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Moving Pictures
Aug 11, 2025, 06:28AM

Torn Apart

Weapons is another drama smuggled into theaters as horror.

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It’s a bad day when the only semblance of an active, if not thriving, film culture is something called “Film Twitter.” Years after Elon Musk renamed the social media site “X” and drove away a not insignificant number of users, Twitter’s become a wasteland of robots, shills, and the remaining addicted (I’m not excused). For many people, there’s no reason to stay on the site other than its film “community,” however bitter and anemic it’s become. As with every other sphere of public life, the general level of intelligence and quality of discussion have plummeted, leaving otherwise not-stupid people sounding pretty dumb—but to be fair, sometimes there’s nothing to talk about, but the addiction’s always there. A “discourse” will self-generate and last as long as needed; I doubt that clip of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes would’ve gone viral at all if another celebrity died, another piece of the edifice gone.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons, his second film and the follow-up to his surprise 2022 hit Barbarian, has hit theaters and “Film Twitter” has already coalesced around exactly one talking point, just as it did with Eddington last month. “Film Twitter” played pinball dithering over whether or not Ari Aster’s film was “centrist” and “playing both sides,” as if we were right back in Charlottesville in 2017; now, people are saying that Cregger has nothing to say that and that Weapons is “about nothing.” Sean Fennessey of The Big Picture podcast wrote, “Just read a few WEAPONS reviews written by younger critics. They seem concerned the movie ‘isn’t about anything.’ This is what 10 years of “elevated horror ”handholding has created. It’s nice to reflect a bit rather than have the thing explained to you by a character.”

I’ve also seen Weapons compared favorably to last year’s Longlegs; I agree with the assessment of one Tweeter—even if I can’t find the tweet—that, paraphrasing, “Weapons is like if Longlegs stuck the landing.” Osgood Perkins’ inexplicably popular horror movie completely fell apart at the end, its grim and colorless mystery culminating in a laughable display of “it was all just MAGIC!” Absent a recurring icon with known strengths and weaknesses—Jason Voorhees, Freddie Kreuger, Michael Myers, the alien from Alien, the predator from Predator—it’s very difficult to take the dive into the supernatural and the superhuman, because it invalidates everything that’s come before, leaving the audience no room to think. As the mythology is left open-ended, viewers are paradoxically left scratching their heads—so, what was the point of this? Magic. And the point of that? Magic. And so on…

Michael Shanks’ Together was a romantic drama smuggled into theaters as a horror movie, and even though the villain turns out to belong to, what else, a cult, the twist justifies itself and is supported by the movie we’ve just seen. I can’t say the same for Weapons, which does suffer from “it was all just an evil witch,” but the payoff is worth it: the film ends with 15 elementary school kids devouring the evil old woman alive. To go back to the beginning: Julia Garner plays a teacher, and one day all of the kids in her class go missing. Josh Brolin is among the parents, most naturally suspicious of Garner; what no one can figure out is why all the kids left their houses of their own accord, all running away with their arms extended at a 45 degree angle. Cregger cuts from multiple sides of the story, breaking the film up into character segments: “Justine,” “Archer,” “Paul,” “Marcus,” “Alex.”

Cregger was apparently inspired by Magnolia, and the influence is clear, if not in the block construction of the screenplay. Like Together, Weapons is closer to a suburban drama like The Ice Storm than most recent horror movies; both films augur a marginally less boring near future at the movies where our current options are limited to superheroes, kids movies, the occasional auteur, remakes, and plenty of horror. The idea that Weapons “isn’t about anything” only applies to its ending, and its inexplicably powerful supernatural supervillain. Why does Aunt Gladys (played to the rafters by an unrecognizable Amy Madigan) come to town and zombify her sister, her husband, and these 15 kids? Fountain of youth? Mass sacrifice? She isn’t given the opportunity to “explain her plan” (Thank God), and if not for the remarkably moving climax where all the psychically imprisoned kids tear their captor limb from limb, I would’ve been just as pissed as I was walking out of Longlegs. The movie delivered on a visceral level, and made its own emotional sense; no proper explanation is needed.

The cast is what Weapons really has going for it: Garner is one of the most exciting young actresses, and it’s a relief to see her in something new after possibly getting lost in the soup with Madonna and her long-delayed biopic. Her performance in The Assistant was overlooked because of its early-2020 release, and I’ve been waiting to see her again. Five years on, she fits right in as an earnest and semi-alcoholic school teacher just trying to hold it together and, hopefully, find her kids. Brolin’s nothing if not dependable, and there are few actors his age working now that could play a pissed-off father better than him. Austin Abrams also distinguishes himself as a grungy meth head caught in the snares of cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) and Madigan’s wrinkled witch. Ehrenreich is another actor who hasn’t been around as much as he should’ve in the last decade; but after a key supporting role in Oppenheimer, he appears to have found his footing, forgiven for the Star Wars spinoff he was made a scapegoat for back in 2018.

Weapons split the full house where I saw it at the Charles—just as many people said they “loved it” as those who thought “it sucked” as I was walking out—but from the moment (still unseen) Madigan gets into a sleeping Garner’s car and discreetly cuts her hair with a gigantic pair of scissors, the audience was primed to scream, and completely tuned into every move the film made (especially Josh Brolin waking up from a nested nightmare and screaming, in wide shot, “What the FUCK!”) An active audience is a healthy audience, and that’s what it’s all “about” to me. It was certainly better than Barbarian (BORING!).

—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits

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