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You are at:Home » Weapons’ ending explains everything you actually need to know
Lifestyle

Weapons’ ending explains everything you actually need to know

11 August 20257 Mins Read

But more importantly, Weapons has what every horror hit needs: a lot of effective, unexpected, sharp shocks, imagery that gets under your skin and sticks there like a thorn, and an ending that will leave people talking, interpreting, and even arguing. Cregger doesn’t stint on answering the questions that first trailer asked: Why did 17 children from the same third-grade classroom all leave their beds in the middle of the night and disappear? Where did they go? What happened to them? But his script leaves plenty of small mysteries for viewers to wonder about and argue over, and the movie ends in a place that seems designed to rankle anyone who can’t handle ambiguity.

Leaving the audience wanting more is the exact right move for Weapons — and that feels like a lesson Cregger learned from the response to the ending of his debut feature. Weapons is a better, more complete movie than Barbarian, and that incomplete ending is a big part of what makes it land better and harder.

[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for both Barbarian and Weapons.]

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Weapons’ setup feels like a spin on the classic Pied Piper story, minus the first act with the rats: All the mysteriously missing kids followed a mysterious call into the night, except one of them, a small, pale boy named Alex (Cary Christopher). It also feels like it’s going to be an alien-abduction story. It’s obvious something otherworldly is going on, given the details of the case: the way the kids disappeared so completely, or the way they all ran away at the same time, at 2:17 a.m., and all ran in the same way, with their arms stiffly held out from their bodies as if they were pretending to be jets.

The reality is much weirder than aliens. Cregger unfolds his story from several different points of view and in several different timelines, as third-grade teacher Justine (Julia Garner) endures her community’s suspicion and blame, grieving father Archer (Josh Brolin) stalks her and seems prepared to take out his anger on her as his life falls apart, local cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) navigates alcoholism and an affair with Justine, and local homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) witnesses events he isn’t prepared for. Eventually, viewers learn that Alex knows exactly what’s going on: a woman (?) styling herself as his Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan) has inserted herself into his household and seems to be using sympathetic magic to prey on his parents, his classmates, and anyone who begins to suspect what she’s doing.

The questions Weapons leaves behind mostly revolve around Gladys, and what exactly she is. Is she human? Cregger makes some sly references throughout the movie to parasitic infection (there’s a whole rundown on parasites on the blackboard behind Justine when she enters her classroom on the day her kids go missing) and to Cordyceps, the fungus that can infect carpenter ants and rewrite their brains to help them spread Cordyceps spores. (Or in HBO’s The Last of Us can infect people and create zombies.) Nothing in Weapons suggests that Gladys is a fungus — but we wind up knowing virtually nothing about her. It’s easy, based on her behavior, to say “Oh, she’s a witch who controls people with magic.” But just like Disney Plus’ Agatha All Along, Weapons doesn’t give us any sense of what “being a witch” actually means, in relation to being human or being anything else.

A wild-eyed woman screams downward toward the camera, her head wedged through a hole bashed in a white door, in Weapons

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

And that stands in stark contrast to Barbarian, which also revolves around a central mystery — a seemingly impossible series of caverns and tunnels underneath a rental house, and an unlikely creature that lives there but comes creeping out at night. Barbarian is full of intense shocks as well, but the impact dissipates toward the end of the movie, as Cregger overexplains the creature’s origins, and each new reveal just makes the story seem more and more improbable and silly. By the time the creature is smashing through concrete walls to get to her victims, the film is so far from the grounded reality of the first act that it’s started to seem like a dark comedy.

Leaving Gladys’ origins and the meaning of her powers open-ended lets Cregger hang on to a lot of the sense of dread and confusion that surfaced in the movie’s marketing and that suffuses its story. It’s enough to know that she behaves like a parasite, battening onto Alex’s parents, taking control of their bodies, and using their home as a base of operations. When she tells Alex that she’s sick and that she needs all his classmates to help make her “better,” then seals them all in a kind of suspended animation in her basement, it isn’t perfectly clear how she’s feeding on them, but it’s clear that she’s spryer and healthier instead of sick and exhausted. We’re left to do the work of filling in the blanks ourselves, and the movie is creeper for it.

The biggest mystery of all is what happens after the movie’s final shot. Alex takes control of Aunt Gladys’ magic and sics his classmates on her, and they rip her apart with their bare hands and teeth. Justine and Archer survive. Paul does not. Archer is reunited with his son, and a voiceover tells us that Alex’s parents haven’t recovered and that he’s being raised in foster care, and that eventually, some of the kids in Alex’s class began to talk again — the implication being that some of them still haven’t recovered at all.

A young terrified boy stands with his back pressed to a closed door and his arms outstretched to block it in Weapons

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Does the community ever heal, after all the misinformation, suspicion, and accusations? Who gets the blame when 17 missing children suddenly reappear and publicly murder what appears to be a frail, aging lady? What does Alex tell the authorities about what happened? How does Justine explain that she murdered a police officer she was sleeping with, or justify her presence in the house where all the children suddenly reappeared? What happens to the magic tree that seems to be the center of Gladys’ powers?

For Cregger, leaving all these questions open, and leaving his characters in a state of chaos and upheaval, is the exact right move. There might have been an urge (or nervous pressure from executives at New Line or Warner Bros.) to guide Justine toward a happier, more satisfying ending, or at least some narrative promise that she doesn’t end up in jail or in involuntary committal, given the improbable, unbelievable story she’d be telling authorities after all this. It’s unclear how much she or Archer even understood about what they experienced in Alex’s house — the significance of the salt lines, for instance, or how and when Gladys took control of Paul, James, and Archer.

But Cregger resisting the urge to fill in all the blanks leaves the audience caught in a state of horror and unknowability, in the state of shock that often follows real-world violent events. Unlike with Barbarian, there’s no sense that the story has been wrapped up with a neat bow. Weapons shares Barbarian’s sense of finality and justice for the most malevolent force in the film, and its sense of grief that innocents died as well, but there’s much less of a feeling that anyone involved can walk away clean and return to their normal lives. That may not be as satisfying for every viewer, but it lets the audience walk away without that sense of disappointment that so often comes in a mystery story where all the mysteries get unraveled, and all the questions get answered. Weapons ends before it starts to feel mundane, overexplained, or obvious. If it leaves viewers wanting more, that’s a feature, not a bug — parasitic or otherwise.

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