Movie: Weapons
☆☆☆☆☆
The most terrifying part of this movie was me crying during the entire end sequence while everyone else laughed around me. Regardless of Cregger’s intentions, I feel like there is a lot of potentially harmful rhetoric in this movie.
My main thought is this— if Cregger truly wanted to make a film that successfully commented on school violence and mass shootings (which idk if he wanted to do), he would not have made Gladys his villain. The true demographic of people who are committing mass acts of school violence are young adult white men. Once again, just as he did in Barbarian, Cregger used an older female body as the grotesque monster.
In the final sequence which really got everyone laughing (…), Gladys is running from the group of children she abducted and it’s supposed to be funny because… why? The only answer I can find is that Cregger believes that the her movements, body, and attempts at femininity are laughable.
Choosing Gladys as the monster doesn’t just mock older women/the female body, it also points to a larger issue with the story itself. Gladys is the Other, and the film is basically saying ‘There is a malicious Other that is going to steal your children!’ What could have been a compelling film about violence within the family system and school violence feels instead like a story that mimics a sort of conservative panic around the Other that is akin to anti-trans legislation and DEI cuts.
In the end, the monster is killed by the children who she took because Alex, who had to care for his parents and his peers, used Gladys’ witchy power to fix them on her. Should I be happy, think “good for them” because they killed her? Is the proposal a sort of vigilantism to fix these problems? Sure, maybe this all sounds like a stretch, and sure, it’s just a horror movie. But maybe the reason the whole theater was laughing is because Cregger intentionally or unintentionally infused harmful beliefs in these character and this story that make people think this is just the way the world is. Kids will be brutalized and it’s up to the average joe, or god forbid the children themselves, to deal with it and take revenge, and the person brutalizing your children won’t be mass shooters or abusive adults, it will be an Other that you’ve projected your fears onto.
I get this is just a movie, but I really did come out of the theater crying, shaken up by the movie and by the audience reaction. Horror is such a unique avenue to deal with disturbing and distressing issues, and it feels to me like Cregger has taken a lazy path that is deeply harmful.
On a technical level, it was a really good horror movie. But what I’m taking from the story is too harmful to make this a good movie for me.