Horror has a long history of confronting us with what we take for granted, revealing the dark truths we keep in the locked basements in the back of our minds. We may not like to think about it, but we all know if someone really wanted to break into our homes, they probably would. In a real sense, our locks are as much for our peace of mind as they are for our protection.
Comedians have long satirized those vulnerable social bonds with observational comedy, but filmmaker Zachary Cregger specializes in a different, yet still similar, kind of provocative storytelling that could be called observational horror. Between “Barbarian” and now “Weapons,” Cregger’s written his career with the fading ink of our social contracts, exploiting our back-of-the-mind fears against us. He also rejects tidy interpretations of his work, leading some to claim “Weapons” definitively means any of half a dozen different things, while others debate whether art must “mean” anything at all. The result is two films that are both thoughtful and reckless, gesturing at signifiers of meaning without committing to a single viewpoint.
Following a town’s agitated response to seventeen children disappearing into the night never to return, “Weapons” is a spin-the-dial of potential metaphors: the violence older generations inflict on children, the ease with which we weaponize ourselves or each other under duress, or, inevitably, school shootings, addiction, and the abuses of the police. There are also two “survivors” of the incident, a student named Alex (Cary Christopher) who didn’t run away with the other kids, and the teacher, Justine (Julia Garner), and the town targets them in a makeshift witch hunt –– an easy read for how we scapegoat the vulnerable. Some have gone as far as to accuse “Weapons” of having a conservative, reactionary outlook, where an “outsider” (a witch) comes to prey on the inhabitants. After all, the Republican-coded Archer (Josh Brolin), also a father of a lost child, has his fears validated. Or “Weapons” is about none of those things, swiftly deploying each idea before rushing to the next.
You can feel that thematic confusion most with the much-debated, dreamed-up tableau of an AR-15 floating above a family home. Speaking to NBP’s own Matt Neglia, Cregger explicitly denied it was a metaphor for school shootings, while to others he’s said he follows David Lynch’s Big Fish style of subconscious intuition; IE, he doesn’t know what it means. As a result, many of the most glowing reviews contradict Cregger’s own words, which positively cite school shootings as an affecting parallel. In a movie about collective mourning and anger over missing and presumed dead school children, who can blame them?
In fairness to Cregger, like the other popular interpretations of the film, the school shooting metaphor doesn’t fully track. The witch’s interest in the children is by happenstance and bad luck. She wants their life force to restore her sick body, but only once did sucking that healing energy from the adults fail. But this same roundabout logic applies to the most obvious reads of what “Weapons” is “really about,” where you can draw lines between a constellation of ideas, only to form an incomplete picture. Some critics have celebrated that difficult-to-pin-down-ness, saying it’s a rebuff to the overly simplistic readings in the “elevated horror” era of horror, while others again complain it doesn’t “amount to anything.“ I wonder if Cregger will later regret these limiting clarifications– Christopher Nolan once revealed the secrets of “Memento,“ and he quickly learned it’s better to let his movies speak for themselves.
And, of course, filmmakers don’t have the last word on their own work. Any lens of meaning is fair game as long as the intersection of the text itself supports it, the cultural context it was released in is considered, and what meaning and emotion the audience extracts from it. Last year, I argued “Civil War“ was a parable about how our screen-dominated culture has warped our ability to engage with spectacle, violence, and, plainly, other people, despite whatever Alex Garland said to the press. “Weapons“ is an extreme example of the same idea. Cregger seems less like a warlock of the American subconscious than a filmmaker evoking so many cultural omens at once, apparently without anticipating what they might mean to an audience; he’s emboldened a discourse that’s unusually in opposition to his own intentions.
The clearest throughline between his two films, though, is how social boundaries are observed or denied. The strongest distillation of that idea is still the first act of “Barbarian,“ where Cregger could scrutinize gender differences around when, how, and with whom a woman, and to a lesser extent a man, feels safe in domestic spaces. The court’s out on whether Cregger walks back that thoughtful theming by the tumultuous third act (I’d give Cregger a light sentence).
For “Weapons,“ Cregger shotguns that approach over an entire town. Instead of an AirBnb and tensions around gender, there are alcoholic teachers, abusive cops (Alden Ehrenreich), homeless addicts (Austin Abrams), and rageful wives, who all collectively invade cars, gas station mini-marts, more basements, forest tents, schools, and police stations, expanding the rules of “observational horror“ to an entire suburban environment. As a result, the scares shift too. There are assaultive door-knock-ditches, multiple stalkings (down the street and inside a liquor store), weirdos showing up at work, a lady with scissors who crawls into the back of a car while the driver is asleep, and the marrow-deep terror of a distant relative coming to stay with you for a while.
We’re supposed to be nice to old ladies, which is how Gladys (Amy Madigan), the witch, gains access to her targets, even if everything about her feels “wrong.“ Yet, that plot point is also betrayed by Cregger’s inconsistent handling of his material. If Gladys is a wolf in a sheep’s orange wig, his desire for spooky, clownish affectations contradicts her stated desire for a low profile. Likewise, her schemes arouse an awful lot of attention; you don’t need to be a Cinema Sins nitpicker to find it ludicrous that it wouldn’t arouse suspicion if Alex’s parents stopped showing up to work, or later, how Gladys hijacked Marcus’ mind to attack Justine in broad daylight as black goo oozes out of his face. Tropey horror fun, sure, but the form and function of Cregger’s storytelling are misaligned.
Each character in “Weapons“ also dramatizes those social rules in positive and negative ways. Justine has a DUI on her record and a history of sleeping with people she shouldn’t, while at school, she’s chastised for “caring too much,” even if it “comes from a good place.“ We’re given the tricky example of her driving a child home when their parents didn’t show up at school. Teachers are prohibited from personal settings with students so they can’t take advantage or abuse them, but what if you’re a teacher who “knows” you’re just trying to help? Justine’s rule-breaking eventually turns into the obsessive stalking of Alex, which leads her to the newspaper-crusted cocoon of a house. Uncomfortably, she’s rewarded for that behavior– her creepy stalking is what ultimately rescues the children and stops the witch.
Meanwhile, the school principal, Marcus (Benedict Wong), is Cregger’s most consummate rule-follower. Still, if his warnings to Justine to lay off investigating Alex had been heeded, she would’ve never discovered the whereabouts of the children. On the flip side, “Weapons“ shows he was correct to uphold the boundaries between principal and parent (or, aunt) by refusing Gladys’s entry into his home. His husband lets her in, and she kills him. Marcus’s instinct, it seems, was the correct one–– after all, those rules exist for a reason. Then there’s Archer, who manipulates his way into the living room of another family with a missing child. The mom said no. The dad said yes. What he did is a dirty trick, but it also allowed him to see their door-cam footage that connected the strange airplane-arm run of the missing students to Marcus’s attack on Justine. Marcus is punished for his observance of social rules, while Justine and Archer’s trespasses are rewarded.
With these broad, messy developments, what’s left is another muddy witch’s brew of what any of this is “about.“ Even “Magnolia,“ a major influence on “Weapons,“ brings its vast matrix of characters and wayward themes full circle. In “Weapons,“ we never see Justine deal with her alcoholism, we never see Archer contend with his toxic fatherhood, and the provocations about weaponization and suburban angst are curbed for gags and gore. If the older generation is doing damage to children, the film provides little evidence of it outside of the witch’s incidentally using kids as a means to an end. Marcus’s son is a bully, but that’s hardly a sweeping social statement.
If “Weapons“ is about how we turn against each other too readily, that we are “weaponized,“ the town’s hysteria is awkwardly validated by having an imposter worthy of their ire. Ari Aster’s “Eddington“ is a near cousin, but his tense mayoral race turned suburban shootout came from latent attitudes exploding from inside the town, while Cregger’s witch scapegoats these issues from view. If she caused much of the town’s fear-spiral, how could anyone learn to grow? The missing kids do eventually rush through the lawns of suburbia like an avalanche of small tumbling bodies that destroy homes along the way, the final joke of “violating civic boundaries.“ So what? I’m not much closer to knowing the filmmaker’s true feelings on social contract now than I was before, revealing a mind that thinks in structure and scares before character or fully developed theming.
It could be as simple as a filmmaker painting a society whose implicit communal laws don’t function as we hope, that it’s a flawed system, nothing more than an illusory framework we project onto our lives for a sense of comfort. There’s an intentional anticlimax to the end of “Weapons,“ forcing us to live with the unresolved arcs and pains of kids who have been rescued but whose lives will never fully improve– an easy metaphor for Cregger’s own grief. You could also see Cregger as a filmmaker who doesn’t overthink these things and doesn’t seem to want us to either; he’s throwing whatever ideas, feelings, or images into his cinematic cauldron that seem to resonate without planning or consideration to how they add up. Do they need to? Should they? Is it enough to be an audience Rorschach test, where we project our own meaning onto it? Does that mean “Weapons“ is about all these things, or not about anything? The answers are, at once, elusive and simple. Movies aren’t crossword puzzles, but they should amount to something.
Have you seen “Weapons?“ yet? If so, what did you think of it? What did you think it was about? Please let us know in the comments section below and on Next Best Picture’s X account.
