Zach Cregger’s 2025 horror film Weapons released in theaters on August 8th and has grossed over $140 million since. The film is set in a small town where, as the young girl narrator explains, every kid in one teacher’s class disappeared. All but one.
Known for his 2022 movie Barbarian, Zach Cregger is an actor and filmmaker. Similar to Barbarian, which covers the issue of sexual assault, Weapons has mature themes like addiction and grief ingrained into every detail. An interesting element of Weapons is that it is split into parts similar to Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope, where a character is featured in each section.
The movie primarily follows Justine Gandy, the teacher of the class that disappeared. She is ostracized by the community and blamed for the vanishing of the kids, causing her to turn to alcoholism, and throughout the movie, she attempts to find the kids to defend her reputation and sanity.
Another main character, Archer Graff, is one of the angry parents, accusing Justine of being related to the disappearance of the kids. In the film, he is unsatisfied with the attempts of the police to find the missing children and takes matters into his own hands.
Paul Morgan and James Anthony are two primary characters. Paul, a cop, pursues James, a drug addict, after a confrontation, playing a game of cat and mouse which eventually leads them to the mystery of the kids.
Finally, Marcus is the principal of the school from which the children disappear. At the beginning of the movie the young girl narrates, “A lot of people die in a lot of weird ways.” Marcus was the first victim of these strange deaths.
Spoilers:
Cregger’s main inspiration for this film was the death of his friend and his father’s alcoholism during his childhood. In 2021, Trevor Moore, a close friend of Cregger, died from a fall from his balcony. Moore was intoxicated and had fallen around 2:30 am. It was unclear whether it was an accident or a suicide. Each of the parts, and their respective characters, symbolise an aspect of grief that Cregger experienced.
The main antagonist of the movie is Gladys Lily. She claims to be the aunt of Alex Lily, though Alex, the only child left in the class, and his father hardly remember her. Gladys plans to move in with the Lily’s because of her declining health and once she does, things start going wrong.
After Alex walks home from school, due to his parents failing to pick him up, he finds his parents in a trance induced by Gladys. She threatens Alex by making his parents harm themselves in an uncomfortably tense scene. With Alex afraid of what she can do, she convinces him not to tell anyone about what’s happening.
Alex’s unsafe homelife during the movie mirrors that of Creggers because of his alcoholic father. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cregger said, “The final chapter of this movie with Alex and the parents, that’s autobiographical,”
He later said, “The idea that this foreign entity comes into your home, and it changes your parent, and you have to deal with this new behavioral pattern that you don’t understand and don’t have the equipment to deal with.”
Justine is also written to be a stand in for Cregger. In the same interview, he says, “I’m an alcoholic. I’m sober for 10 years; my father died of cirrhosis.” This connects to Justine through her alcoholism caused by a traumatic event and may show that Cregger was tempted to relapse at the time of Moore’s death.
Eventually Alex is made to steal an item from each of his classmates in return for Gladys leaving them which she promises will bring his parents out of their paralyzed state. Gladys uses these items to take control of the children and force them to run to the Lilly’s house at 2:17 am, mirroring the time that Moore died.
Gladys claims that these children will heal her yet there is never any indicator of that. This could be a metaphor for how someone’s tolerance for drugs continues to build up until they need more and more but the drugs never actually make them better.
Near the beginning of the movie, both Justine and Archer have dreams ending in a lady with clown makeup scaring them awake. While Justine’s dream is, for the most part, just to scare the audience, Archer’s dream has symbolic messaging that hints at the deeper themes in the film.
In his dream, Archer wakes up at 2:17 am in his son’s bed, walks downstairs, and sees his son running into the trees in front of his house. Archer chases after him only to end up back at his house. This running in circles symbolises that blaming Justine for the disappearance was getting him nowhere.
As Archer approaches his house, a black assault rifle fades into view and looms above the house with the numbers 2:17 am appearing on the side. This is one of the more confusing examples of symbolism in the film but it may be revealing that the disappearance of the kids is an allegory for school shootings and the weaponry symbolizes Archer’s rage.
Finally, while the ending is best left unspoiled, the final voiceover says that all of the children were reunited with their families and some of them were even able to speak again. This line reveals the message of the movie. Even after traumatic events have passed, things don’t just go back to normal, we have to live with what’s changed.
Overall the movie was solid. Weapons had slightly crossed over the threshold of depth where it loses accessibility in exchange for deeper themes. After a certain point it becomes too difficult to read and thus loses quality.
Also the main villain, Gladys, seemed a little too absurdist. For a movie about the kidnapping kids and the deep suffering this inflicted. An odd clown witch is too goofy for a movie about a kid whose family and entire world was taken from him.
Regardless, the main idea was really good and the characters were all interesting and had depth of their own. The idea of a little kid having to take care of his family was interesting and had so much depth just for that depth to be taken by a silly hag.
All in all Weapons is definitely worth a watch if you like horror movies.