Weapons is the newest horror film from Barbarian filmmaker Zach Cregger, and like his first film, it features a jaw-dropping twist revealed through a nonlinear timeline. And with the movie now streaming on HBO Max just in time for Halloween, it’s a great time to unpack the dark, disturbing ending of Weapons.
Weapons opens with a child narrating the story we’re watching, as if it were a suburban fairytale. As the unseen narrator tells the audience, 17 students from the same class at school left their homes at 2:17 a.m. — and never came back. Over the course of the film, as grieving parent Archer (Josh Brolin), scapegoated teacher Justine (Julia Garner) and police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich) search for answers, the truth about who is behind the strange tragedy is revealed. (Spoilers ahead!)
What happened to the kids in ‘Weapons’?
Throughout the film, we see the children from Justine’s classroom leave their homes at 2:17 a.m. in the exact same manner — running with their arms outstretched at their sides, toward the very same direction, almost as if they are in a trance. The only child who does not leave their home that night is Alex (Cary Christopher), but in initial interviews with the police, he and his parents do not have any answers about where his peers may have gone.
As it turns out, Alex is lying — and for good reason. That’s because all of the children who went missing headed for his house. Criminal James (Austin Abrams) discovers the children in the basement in a catatonic state, where they are being used as an energy source for Alex’s Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan).
Who is Aunt Gladys?
As we learn from Alex’s storyline, Aunt Gladys showed up at his house, claiming to be an elderly relative in need of care. (Whether she’s actually related to Alex, or just using his family, is up for interpretation.) Gladys initially appears very ill, but one day, when Alex comes home, he finds her looking much healthier and more energetic. His parents, however, are in catatonic states and seemingly under the control of Gladys, who is able to force them to do terrible things like stab themselves with a fork.
It turns out that Gladys is some sort of supernatural being who siphons the energy of others and can place people under her control — essentially turning them into weapons with a short supernatural ritual. Gladys tells Alex that she is using his parents as an energy source, and it is now his responsibility to care for them. She warns Alex that she will hurt his parents if he tells anyone what she’s doing.
Warner Bros. Pictures
Alex keeps this secret for weeks and is forced to feed his parents soup and cover the windows of his house so that no one learns the truth. But soon, Gladys demands more energy. She tells Alex to get something that belongs to each of his classmates so she can perform the ritual and do what she did to Alex’s parents, but to an entire classroom of children.
Alex, having no choice but to comply, helps Gladys get all of his classmates to his house, where she siphons off their energy, leaving them catatonic in the basement.
How ‘Weapons’ ends, including whether the kids ever go home
Eventually, teacher Justine and parent Archer, originally at odds throughout the film as Archer long blamed Justine for the disappearance of his son Matthew (Luke Speakman), team up and discover the truth about the kids’ whereabouts. They go to Gladys’s house, where a battle ensues: Gladys uses her powers, weaponizing Alex’s catatonic parents to attempt to stop them from getting to the children. But Alex is able to pull one over on Gladys, using her strange ritual to turn the children in the basement against her.
Gladys is chased all throughout town by the 17 children she kept in the basement, who are now under Alex’s control. The kids catch up to Gladys and attack her — ripping her apart in a gruesome scene. When she’s dead, the spell over the children is officially broken. Archer finds his son Matthew and takes him home.
Though the film ends with Archer and Matthew walking off, the narrator reveals that the children were reunited with their parents and that a few of them even “started talking” again. It’s left ambiguous as to whether or not the kids will ever come out of the catatonic state Gladys put them in.
Sadly, Alex’s parents are institutionalized, and he goes to live with a different aunt — one who was not an energy-draining witch.
Is ‘Weapons’ a true story?
While there are no witches like Gladys stealing children in the middle of the night, Cregger told Rolling Stone that Weapons was inspired by a real-life tragedy: the 2021 death of his best friend and Whitest Kids U’ Know collaborator Trevor Moore.
“The town is dealing with a loss. And so was I,” Cregger said.
He also said he did not start out knowing that Gladys would be the instrument behind the missing children, deciding to write the movie with only the initial question as to where the kids went. “I’m just like, ‘OK, let’s go. Let’s see if I can solve this. What happened? Who were they? What was left behind? What does it feel like?’”
The central concept of Weapons — children who simply vanish one day — has also made many people think about the film as an allegory for school shootings. In Archer’s dream sequence, an automatic rifle appears in the clouds with the numbers “2:17.” However, Cregger said he wasn’t making any conscious statement by including the gun in the film.
“It’s a very important moment for me in this movie, and to be frank with you, I think what I love about it so much is that I don’t understand it,” Cregger told Variety. “I have a few different ideas of what it might be there for, but I don’t have the right answer. I like the idea that everyone is probably going to have their own kind of interaction or their own relationship with that scene, whether they don’t give a s*** about it and it’s boring, or whether they think it’s some sort of political statement, or whether they think it’s just cool. I don’t really care. It’s not up to me. I just like that it’s there.”