**Warning: This article contains major spoilers!
Weapons opened on August 8, and it seems like it’s the number one movie folks are currently talking about. It’s currently showing a Tomatometer score of 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It made over $42 million on its opening weekend, taking the number one spot at the box office, so Weapons has definitely made a big splash already.
Much like Zach Cregger’s prior WTF horror film Barbarian, Weapons takes a zig-zag storytelling route, but instead of just abruptly ending the first act and jumping into a seemingly-unrelated second (as in Barbarians), Cregger did something different. We are presented a basic story, then view the events through the lens of several different characters. So we are watching the same story as Justine, Archer, Marcus, Alex and James each experienced their part in it.
As shown in the trailer, the basic story involves 17 different children in the same classroom getting out of their beds at 2:17 in the morning, walking out of their houses and running off into the distance, arms straight out as if they are pretending to be airplanes. The children just disappeared, and the only clues are assorted doorbell videos showing their departures. Only one child, Alex, shows up for school the next day.
Their parents are obviously distressed and grieving, and a lot of the blame is being placed on their teacher, Justine Gandy. She claims to know nothing about what happened, and there is no evidence to show that she does. This doesn’t make the suspicious parents happy, and the school principal Marcus puts Justine on leave. She makes the questionable decision to basically stalk Alex, and sees through his papered-over window his parents sitting motionless in the living room.
Justine’s cop ex-boyfriend Paul ends up going to Alex’s house after she and a drug addict named James tell him something weird is going on. With James in the back of his cop car, Paul goes into the house, where he remains for several hours before coming back out and dragging James kicking and screaming inside.
Archer, whose son Matthew was one of the kids who disappeared, becomes fixated on Justine, and is verbally confronting her at a gas station when Marcus comes tearing across the street, bloodied and wild-eyed after a close encounter with Agnes (You can see part of that hair-raising scene in the clip below). We then see said encounter replayed, and that’s where we get a clearer idea of what is causing all of this chaos. After Agnes wraps locks of Marcus’s and his husband Terry’s hair around a thorny twig, Marcus is hypnotized into violently killing Terry, then takes off running to find Justine and do the same.
Eventually, we see Alex’s story, in which his kind parents bring home his mom’s sick Aunt Gladys. She has some pretty odd décor in her room, including a small tree, and that tree becomes very important very quickly. The day after Agnes’s arrival, Alex’s dad does not show up to pick him up after school, and he walks home, only to find his catatonic parents at the dining room table. Agnes tells him they are sleeping, but when he balks at doing as she says, she demonstrates her powers by making them stab themselves in the face with their forks. She then instructs Alex to feed his parents soup so they won’t starve.
As the weird, creepy events pile up, Justine and Archer go to the house in question, and that’s where Weapons, already in high gear, kicks up into utter, chaotic insanity. They find the 17 missing children standing frozen in the basement. Paul is in the house, as are James, Alex and his parents (who are standing guard outside of Agnes’s bedroom door), held in place by a line of salt.
Agnes manipulates Paul into attacking Archer, then Archer into strangling Justine, and Alex decides to free his parents from crazy Agnes’s grasp by stepping over the line of salt. He breaks a twig off of the odd little tree, wraps a locks of Agnes’s red wig around it, then snaps it, which causes Agnes to panic and run out of the house like a bat out of hell.
The 17 kids all literally bust out of the house Kool-Aid man style and tear off after her. They go through fences and neighborhood houses, destroying everything in their insane dash to get to their captor.
It’s a frantic and bloody scene, and they eventually catch Agnes and literally dismember her. In the final voice-over, as we watch Alex embracing his catatonic parents, we are told that he went to live with a kinder Aunt, and his parents are being fed soup by others. We are also told that at least some of the 17 children, who were also left catatonic, are now starting to talk again.
In short, it seems that Agnes was a witch. Though it was never clearly stated, there is a clue in the word “Witch” that was painted on Justine’s car. When Agnes became terminally ill, she attempted to use Alex’s parents and the 17 children as a way to restore her strength and wellness. To do so, she utilized her thorny tree and collected locks of people’s hair to control them.
Agnes's witchcraft is also what caused the crazy dreams people were having - she was heavily featured in said dreams. In Justine's dream about walking into her dark classroom, the child she saw was wearing Agnes's garish makeup, with red lipstick and heavily rouged cheeks, and James saw her in the woods when he was running away.
Weapons takes us on a mad, wild ride, and it’s one that pays off in the end.