Weapons: Movie Analysis and Review
Warner Bros
By: Mathew Manseau and Frederika Skrobotova
Weapons is a 2025 Horror/Mystery film directed by Zach Cregger that employs nonlinear storytelling to tell a story of grief, love, and 17 kids inexplicably going missing.
Summary (Spoilers)
The film starts with a child narrating the introduction to the premise of the movie. She explains how one day, in Maybrook Elementary School, every student but one in Justine Gandy’s third-grade class disappeared. That day, at 2:17 AM, every kid woke up, walked out of their house, and began running outside towards an unknown area. They ran in a specific way with their arms half-stretched out to make the shape of a triangle. The only student who stayed home and showed up that morning to school was Alex Lilly. After explaining this, the narrator stops talking, and the movie starts, beginning with one of six total perspectives shown, that of Justine Gandy.
Justine gets placed on leave after the incident due to both suspicion that she had something to do with the incident and the shame she received from the whole town. We follow her throughout the next few days, seeing how she can’t let the case go, being paranoid, relapsing into alcohol, and following Alex home on several occasions. The first time she follows him home, wanting to talk to him, she notices all of the house’s windows are covered in newspaper. Curious, she walks all around the property and notices a gap in the newspaper. Looking through it, she sees Alex’s parents sitting on a couch, disheveled and motionless, staring right at her. Frightened by this, Justine calls Maybrook’s principal, Marcus Miller, and demands he do a wellness check on Alex. Marcus reluctantly agrees. The second time Justine follows Alex, she attempts to strike a conversation. Alex runs from her, insistent that she leave him alone. However, instead of listening to Alex, Justine stays in her car overnight, watching the house. She eventually falls asleep, and we see the house’s door open. Alex’s mother staggers out with a pair of scissors, climbs inside the car and started cutting off a lock of Justine’s hair. Justine’s perspective ends there, and we switch over to Archer Graff.
Archer is the grieving parent of Matthew, one of the missing kids. He launches an investigation of his own into the case, frustrated that the police haven’t made any significant progress. He looks over security camera footage of the children running and notices how their paths line up in a similar direction. Archer pinpoints this area on a map but doesn’t have an exact location. Sure that Justine has something to do with the disappearance, he follows her into a gas station and attempts to figure out what she’s been hiding. The confrontation is interrupted by Marcus, running towards Justine in the same position the missing kids ran. He begins attacking Justine, and Archer manages to hold him off long enough for Justine to run into the station building.
The perspective switches once again, the next two being those of Paul Morgan and James, a police officer and a homeless drug addict. Paul chases James down after catching him trying to break into a building, then knocks him out after accidentally stabbing himself with a needle in James’s pocket. After realizing the incident was caught on his car’s camera, he lets James go. We later see James breaking into Alex’s house, and while gathering objects to later sell, he hears a noise from the house’s basement. Entering it, he sees the 17 kids, standing in the same motionless way Alex’s parents were sitting. Spooked, he quickly leaves the house. Remembering the $50,000 reward given to whoever found the missing children, he calls the police station and ends up leading Paul to the house. Paul goes in to investigate for hours. It’s not shown what he does inside, but it’s revealed that he was put under Gladys’s control. He only returns to drag James inside.
The next perspective shown is Marcus’s, who intends to meet with Alex’s parents for the wellness check. Instead, Gladys, Alex’s visiting aunt shows up, very concerned about whether anyone had alerted the authorities on the house. She then claims Alex’s parents have fallen ill and can’t make it to the check, very clearly lying. The meeting seems to have gone nowhere, as we cut to a later scene in Marcus’s and his husband Terry’s house, to which Gladys shows up unannounced. She requests a bowl of water, and as they get it for her, it is revealed that Gladys is a witch who can put people under her control, seemingly gathering youth from them. By wrapping one of Marcus’s prize ribbons around a thorny branch and ringing a bell, he is put under her control. She snaps off a piece of Terry’s hair, which she also wraps around the branch, and breaks it in half – causing Marcus to relentlessly attack Terry until Gladys drops the branch in water. She then wraps the lock of Justine’s hair around the same branch, snapping it which causes Marcus to “lock” onto Justine, chasing her down. At the time Marcus gets to Justine, she is talking to Archer who wants to get information out of her. After Marcus gets to Justine, she gets in her car and drives away. Marcus gets run over by oncoming traffic and it cuts to Alex’s part.
The final part is from Alex’s perspective, the audience learns that Gladys had taken control of his parents. Alex is forced to agree that he won’t tell anyone about Gladys being at the house or even existing. She explains that he still has to feed his parents every day and requests that he bring home a belonging from each of the students in his class. Those belongings allow Gladys to take control over all of them and she places them in the basement. Eventually, after the montage of feeding everyone and helping Gladys, Alex’s part catches up shortly after James is dragged into the house. We see Archer and Justine enter the house and they set off an alarm that causes James and Paul to attack Archer and Justine. It cuts to Alex’s view and he steps over a line of salt that Gladys told him not to cross, causing his parents to scream and chase after him. After running around the room Gladys had her items in, he is able to wrap her hair around the thorny branch and cause everyone who was under control to attack her instead, chasing her throughout the town and killing her. Her death seemingly snaps everyone else out of her control, however, it’s unclear if the children are free or under Alex’s control now. Later, Archer catches up and finds Matthew, then the narrator returns to explain that Alex is now living with a different family, ending the movie by saying that it took years for the kids to start speaking again.
Rating
8/10
The movie had an excellent plot and great sound design, although it lacked a consistent tone. The tone quickly shifts from being a horror movie to being a comedy. Especially during the climax—the movie didn’t take itself too seriously, which felt out of place from the content and the message the film tries to convey. The story was well written, unique, and kept us hooked.
Inspiration & Review (Mild Spoilers)
Weapons is loosely inspired by real events in Zack Cregger’s life, which he expands on in an interview with The Next Best Picture Podcast. He began writing Weapons after a close friend of his died, saying “it was a really fertile playground for me to write about my anger and sadness and all these things, and let them do everything I wanted to do.” Weapons is an exploration of Cregger’s grief and experience after the loss of a loved one, which he notes felt therapeutic. That being said, Weapons is definitely more focused on its themes of grief and addiction rather than the horror aspect. While the scenes in which a character is attacking another are good, those scenes don’t seem to take themselves seriously. For example, when James is put under Gladys’s control, he begins attacking Archer, even after being knocked down. It overall has a comedic tone, with him falling down, then getting back up, repeated multiple times. This might have been an intentional choice but does make the horror side of the movie seem a bit sloppy and inconsistent with its tone. When is the viewer supposed to be scared of the characters and when are they meant to laugh? Is all of it meant to be slightly comedic or is all of it meant to be disturbing? It’s good to balance out a film with some lighter moments, but it’s important to choose those moments carefully.
Analysis (Spoilers)
Weapons represents self-destructive behavior with its characters, name, and themes. The name Weapons suggests that the characters use weapons against themselves, and also turn into weapons. For instance, substance use is a recurring theme across Justine, Paul, and James. Their usage of these substances is fueled by Gladys. Gladys has a bell with an upside-down triangle and the number 6 carved on it that gives her control when she rings it. That same triangle is shown in the intro of the film with a circle around it, which is a symbol that represents the journey to sobriety and is used by the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, tying into the film’s themes of grief and addiction. The 6 on the bell also represents the 6 main characters of the film, Alex, Justine, Paul, James, Archer, and Marcus. The bell Gladys uses allows her to “weaponize” people by making them “lock on” to someone. It controls that person and makes them relentlessly chase and attack someone. In the dream scene with Archer chasing after his son Matthew, a rifle is shown hovering over the house Matthew runs into with the number 2:17, the time that the 17 kids ran away. The fear parents face when their children are missing is shown numerous times. The rifle might be an allegory for one of the many ways parents may lose their children. The number 217 is also relevant since the number 217 is an angel number that encourages someone to seek enlightenment. Archer has his dream where he follows his son, Matthew. The dream reveals where Matthew went and it was Archer’s moment of enlightenment since he learned Justine was innocent.
Final Thoughts Although being labeled as a horror movie, Weapons is seen to be much more than that. The film is a thrilling, uniquely told story that showcases grief, self-destruction, several coping mechanisms, and love. It’s an interesting watch with many open-ended details through the film for the audience to interpret in many relevant ways, different perspectives, and nonlinear storytelling. Though it has its flaws with inconsistent tone and unseriousness, it makes up for it with a great representation of what someone can go through after losing someone, and a great story overall.