Zach Cregger’s startling horror movie Weapons isn’t short on ideas, either narrative or metaphorical. The film’s hook is a central mystery involving 17 children disappearing all at once, all running out of their homes at 2:17 a.m., arms outstretched and going who-knows-where. But the story behind the movie is uniquely personal, Cregger has said in interviews. It has to do with his family’s history of alcoholism and his grief over a friend’s death, as well as the other messages people may see in its dream-gun imagery or its characters’ political leanings. At the same time, he says, “I don’t care if any of this stuff comes through. The alcoholic metaphor is not important to me. I hope people have fun, honestly. It’s not really my business what people make of the movie.”
People certainly are seeing a lot of different things in Weapons, from a commentary on school shootings to messages about child trafficking, or the way each generation pushes its problems onto the next. That’s a lot for any one movie to tackle, and layering these ideas atop all the personal elements can muddy any metaphor. Here at Polygon, we’re mostly fans of Weapons and the spell it weaves, but that doesn’t necessarily mean thinking every thread within the movie gets equal weight and equal attention.
In particular, one Polygon writer was frustrated by the way the movie’s school-shooting angle feels underdeveloped, while another of us appreciates that Cregger doesn’t underline his real-world metaphor too heavily. As always, when we have a conflict — about James Gunn’s take on foreign policy in Superman, for instance, or about Titanic’s alternate ending, Spider in Avatar: The Way of Water, the song cut from The Muppet Christmas Carol, and more — we take it to Polygon Court.
[Ed. note: Broad spoilers ahead for Weapons.]
Opening statements: Weapons’ school-shooting imagery, explained
Tasha: Let’s start with the big picture here: Cregger’s script centers on the sudden disappearance of 17 third-graders who all inexplicably vanish into the night, leaving their parents and the community to mourn, rage, and look for someone to blame. He tells the story through many different points of view, particularly centering on the kids’ teacher, Justine (Julia Garner); one missing kid’s father, Archer (Josh Brolin); a local cop, Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), and Alex (Cary Christopher), the one kid from Justine’s class who didn’t disappear. Each of these characters draws out a different emotion: Justine is grieving and self-destructive, Archer is angry and looking for a target, Paul is struggling with sobriety, stability, and his relationship. Alex has an even more complicated role to play.
Cregger uses all this to explore the kinds of emotions people feel around loss and abandonment, but the specific narrative elements feel much more specific to school shootings. The sense of loss, the search for a scapegoat, the way it all happened so abruptly and feels so inexplicable, the community’s shock and confusion, the need for the school to go on afterward — it’s all represented here, alongside some pretty specific visuals, like the stuffed-animals-and-candles memorial outside the school.
Isaac: The film also explores Alex’s perspective. He’s harboring a secret he dares not reveal, fearing dire consequences for himself and his family. Cregger uses Alex’s arc to channel his own childhood experience in a fractured home with substance-abusing parents, and to embody one of Weapons’ central themes: growing up with a parasite. That idea surfaces twice: first in a documentary the school principal watches, then in a lesson Alex receives, both defining a parasite as an organism that feeds off another. In Alex’s case, the “parasite” is a force that has overtaken his parents, leaving him to step into the role of caregiver long before his time. I love the ambiguity and mystery surrounding that force, which works to bolster the scare factor. But it bothers me that the ambiguity creeps into the plot, and invites more questions than answers.
Presentation of evidence
Isaac, the case against Weapons’ school-shooting angle: I went into this movie knowing as little as possible. I saw the initial trailer and shut everything else out to avoid spoiling the mystery, and it wasn’t until after I had already watched the film that I discovered it also ties into the director’s childhood. After learning that, it made sense that those sections of the film felt strongest to me, while the school-shooter themes only seemed to scratch the surface of what Cregger may have been trying to say.
The school-shooter angle wasn’t personal for him — it’s more mechanical, not just about the emotions, but about America’s societal divide on how to deal with it. We look for the police to do their jobs, like Justine does with her boy-toy cop Paul. We try to get back to a place of normalcy, like Marcus, the principal. Or we try to figure it out ourselves, like Archer, who’s trying to solve his son’s disappearance alone. The overall message seems to be that it takes an alliance between a liberal teacher and the Big Bad Truck Dad, setting aside their differences, to solve the issue. But that’s only implied, and never woven into the narrative. When Archer dreams about his missing son, an assault rifle and the number 2:17 hover over Alex’s house, but that’s never really part of the narrative either. I had to go do homework to learn it’s a nod to H.R. 1808, the 2022 ban on assault weapons that passed the House with 217 votes, but failed in the Senate.
I have an issue with this, and it’s much the same issue I had with Jordan Peele’s Us, where it felt like the film wasn’t for audiences so much as it was for YouTubers like New Rockstars — the analysts who break down and study all the symbolism and themes sprinkled throughout the picture that weren’t really explored in the narrative itself. I like ambiguity in some cases, but I resent feeling unsatisfied when a movie’s hook (a metaphor for school shootings) feels superfluous to what the film is really about (something much more personal).
Tasha, the case for: I’m not going to argue with you about the giant floating assault rifle, the one element in all of Weapons that struck me as too literal and too obvious. (And also faintly ridiculous.) Cregger gets a little bit of grace on that one because it’s happening in a dream. But the other dreams in Weapons seem to be pretty specific psychic impressions about what’s really going on: Archer and Justine both seeing creepy representations of Alex’s eerie “Aunt Gladys” (Amy Madigan), Archer following his dream-son to Alex’s house, Justine seeing all her students frozen in place except Alex, who’s been remade in Gladys’ image. It feels like Justine and Archer are both tapping into some kind of unconscious understanding of their enemy and what’s happened to the children, and the floating gun feels like it’s outside all that, and is a more literal representation of how Gladys turns her victims into weapons.
But the gun and its pointed “2:17” reference aside, the school-shooting metaphor here doesn’t strike me as a preachy message about how America’s political left and the right need to sync up and solve the problem. (If the message were that literal, Archer would be arguing that the Constitution protects our rights to use mind-controlling magic.) To me, it just feels like Cregger is tapping into the emotions and complications we all recognize from these events, in the same way disaster movies after 9/11 tended to use familiar iconography around collapsing buildings and spreading clouds of debris, without necessarily carrying political messages about 9/11 particularly.
Yes, Archer drives a pickup truck and Justine is a teacher, but I just don’t see them as all that representative of different sides of the school-shooting issue. Am I missing a deeper sense of the metaphor here?
Isaac: Well, Archer doesn’t find out about the mind-control stuff until much too late to even raise an argument about it. But I do believe Archer and Justine’s backgrounds play heavily into symbolically representing the political right and left, in a surface-level way that could’ve been dug into deeper. Archer is a small-town, big-truck-driving blue-collar guy, to say the least, and he believes he can do police work better than the cops, and that fits some broad stereotypes that would align him with the right.
Then you look at Justine, who gives off such leftist whistleblower vibes, it’s comedic. She questions authority, especially the police, and has no faith in their ability. She intervenes in Alex’s life in ways that are downright illegal, even if she’s coming from a place of genuine empathy. She’s tender-hearted (or bleeding-hearted, depending on your perspective) enough to focus more on his feelings than his rule-breaking when he sneaks away from gym glass to steal his classmates’ name tags for Gladys’ ritual. She’s small, but she’s bold, and she cares, maybe even a bit too much.
It seems important to the school-shooting story that Alex is also a soft-hearted, sensitive kid, because that’s what’s being modeled for him at home. His father is as loving and tender as Justine, and supportive of his wife even when he doesn’t want to be, when her creepy aunt comes to live with them. He cares about his son as a person, which just makes Alex’s losses more tragic.
Whereas it’s implied that Archer’s kid Michael might be a bully because of what he sees at home — we don’t know how belligerent Archer was before his son disappeared, but we know he was a gruff, emotionally withholding man who didn’t know how to interact with his own kid. We know from Alex’s perspective that Michael is a bully, and we can suspect he gets that from his father, an adult bully who blames a vulnerable woman for something outside his control, then stalks and harasses her and vandalizes her car.
I do agree that the movie’s title ties into Gladys turning her victims into weapons, but I think it goes a bit deeper. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cregger was using that floating gun to signal that Michael could become a school shooter, given his family background, the trauma of the kidnapping, and being introduced to ultraviolence in a comatose state. If Cregger wasn’t trying to say that all sides of the spectrum need to come together and prioritize our children to avoid traumas like this (or else), I’m not sure what the school-shooter allegory is for in the first place.
Tasha: For me, guessing Michael might someday become a school shooter is going too far into projecting Cregger’s intentions out into the part of the story he deliberately chose not to tell, especially since we know so little about Michael as a person, either before or after the kidnapping. Metaphorically in this case, the “school shooter” is Gladys, who engineers all the violence; the kids are the guns, not the gun-wielders. Which is an alternate read on the floating gun over Alex’s house — it represents what she’s turned the kids into. In the dream, Archer is looking for Michael, and arguably the gun is telling us what Michael has become in Gladys’ hands, though unlike with characters like Archer or Marcus, we don’t see what kids-as-weapons fully looks like until the movie’s climax.
For me, the school-shooting imagery is much more about the familiar details of the aftermath of school violence, particularly the shock, helplessness, and frustration the community feels. I see Archer and Justine less as specific political avatars (c’mon, Democrats drive pick-ups too) than as points on a spectrum of emotional response to the sudden, uncontrollable loss of a large group of children.
You can see most of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief stretched between the two of them: Archer is anger and bargaining, either trying to find and punish a scapegoat, or becoming an amateur PI, trying to exchange shoe-leather detective work for answers the entire police department failed to find. Justine, for her part, is in denial and depression, trying to drown her emotions with heavy drinking and self-destructive behavior, like manipulating struggling alcoholic cop Paul (Alden Ahrenreich) into abandoning his carefully won sobriety and cheating on his wife. The fact that the two of them end up working together does feel significant, but to me, it just represents the endpoints of their separate attempts to work through their emotions. They both approach the problem with different responses and in different ways, but like so many other people who navigate grief, they eventually both arrive at the same end point.
But let me ask this: Maybe the real expression of school shootings here is the shocking ending, where the kids themselves commit an act of grotesque violence, and it’s implied that the community’s confusion and frustration is about to hit a whole new level. There are a lot of shocking moments in this movie, but for me, none of them are as startling as the image of these third-graders hurdling their bodies through walls and windows as they try to get to their victims. As The Onion grimly points out every time there’s a new mass-casualty shooting, America has become somewhat inured to the idea of kids committing violence. Cregger finds a way to make it horrifying again, and to remind us that no matter how heinous the act they commit, these are just kids. Does that land for you at all as a payoff?
Isaac: I think the school-shooter theme is used to explore grief through these characters, but I also believe a statement is being made at the same time. I think you make a very interesting parallel between Gladys being the shooter and the missing children being the guns. I also believe Gladys is the shooter in this metaphor — but folks like Paul, Alex’s parents, principal Marcus, and Jake are the weapons. The missing children are the victims of school shootings, the ones who are left alive and have a piece of their innocence stolen from them by being part of this trauma.
They don’t commit violence until they’re deployed by Alex, who is a victim of Gladys just as they are. The kids tearing into Gladys until she’s a bloody pulp and the kids staring down at the mayhem is them involuntarily witnessing the horror of school shootings. The reason I wouldn’t be surprised if Archer’s son becomes a school shooter is because the survivors are victims of violence and traumatized by it, which begets more violence.
That’s the fallout. The adverse side effects and result of this situation. This stems back to my thought that the film’s statement is “Children must be prioritized to avoid traumas like this, because it just creates more trauma down the line.” And not just when it pertains to school shootings, but the more common things as well, like kids being exposed to alcoholism at a young age, similar to Cregger’s upbringing. Prioritize the children! Don’t play the blame game or look to legislation to be the best parent you can be, because it starts at home, like it did for Alex and Michael.
But given how my theater reacted to Weapons’ ending, we may already be doomed. I agree America is numb to the idea of children committing acts of violence, because my audience roared with laughter at the scene of children hurdling their bodies through windows and walls to kill an old lady. I don’t know about your theater, but the audience in mine found it hilarious! I don’t entirely believe Cregger played the moment to be horrifying, either. I think he intentionally filmed that sequence with humor at the forefront. An old lady yelling and slowly running away from kids, no matter the context, is hilarious. And the film transitions between drama, horror, and comedy so often that the laughter felt welcomed. After that ending, I wondered “Was I not supposed to be taking all this seriously the whole time?”
Tasha: I agree that the climactic sequence plays as weirdly comedic. I found the child-weapons horrifying, but Amy Madigan’s slow-motion flailing fleeing felt pretty Keystone Kops, like it just needed “Yakety Sax” playing in the background to be a full-on Benny Hill chase scene. I don’t blame anyone who laughed: Weapons is a tense, gruesome, intense movie, and it’s natural to find the release at the end cathartic. Though given how ridiculous, over-the-top, and similarly laugh-worthy the equivalent climax gets in Zach Cregger’s Barbarian (I will never stop laughing at The Mother smashing through a concrete wall like the Kool-Aid Man), I’m wondering if the dark-comedy ending may just be a signature for him.
But I also don’t think you were wrong to take the rest of the movie seriously — especially not its evocation of elementary-school shooting victims! I have to ask at this point, though: Your original complaint was that this entire metaphor was shallow and poorly thought through, but you’ve laid out a pretty thorough analysis of what the characters mean, how it all works into the movie’s themes, and what we’re supposed to get out of it. What did you feel was missing? What did you want more of in Weapons?
Isaac: I had the same issue with Barbarian that I did with Weapons in terms of the ending — the tonal shift gave me whiplash, the more Cregger explained The Mother. He attempts to course-correct that in Weapons by leaving some things ambiguous, but every loosely implied answer meant two more questions sprung up in its place.
Both films work best when saturated in their own mystery — the second the reveals come during Alex’s perspective, and Weapons’ horror elements ramp up, the less scary it becomes. I could feel my interest waning. I guess I wish the film stayed more in the pocket of its horror-mystery hook, instead of riding the line of dark fairy tale/dramedy the further it progresses.
I never felt satisfied upon finding out the mystery of why 17 children from the same class ran outside at 2:17 a.m. to go who-knows-where. We learned when, where, how, but never exactly why, beyond their presence sustaining Gladys’ health. What’s her motive? Why children? Ambiguity of the origins of her power and their mechanics are effective, but don’t skimp out on what made me come to the theater: Why exactly did she take those kids, and what happened to them now that she’s dead?
Couple that with the arcs of Paul, Marcus, and Jake ultimately being abandoned to set them up as brain-dead obstacles in the final act, having to do homework and immerse myself in interviews and breakdown videos to understand key aspects of the film (Brolin couldn’t even give us a straight answer about what the floating gun means), and having my questions suspended until whatever prequel or continuing story the film sets up by the end — I just wish Weapons, which appeared to be a deeper movie on the surface, wasn’t just setting up a franchise to explain things that could’ve readily been answered here in this story. If you want to be mysterious, be mysterious, but don’t set up a future film at the end, in which more will be explained.
Closing arguments (and opening arguments in the case for and against Weapons 2)
Tasha: I’m on record as saying I think the end of Weapons tells us everything we actually need to know, and that the fact that we want to know more is a feature, not a bug. I like the movie’s ambiguities far more than I’d like a cleaner, more spelled-out version that, for instance, put Archer in a MAGA hat and covered Justine’s car with Kamala Harris bumper stickers, and that had them discussing and analyzing his dream-gun imagery before braving Alex’s house. The details we get about Justine’s school and the community’s response communicated enough about the school-shooting experience for me to feel the emotions without making it more literal.
And I’d much rather see Cregger move on to another startling original vision like this one than turn his discarded origin-story material into another movie. I’m with you on feeling disappointed by any movie that feels like it’s saving all the important answers for a sequel or prequel or spin-off. But here, Weapons gave me what I needed — including enough mysterious hooks to fuel interesting conversations about what Cregger is really doing here.
Isaac: I’m right there with you, in that a more obvious movie with characters explaining all their parallels and wearing all their stereotypes on their sleeves would be a boring alternative. And I do enjoy these deeper discussions where we can dig into what characters may represent with the little we get with them. But I don’t know if I want to know more about Weapons after this movie, because what enticed me was why these children mysteriously ran off. I’m not interested in a full-length feature film about Gladys, which it seems like we’re going to get.
It reminds me of The Black Phone, another horror film involving a creep luring in children, that’s also getting a sequel this year. I never understood the need for a part two, as everything in that self-contained story was explained and settled. I cared about the kids in Black Phone, not The Grabber, but a sequel about the monster is exactly what we’re getting. Black Phone 2 made me ask myself the same question a continuation of Weapons brought to mind: Why?
