Featured Essays weapons I Can’t Shake Weapons I love it when a movie decides to be about everything. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on August 12, 2025 Credit: New Line Cinema Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: New Line Cinema I spent the weekend thinking about Zach Cregger’s Weapons. I want to talk about it briefly—specifically how Cregger writes his story to contrast with two of his biggest influences, Magnolia and Prisoners, in a really interesting way. (Spoilers for Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling 1999 drama Magnolia and Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 thriller Prisoners—both of which you should watch as soon as possible, if you haven’t.) There are some superficial same-nesses. The most obvious ones: Weapons’ structure is fractured into six points of view, as Magnolia’s is shattered into at least eight, intercut over the course of its more than three-hour runtime. As in Prisoners, kids have gone missing, throwing a community into turmoil. Weapons’ color palette and setting are a riff on those in Prisoners’—they both take place in small-ish Pennsylvania towns, and the light is that same maddening thin grey light that finally drove my parents to take the drastic measure of moving us to Florida. Where High Jackman’s Keller Dover is a poor, struggling carpenter (lol), Josh Brolin’s Archer is an upper-middle-class contractor with a shiny McMansion and employees who report to him. Where Prisoners opens with a gruff adult male voice reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Weapons opens with a lilting, high-pitched young girl telling us the events of the movie like she’s telling us a bedtime story. In Weapons, Alden Ehrenreich’s troubled cop Paul has cultivated a mustache that is a close cousin to the one John C. Reilly’s troubled cop Jim Kurring wears in Magnolia. Where Prisoners ends with both girls saved, and with Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki just about to discover, and presumably rescue, Keller Dover (before an emotionally fraught cut-to-black), Weapons takes us back to the our young narrator, who tells us that some of the victims have been put in a home, others are just now relearning to speak again, and one has been sent away from the town to live with other relatives. While most of the cast makes it out alive, there is no happy ending here. And finally where the title “Prisoners” refers to the prisons of trauma that all the characters are trapped in, “Weapons” refers to the way each characters desires and addictions are weaponized against them in one way or another. But really the resonance here is in how Weapons differs from Magnolia and Prisoners. Where Magnolia’s threads pull people together for a couple of transcendent moments, Weapons is about how we’re too fractured to come together. If this makes any sense: Magnolia feels to me like one of the sprawling, “era-defining” literary novels of the 1990s, where mostly white men wrote books that spanned decades, told from many different perspectives, often jumping off from or converging on one historical point. Think Infinite Jest, Underworld, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Snow Crash, The Corrections—that kind of thing. Magnolia is the filmic version of that. And as with some of those novels, it feels like the work of a young man, with a young man’s preoccupations and blindspots. Magnolia has nurse Phil Parma (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) reaching Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise) just in time for the man to talk to his patient, Frank’s dying father, Earl Partridge. Frank at least has the catharsis of crying over his body, and Earl wakes just long enough to see his son before he dies. After that, an emotionally exhausted Frank chooses to visit Earl’s wife in the hospital, implying that he and his would-be stepmother might develop a bond, even if he and his father couldn’t. Officer Kurring and Quiz Kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) come together to right a wrong of Donnie’s, and Jim later, maybe, connects with a woman named Claudia. And of course, at the center of it all, an inexplicable frogfall brings Los Angeles to a halt, and leads most of the characters to believe that they’re witnessing a moment of divinity cracking through quotidian life. In Prisoners the two main characters are basically alone. Keller Dover has built a life with a family, a community of friends, and a deep well of Christian faith, but at the center of that he’s still alone and suspicious, trusting no one, prepping for a doomsday that could come any time, haunted by his own father’s death to the point that he can’t be the father his kids need because he thinks he has to be a superhero. He takes justice/vengeance into his own hands rather than trusting the God he claims to believe in. Detective Loki keeps himself alone intentionally, tries and discards belief systems, lets his work become his whole world. Neither man can lean on anyone else, which is part of why the case is so difficult—if they’d been capable of communication and cooperation the movie would have been at least an hour shorter. But in the end Prisoners makes the intriguing choice to hint at a supernatural element in an otherwise coldly realist film, giving us a detective who manages to rescue a terrified child, and most likely her father, possibly through, if not divine intervention, than a divine nudge. Weapons offers us no such relief. The powers-that-be seem to have given up, there is no heroic detective, no connection possible, and the only supernatural element we see is malevolent. In fact, the only thing that breaks through characters’ isolation is Aunt Gladys’ ability to reach into their minds, as she visits Justine, Archer, and James suring dreams or altered states to assess them as threats. (Hilarious how the town engages in a kneejerk witch hunt, because of course they do, only for the film to reveal an actual witch, whom none of the adults suspect until it’s too late.) It feels more mature to me—or maybe the word I’m looking for is not mature but nihilistic? It feels like it’s partly about the fact that we can’t ever truly know each others’ perspectives. It’s about how we can’t truly know our partners or our children or our families. The inside of the human head is as much of a mystery as the world outside of it. Even when Julia Garner’s Justine and Josh Brolin’s Archer combine forces to hunt for the kids, what might feel triumphant in a different movie ends up feeling sickly and defeated. Justine ends up killing two people in self-defense, and when Archer finally discovers the children trapped in the basement he paws through the room looking for his own child, literally pushing other kids aside as he calls his son’s name. Meanwhile, poor Alex Lilly, whose life has been an unrelenting nightmare for months, saves himself. When everyone comes together in Weapons there’s no sense that any borders have been transcended, or that any divinity is pushing things along. Alex is able to turn his aunt’s magic against her because he’s studied her ritual. His parents only stop trying to rip him to pieces because his classmates get to his aunt and kill her, breaking the witch’s mind control over them—but meanwhile he still has control over the other 17 children, right? The only catharsis in the film comes in the form of those children tearing a woman to pieces, showering themselves in her blood—and they’re only doing it because Alex told them to. It’s catharsis for us. Not for them. Like a lot of films this year, Weapons is a cry of grief, but I think it’s leavened with enough humor, and enough people act like people would actually act, that it works. Cregger isn’t screaming “GRIEF!!!!” in your face—he’s much more screaming “WHY IS EVERYONE ACTING LIKE NOTHING’S WRONG???”, and that I find relatable. But most of all, it’s that solitude. In Weapons, everyone is alone. Organizations fail. Religion is never mentioned at all; the story skips up to a month after the vanishing, so we see the makeshift “Maybrook Strong” altar that people have set up at the school, but we don’t see the vigils that undoubtedly happened earlier on. The cops are useless; when the case is “solved” it’s by a teacher and a parent, the only two people in town who refuse to move on with their lives. We we know from the opening narration that the town officials were so “embarrassed” about the case that the whole thing has been covered up—which is why it takes a child to tell us the story like an urban legend or a fairy tale two years after the events. I’ve seen a lot of people talking about what the movie is about, but I think the answer is that it’s about whatever grief and addiction we bring to it. It’s about our own isolation in a world that seems committed to collapse.[end-mark] The post I Can’t Shake <em>Weapons</em> appeared first on Reactor.