s involvement in the disappearance and writes “witch” in red paint on her car, before finding out that there is a literal witch at work who stole the children for a ritual that doesn’t sound completely different from a QAnon conspiracy theory. 

I think any attempt to ascribe a particular meaning to the film works like a Rorschach test, saying more about the viewer than Cregger’s intention. The early scene in which Archer, at a school assembly, presents a theory that Justine must have radicalised the children into running away because it’s the only conceivable place where the children could have been influenced, in the imagined space of the dangerous classroom, closed to the parents, resonates heavily with current discourse about teachers and syllabi. She is a young woman, now stalked by Archer and judged for her personal choices, and an easier target to imagine than the eventual reveal of an actual witch moving into the neighbourhood to wreak havoc. The way that Glady’s witchcraft weaponises people specifically against their loved ones made me think of what catastrophes conspiratorial thinking and misinformation have wrought on families who find relatives and friends unrecognisable and unable to reach – but none of these interpretations fit entirely neatly with the film, and maybe that’s where its potency lies. 

2025, directed by Zach Cregger, starring Julia Garner, Cary Christopher, Jason Turner, Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan, Scarlett Sher.