Everything Weapons Is (And Isn’t) About
All the various ostensible suspects we’ve been following are just pawns in Gladys’ game. Gladys, by the way, likely isn’t even Alex’s real aunt. His parents say they haven’t seen her in 15 years; she says she met Alex when he was a baby, though he is much younger than 15. She herself is an unholy spirit, and one can infer she’s gone town to town replenishing her corrupted soul with unsuspecting people for perhaps centuries.
Unlike so many horror movie villains these days, Gladys doesn’t explicitly represent anything. (The most recent example of this is Together, which is a very literal metaphor for codependency.) She’s not the physical manifestation of someone’s trauma. Instead, she’s inexplicable evil—which makes her more scary, and has also allowed people to speculate as to what Weapons is trying to say.
The most obvious take is that Weapons is somehow commenting on the prevalence of gun violence in schools, where young children are here one day and then simply gone thanks to the whims of someone wielding an all-powerful tool. And it’s true that Cregger certainly invokes imagery that has become all too familiar in the days since Sandy Hook, from the empty classroom to the “Maybrook Strong” memorial outside the kids’ school. In Asher’s dream sequence he envisions an assault rifle floating over his home. The image is potent: For many American parents their nightmare is that their child is gunned down while attending class.
Cregger told Variety, however, that even he doesn’t have a singular explanation. “It’s a very important moment for me in this movie, and to be frank with you, I think what I love about it so much is that I don’t understand it,” he said. “I have a few different ideas of what it might be there for, but I don’t have the right answer.”
The director has revealed that the movie was born out of grief after he unexpectedly lost a friend, but Weapons isn’t overtly “about” grief in the way of, say, this year’s Bring Her Back, in which a woman tries to revive her dead daughter through demonic means. Instead it’s more about the gnawing lack that happens when people leave your life. Cregger said writing the screenplay did not heal him, it just gave him an outlet. “Somebody dies, and you’re gonna feel that absence for the rest of your life,” he said. So what do you do when there are no answers?
Justine drinks to excess; Asher relies on his anger. They both come close to the right answer but remain, for most of the runtime, far away from it. Justine suspects something is up with Alex’s house, but her stakeout becomes nap time when she overdoes it on the vodka. Asher is not wrong that there’s a witch in town, but he’s too blinded by misplaced rage at Justine, who to him represents another cultural boogeyman—the teacher that crosses boundaries with her students.
When Gladys arrives you could make the case that Cregger is playing into misplaced fears of grotesque elderly ladies, but I don’t think that’s the intention, even if you can argue that it’s a negative depiction of aging womanhood. Gladys seems like she emerged out of a fairytale, her makeup painted on like something out of a child’s scrawled artwork. Her presence is irrational the way most terrors are. She confirms all the theories and none of them.
Perhaps the best way to understand Weapons is the final line of the movie, spoken in voiceover by the unnamed child who is telling the tale. The girl says that all the children were reunited with their families and some of them even started speaking again. And then the credits roll, and you’re left with the unsettling reminder that sometimes horror just is, and we all just have to live with it.
