Weapons (2025) 🔪

⚠️ Content Warning: This film could be triggering for some viewers. It deals heavily with children vanishing, being manipulated, and used in sinister ways.


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Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

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Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Weapons (2025) is a chilling horror film centered on the mysterious disappearance of seventeen children from the same elementary school class, all vanishing one night at exactly 2:17 a.m. The community scrambles for answers while paranoia and suspicion rip through everyone connected.

The story unfolds through multiple characters’ perspectives, each giving you a piece of the puzzle:

Justine Gandy (Julia Garner): A teacher whose whole class disappears and who becomes the prime suspect.

Archer (Josh Brolin): A grief-stricken father, guilt-ridden and desperate to find his son. (Originally Pedro Pascal was meant to play him, but Brolin grounds the role with weariness and rage that feels more authentic.)

Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich): A cop compromised by past mistakes.

Marcus (Benedict Wong): A school principal whose secrets unravel in shocking ways.

Alex (Luke David Blumm): A boy trapped in the nightmare at the heart of it all.


At first, it looks like a supernatural mystery. Maybe even a government cover-up. But no — the real horror is witchcraft, possession, and a sinister woman named Gladys (Amy Madigan) pulling the strings.

The film feels like a Stephen King story brought to life: small-town paranoia, grief-stricken parents, the evil hiding behind familiar faces. And yet it isn’t King at all.


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Characters & Performances

Julia Garner as Justine: Carries the paranoia and unfair suspicion well, though her “shady past” with students is undercooked.

Josh Brolin as Archer: The heart of the film. His grief, rage, and slow unraveling feel brutally real. His arc (from accusing Justine to realizing the truth) is one of the strongest.

Alden Ehrenreich as Paul: His corruption makes his downfall inevitable, but he still leaves a strong impression.

Benedict Wong as Marcus: Goes from compassionate principal to one of the most terrifying possession victims. The bulging eyes and erratic body language are nightmare fuel.

Amy Madigan as Gladys: One of the most loathsome horror villains in years — more on her in spoilers.

Highlight Scene: The Gas Station 🚨⛽

One of the most intense sequences in Weapons comes during a confrontation at a gas station. Archer corners Justine while she’s fueling up, ranting and accusing her, when suddenly in the background Marcus is seen sprinting toward them full speed, his body language completely wrong — eyes bulging, arms stiff like an airplane. The dread builds instantly because you realize he’s possessed, and the scene flips from verbal argument to full-blown attack in seconds.

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Pacing

The film is structured in chapters (Justine → Marcus → Paul → James → Alex). Each overlaps with the others, giving the same timeline from different perspectives until the pieces click together. It’s slow at first but escalates into chaos and carnage by the last two chapters.


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Pros ✅

A horror film that genuinely feels like Stephen King without being Stephen King.

The chapter storytelling keeps things layered and tense.

Benedict Wong’s possession scene is disturbing and unforgettable.

The gas station sequence (promo clip) is pure dread and a turning point in the story.

The finale delivers one of the most cathartic horror villain deaths in recent memory.


Cons ❌

Justine’s shady backstory is hinted at but not fleshed out enough.

Also I feel they could have cut out rhe Junkies chapter, he was the weakest part. He really isn’t interesting, irs just hes a junky.



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Final Thoughts & Rating

Weapons is a vicious, layered horror film that weaponizes paranoia, witchcraft, and grief into something unforgettable. It’s messy, unnerving, and unrelenting — but in the best way.

⭐ 9/10 — with an extra nod to Gladys, who deserves a spot in the “most hated characters in horror” hall of fame.


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Spoilers Ahead – Enter If You Dare ⚠️

The Chapter Structure

Chapter: Justine – We meet the teacher whose entire class vanishes. She’s immediately under suspicion, rumors swirl about her “getting too close” to kids, and Marcus even calls her out: “You’re a teacher, not a guardian.” At the gas station confrontation, she’s cornered and painted (literally) as a witch. She’s essentially the scapegoat of the town.

Chapter: Marcus – We see the principal’s unraveling. He buys red paint (the same used to vandalize Justine’s car with “WITCH”), and later, after being possessed by Gladys, he brutally kills his boyfriend. His possession scenes are some of the creepiest in the film.

Chapter: Paul – We follow the cop’s downward spiral. After a tense encounter with a junkie named James, Paul gets dragged deeper into Gladys’ web, eventually attacking Justine in violent, grisly fashion (the cheese grater scene is hard to watch). His arc ends with his brains blown out by Justine herself.

Chapter: James – The junkie stumbles into the truth first. He finds Alex’s comatose parents and the missing kids in Gladys’ basement. His attempt to expose her only feeds into her manipulation, as both he and Paul get folded into her game.

Chapter: Archer

Archer’s story is the slow-burn grief chapter, and it hits heavy. He’s a father hollowed out by guilt, sleeping in his missing son’s bed every night instead of with his wife, clinging to a phantom routine that feels almost ritualistic.

But here’s where it gets interesting: he channels that grief into obsession. Archer becomes the town’s unofficial detective, mapping the paths of the missing kids until he realizes they all funnel back to Alex’s house. On the way there, though, his grief boils into blame — and he targets Justine.

We see him sitting in his car outside her house, red paint cans in the passenger seat. At first it looks like he just picked up the wrong color while working construction on some house doors. Then the camera lingers — and later, when “WITCH” is painted across Justine’s car, the reveal clicks: it was Archer all along. That moment reframes his character — not cartoonishly evil, but a desperate, broken father lashing out at anyone he thinks could be responsible.

That anger makes him hard to trust for a while, but by the end, he circles back into the fight against Gladys. His grief-driven obsession becomes the thing that cracks the mystery open, and ironically, it’s what makes him the most human part of the story.

One of the most effective moments in the whole film comes from Archer’s nightmare sequence. He dreams of chasing his son out of the house, only to find himself staring at a surreal giant rifle in the sky with the timer 2:17 glowing across it. Some people have criticized this scene as “random” or “unconnected” — but honestly, it makes total sense. The town doesn’t know what happened to their children, and Archer, like any parent grasping at explanations, would naturally project his fears. Guns, violence, kidnapping — his subconscious seizes on the most terrifying, tangible imagery.

Also why the 2:17am on the gun? Don’t y’all remember? OK I’ll explain it, because the kids vanished at 2:17am that unfaithful night.

But the scene doesn’t stop there. He returns home in the dream, only to see his son laying silently in bed. Archer breaks, pouring his heart out and saying how much he misses him. And then, in an instant, his son vanishes and Gladys is there in his place, grinning with that grotesque, mocking face. It’s horrifying because it crystallizes everything weighing on Archer: his grief, his helplessness, and the looming shadow of this evil woman who has stolen everything from him.

And here’s where the film nails realism: instead of brooding silently like a cliché horror character, Archer jolts awake, storms out of bed, and yells “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!” It’s raw, human, and exactly how someone would react after a nightmare that cruel. That single line sells Archer as one of the most relatable characters in the film, because he responds the way we would — not as a scripted horror pawn, but as a grieving father pushed to the edge.



Chapter: Alex – The final, devastating piece. We learn Alex has been forced by Gladys to care for his comatose parents and the missing kids. She manipulates him with promises: “If I get better, then I can leave.” The climax comes when Alex finally snaps a twig she enchanted — unleashing the comatose children to turn on her.

What makes all of this even more unnerving is how realistic Cregger keeps the witchcraft. If you stripped away the final chapter reveal, most of the movie could pass as a grounded crime thriller about a mass child abduction. There are no cartoon tropes here — no broomsticks, no cackling in the sky, no neon CGI spells. Gladys doesn’t zap people with lightning bolts; she works with twigs, strands of hair, bells, salt circles, and ritual chants. It’s disturbingly simple, disturbingly believable, and that’s what makes her so effective.

Some people even compared the story to a modern retelling of the Pied Piper myth. Instead of playing music to lure kids away, Gladys silences them, cages them, and uses their very existence as fuel for her curses. It’s folklore horror, stripped down to its ugliest, most human roots.

Heck they have a bedroom scene where Archer has a nightmare and he wakes up saying WHAT THE FUCK!? Yeah it doesn’t get anymore realistic then that.

And that’s why she hits harder than most horror villains. By keeping things grounded, Cregger makes it easy to hate her. She isn’t a cartoon monster you watch for entertainment — she feels like a person who could exist in some forgotten, rotten corner of reality.




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Gladys: The Villain You Love to Hate

Gladys (Amy Madigan) deserves her own section.

On the outside, she’s all wigs, makeup, and the “kindly aunt” routine — telling Marcus and others that Alex’s parents are “unwell” and she’s just here to help. Behind closed doors, wig off and mask dropped, she’s a cruel, manipulative witch feeding off souls.

She:

Forces Alex’s parents to jab forks into their own cheeks just to scare him into obedience.

Kidnaps Alex’s classmates and keeps them comatose in the basement.

Manipulates Alex into feeding the kids, covering the windows with newspaper, and cleaning up to fool police.

And tells Alex if I get better i can leave, oh Fuck right off.

Gaslights him constantly with lines like, “If I get better, then I can leave.”

Relies on possessing adults (Paul, Marcus, even Archer) to cover her tracks — a sloppy arrogance that eventually unravels.

Gladys’ Downfall (Spoilers)

Once Alex finally snaps that cursed twig, after twirling her wig hair on the twig, then everything flips. The comatose kids she’d been keeping as husks suddenly jolt awake, their eyes clearing as if their stolen souls just got handed back. Without hesitation, they surge up from the basement, sprinting after the woman who mutilated them. Gladys, barefoot and frazzled in her nightgown, bolts out the front door and into the neighborhood — not some shadowy forest, but suburban streets where everyone can see what’s happening.

And here’s where it gets wickedly cathartic and darkly funny. As she runs, the kids smash through windows and doors to cut her off, glass shattering everywhere. One neighbor, instead of panicking, just yells to his spouse: “Honey! Look what they did to our windows!” No mention of “Oh my god, those are the missing kids” — just home insurance rage. Another guy mowing his lawn literally stops mid-yard, squints at the sight of a mob of children chasing a screaming old woman, and just… keeps staring. The town’s utter non-reaction gives the whole sequence this surreal slapstick edge.

But make no mistake — Gladys is done. The children finally corner her, pile on top of her, and in a flurry of vengeance they rip her to literal pieces. Watching her head get torn clean off is grotesque, yes, but it’s also one of the most righteous horror payoffs in years. The theater erupted in cheers. I cheered. Seeing this manipulative monster who fed on kids and enslaved her own family finally be torn apart by the very souls she stole? That’s justice.

Even Archer, once freed from her trance, gets his catharsis — tearing through the neighborhood house by house until he finally finds his son. That moment carries its own sting though: the kids are free, yes, but the scars of what Gladys did are permanent.

He also passes through a house thst has this woman saying oh frank look at what those kids did to the glass, really? That’s ur main concern?

On a side note I do love that the witch got messy, the fact she possessed Paul, a junkie and principle Marcus oh and Archer.

It would become suspicious that 2 or 3 grown adults gone missing and that a random cop car is sitting outside the house, without ever leaving.



Gladys vs. Umbridge & Joffrey:

Umbridge hides behind fake sweetness and bureaucratic cruelty.

Joffrey flaunts sadistic power in the open.

Gladys hides her evil behind family. That intimacy, that mask of normalcy, makes her cruelty cut deeper.


On my scale, Gladys is up there with (if not above) Umbridge and Joffrey. I loathed her with every scene.


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Closing Spoiler Note

The ending gives us a chilling epilogue:
A child narrator explains this is “a true story that happened in my town.” But you’ll never hear of it on the news, because the police were too embarrassed to admit they couldn’t solve it — so they covered it up forever.

That final gut-punch transforms the story into an urban legend, the kind of nightmare locals whisper about but never speak of publicly.

Why the Film is Called Weapons 🔪⚔️ (Spoilers)

It finally clicked by the end why the title Weapons makes sense. It’s not just about physical violence — the entire town itself gets weaponized. Gladys doesn’t just prey on Alex, she twists everything around him into tools of control. She turns his own parents into living puppets, forces classmates into comatose shells to be fed on, manipulates authority figures like Marcus and Paul into blunt instruments, and even tries to use Archer against Justine. Alex himself becomes a “weapon” in her scheme, forced to fetch belongings from his classmates so she can curse them.

The horror here isn’t just the supernatural parasite/witchcraft, it’s the idea that family, community, and trust — the very things that should protect children — get twisted into weapons to harm them instead. By the finale, when Alex snaps that twig and the cursed kids turn on Gladys, it’s the first time the “weapons” are pointed back at her.

Huh im surprised took me that long to realize this, anyways the end hope y’all enjoyed that weird ride.