The Feel-Bad, Feel-Good Movie of the Year

This article contains spoilers for the movie Weapons.

The most daring aspect of Weapons is that it answers all of its big questions. The sleeper-hit horror film, written and directed by Zach Cregger, has a distressing but undeniably hooky premise: One night, at 2:17 a.m., all but one student in the same third-grade class got up out of their beds and ran out of their suburban homes with their arms outstretched, vanishing into the night. Where did they go? Why did they run away? The story hinges on an intriguing mystery, but often, opening the mystery box can backfire.

Yet by eventually laying out the reasons behind the kids’ disappearance—and thus making sense of the tragedy—Cregger is doing two things: First, he’s doing his job as the maker of entertainment, creating a dynamite ending that offers real closure. Second, he’s underlining the fallacy of catharsis. Weapons is a movie about a local misfortune that then reveals the enigmatic villain behind it and delights in her comeuppance. Yet it also reminds the viewer that vanquishing evil doesn’t undo the terrors it has already wrought—and that there’s only so much relief a conclusion can actually bring.

Cregger, who was a founding member of the comedy troupe the Whitest Kids U’Know, has said that he began writing Weapons after the tragic accidental death of his close friend and former collaborator Trevor Moore. While the incidents at the core of the film are mythic and supernatural, they also feel utterly senseless; much of Weapons follows the characters trying, and failing, to understand the bizarre thing that’s happened to them. Archer (played by Josh Brolin) is the father of one of the missing children; Justine (Julia Garner) is the teacher who doesn’t know where her students went; and Alex (Cary Christopher) is the missing children’s one remaining classmate, whose continued presence is as curious to everyone as the vanishing of his peers.

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Each of their isolated stories, including those of a few other, more tenuously connected townspeople, functions as a chapter in a larger tale. Cregger is chronicling a community, albeit a dispersed one: People seem to barely know one another, and the town’s institutions, such as law enforcement and the school administration, have responded ineffectually at best. The central conceit of the kids’ disappearance is horrifyingly contemporary—their flight into the night is captured by Ring cameras—but in a neighborhood of identical-looking houses, it’s also troublingly plausible that nobody can figure out where they went.

Eventually, Archer and Justine start to make some progress in their respective searches for the kids, nudged forward by weird dreams and their desire for answers. Yet the person to finally stumble upon the children is an unhoused, drug-addicted man named James (Austin Abrams), who finds them standing zombified in a basement while he’s trying to burglarize what he thinks is an empty home. Cregger thus stages the movie’s most pivotal moment from the perspective of the community’s least emotionally invested member. The unconventional choice hints at the director’s disinterest in a tidy search-and-rescue, and the relief that comes with it. Instead, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s multicharacter opus Magnolia—which Cregger has cited as inspiration—Weapons is rooted in diffusion, tracking lost souls struggling to connect; the action only really begins when they start talking to one another.

After a barrage of freaky, teasing scares, and a lot of ominous attention directed at Alex’s house, where something evil is clearly going on, Weapons gambles on providing solutions. The film recounts what happened from Alex’s point of view. It reveals that his parents have been possessed by his peculiar great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), a dying witch who has set up camp in Alex’s house to drain the life of those around her. When the souls of Alex’s parents prove not to be enough, she enlists the boy to help her bewitch his classmates too, luring them into the house; Alex obliges only when Gladys threatens to kill his parents if he doesn’t help her.

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Madigan is the big reason the final-act revelation works. Chalking up all this madness to one person’s doing might be hard to buy, but her performance is astonishing; as Gladys, she seamlessly slips between brassy charisma and steely menace. The character generates the movie’s biggest laughs and its best jump scares, and her magic is both cryptic and formidable: She can weaponize the people she bewitches as undead assassins, leading to a showdown in which she keeps throwing her thralls at Archer and Justine once they finally figure out what she’s up to.

The catharsis of her defeat is twofold: Not only is Gladys taken down, but her demise also comes at the hands of the children she’s captured. Alex figures out how to work Gladys’s magic and sends them after her, running and screaming, until they tear her apart like a pack of hyenas. The moment is pure cinema joy, even more so because of the transgression—it is a real spooky delight to realize you’re with a packed crowd, cheering on a group of third-graders who are intent on murdering an old lady with their bare hands.

But Cregger gets to have his cake and eat it too. The threat has been taken care of, by way of the kind of kinetic filmmaking that might make anyone punch the air. The battle, however, was long ago lost. The voice-over narration tells us that Alex’s parents remain catatonic, and, after a couple of years, some of the recovered children have only just begun to speak again. Weapons offers a fantasy of triumph, and it’s a satisfying one, but with that exhalation comes many more details to ponder. The wreckage of grief and loss all the characters have been mired in is hardly swept away. As a result, Weapons is the feel-bad, feel-good movie of the year—a rare horror masterpiece that leaps beyond its genre without abandoning its sick, sad heart.