WEAPONS Asks: Who Gets to Die to Save the Children?
Images courtesy Warner Bros.Weapons (Warner Bros., 2025), by director Zach Cregger, is a slick feature focused on the horror of lost children, starring Julia Garner as a wayward teacher and Josh Brolin as a devoted dad. It’s been fairly popular and a big hit in the horror scene, but I left the film feeling a bit dazed by its choice of victims.
In the last few years in horror, there’s been an important conversation surrounding the history of horror and its more problematic tropes. Specifically, filmmakers like Jordan Peele and Rose Glass (Saint Maud) have worked to reframe who dies in a horror film. Whereas horror has a long history of killing off marginalized characters, including people of color, queer people, and the “slutty cheerleader”, most contemporary filmmakers try to frame deaths as non-moral in nature.
Weapons, alas, falls back into that old trap. And I think it has to do with the children.
Here’s the setup of Weapons, spoilers ahead.
The film opens with an unknown child narrator (Scarlett Sher), who explains that in this small town, one day, all the children got up in the middle of the night, walked out of their houses, and never came back. Only one student, Alex, survived.
As the story unfolds, it’s told in sections, each broken into a different point of view. These points of view become archetypal characters, which I believe sets them up for the problems with this film:
Justine (The Teacher)The children were all in one class at the local elementary school, taught by Justine (Julia Garner). Justine is targeted by the town, who are convinced she knows something about the missing children. As we quickly learn, Justine is not as squeaky-clean as she seems on the surface. As she wrestles with the guilt of having her entire class vanish, Justine meets up with an old flame, the local cop Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), and the two hook up.
Justine is the only one who thinks that her one remaining student, Alex, might be in trouble. She begins stalking him, trying to find out the truth about the missing students. Julia Garner has an excellent skill at playing morally gray characters (see The Royal Hotel, 2023), and she generates a lot of empathy on screen.
Justine’s character falls into the stereotype of a woman who is constantly gaslit by those around her. Her principal thinks she cares too much about her kids and crosses boundaries, and thus won’t believe her concerns about Alex. She drinks heavily to deal with the stress (but who could blame her?)
The film can’t kill off Justine, after all, someone has to play the final girl here, so let’s put her aside for now.
Archer (The Dad)Archer is the father of one of the missing children and the loudest person against Justine. Josh Brolin is equally curmudgeonly and fatherly, determined to solve the mystery of the missing children. He starts putting together videos from doorbell cams and realizes the children were all headed toward one section of town when they left their homes.
Archer and Justine eventually team up, as Archer is the only one who believes Justine’s worries over her one remaining student, Alex.
Brolin’s character quickly takes up a lot of emotional space in the film, and while it would have been easy to kill off his character, I think he was saved by the filmmakers for the parents in the audience: You have to have a parent reunited with a kid in a story where kids are missing. The central, emotional point of the story can’t just be their teacher.
Paul (The Corrupt Cop)Paul is a cop who is cheating on his wife with Justine. When he gets caught out, his stress boils over, and he ends up beating up James, a drug addict. Paul hits all of the cop stereotypes: fear of getting injured on the job that overrides what should be a sense of preserving justice, the immediate lack of compunction to cover up his mistakes, plus he is a cheater too. Paul’s actions against James are justified in the film by James leaving syringes in his pockets for Paul to find.
In relationship to the missing children plot, Paul becomes the representative for the police, who rarely handle missing children cases appropriately.
Paul has got to go, and as an audience member, it’s hard not to root for his death. But his character is so stereotypical, and it’s a shame Paul was never given a chance to redeem himself if only to break the stereotype.
James (The Drug Addict)James (Austin Noah Abrams) is unhoused and living in a tent in the woods, where he spends most of his time trying to get more money for drugs. His character is the saddest of the stereotypes presented in this film, not because he’s addicted, but because of how one-note the film makes his character. I’m not sure whether we’re meant to think he’s funny (i.e., a joke) or hate him, but the setup for the tension with his character is that he is the first bystander to truly discover the missing children’s whereabouts.
Of course, as audience members, this is meant to worry us. A drug addict surely would never do the “right” thing and report the missing kids. Oh no! Will the kids ever be saved? Don’t worry — the film solves this by giving James a big cash reward to dangle in front of him as motivation.
James makes for an easy kill, right? Drugs are bad, kids.
For me, James’ death was complicated. Austin Noah Abrams plays the character for laughs, but James is really kind of a tragic figure, and once again, I found myself longing for some reversal of fate here.
Marcus (The School Principal)Marcus (Benedict Wong) is the devoted school principal who has to juggle the crisis of losing a whole class of students and having their teacher go slightly off-course.
In at least one original script for this film that I read, Marcus is straight. But in the final film, Marcus is gay and married to Terry (Clayton Farris). In the film, the two go grocery shopping together and then spend time sitting at matching TV dinner trays with Disney T-shirts. They have the most brutal, most gory on-screen moments.
That should tell you all you need to know: Marcus and Terry have got to go.
Marcus’ death really left a sour taste in my mouth. As the only character who isn’t white in the film, and as a queer character, the extra gore in his death felt particularly frustrating.
As innocent as it may have been meant, Marcus’ death is a subconscious judgment on anyone queer who is in a job close to children. In a world where queer people are often forced back into the closet in order to keep their jobs around kids, the film’s killing off of Marcus was difficult to watch.
Alex (The Survivor)The last section of the film reveals the most, focusing on the one remaining student, Alex.
Where I feel the film succeeds is in Alex’s story. As we learn, Alex’s strange Aunt Gladys comes to stay with the family and ends up doing weird magic to turn his parents into her slaves — her weapons. As Alex is forced to go to school and keep up appearances while his parents are trapped at home, his story becomes a compelling metaphor for child abuse. Like many abused kids, Alex goes along with what his aunt wants, forced to follow her increasingly bizarre rules in order to keep his parents alive. When Gladys convinces him to turn on his classmates, he does so. This echoes the way abusers often make their victims complicit participants in their schemes. It also echoes how abuse victims, especially children, are often very good at hiding the abuse they endure.
Even the villain — a crone, echoing fairy tale villains — is a stereotype. Alex’s Aunt Gladys falls directly into the trope of a wicked witch kidnapping children. She has no backstory or nuance.
Some have said that the message of WEAPONS is that children are weaponized to perpetuate harm — in the way that, as a society, we “allow” school shootings to continue. And partially, this is true. It’s a horrendous reality that our society refuses to pass gun legislation to prevent these kinds of losses. The loss of children reverberates through communities, destroying them. Art can be a metaphor that makes us rethink our choices. It can help us decide to change things.
But if that is the goal, I don’t think the film succeeds because of who it ends up allowing to die on the martyr table for its children. The message that comes off is that marginalized people should die to “save the children”. That imperfect people deserve to die. The reality is that marginalized people are often at the forefront of the fight to make change. Gun violence disproportionately impacts marginalized people. Gun laws today are inherently racist.
While WEAPONS is satisfyingly spooky and has an absolutely bonkers end scene that I really enjoyed, it ultimately struggles to make its message clear.
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[image error]WEAPONS Asks: Who Gets to Die to Save the Children? was originally published in Interstellar Flight Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
