Spoiler Space: Tragedy doesn't actually bring anyone together in Weapons

Like a scary Short Cuts, Weapons creates a chain of cause and effect, with each character taking their pain out on a different neighbor. Archer harasses Justine, so Justine drinks too much and calls Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a local cop and recovering alcoholic. Paul sleeps with Justine, gets caught, and takes his angry regret out on an unhoused meth addict, James (Austin Abrams). Ironically, in doing so, Paul prevents everyone from solving the central mystery, which James has the answer to. Cregger gives us a wider view of things, so we can squirm as Paul calls his wife two chapters after we saw him get with Justine. But the effect allows for a broader statement on how Americans treat each other when tragedy strikes. There is no community effort to find these kids, no sense of ongoing support or house-to-house searches, even though the entire class is only a few blocks away, standing in the basement of the house of the only kid who didn’t run away. Clearly, Maybrook’s antisocial tendencies existed before 2:17 A.M. As Archer learns, even the parents going through the same tragedy can’t relate to one another; they’ve barely interacted.

Suburban, household horror is nothing new to Cregger. In Barbarian, he dug deep into the bones of an old house turned Airbnb. There’s a specificity to Barbarian‘s primary location, 476 Barbary, the only home still standing in the decaying neighborhood of Brightmoor, Detroit. Cregger creates a layered narrative, starting at the top floor and digging down into the basement, sub-basement, and dungeon, revealing how deep the rot goes and the era that led to it. 

Barbarian kicked off a wave of movies about young people being lured into houses. Recently, Bring Her Back and Heretic saw innocent teens having their young lives upended by quirky adults who reveal themselves to be witches looking to shove them into an oven. Barbarian takes a different approach to a similar premise: Rather than spending the movie exploring what the villain wants, Barbarian wants to know who owns this space, and with every new revelation, we’re introduced to another occupant and link in the chain that led to its current state. The movie takes us from Airbnb guests, gentrifying property managers, and absentee landlords, back to the homicidal original owner, whose terror lived in the Reagan era, when residents fled the area and allowed Brightmoor’s urban blight to begin. This narrow focus allowed Cregger to address a specific problem facing cities. By moving to the suburbs, Weapons explores a broader issue of the antisocial surveillance state, where not even single-family fortresses are safe and nobody knows their neighbors.

In both films, Cregger places the same minotaur at the end of the labyrinth: A hag thriving off local strife. Like Barbarian‘s Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis), Weapons‘ central villain, Gladys (Amy Madigan), is a grotesque representation of an older woman playacting as a nurturing mother. Whether or not Cregger blames mothers for societal breakdown is between the filmmaker and his therapist, but they are manifestations of a persistent neglect. Gladys takes advantage of this, worming her way into the community by posing as a caretaker and letting the town do the rest. She lucked out by finding a place with no shared camaraderie, and school administrators who know nothing about their students.

Ironically, Weapons‘ expansiveness extends to Gladys’ death. Instead of Mother’s bullet to the brain for an audience of one, Weapons concludes with a tear through an entire neighborhood, introducing us to faces, backyards, and living rooms the characters never bothered to explore beforehand. For the first time since the school board meeting, the town gathers—this time to watch their children tear Gladys limb from limb. It’s nice to see a community come together.