Weapons 
(Zach Cregger, 2025)

As its title indicates, and its witchcraft plot enacts, the film concerns the transformation of human beings — especially children — into tools of destruction. One senses a commentary upon ideology in the internet age, though the precise ideology and its position on the political spectrum is amorphous. In its most overt instance of symbolism, when a dreaming, bereaved father (Josh Brolin) sees a monumental assault rifle hovering over a copy of his own suburban house, marked by the time at which his child disappeared along with all but one of the students enrolled in the same elementary school classroom, Weapons inevitably evokes the school shooting epidemic that has become part and parcel of twenty-first-century American life. But such symbolism is overdetermined, and the significance of weaponry, mechanized or otherwise, is not reducible to any one spectacle of violence. Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), the film’s antagonist, looks and acts as though she stepped out of a John Waters film. Her conspicuous non-normativity, however, belies her alignment with systems of regulation, or at least the essential regulatory principle. We are dealing here with the sites and symbols of social control: schools, police, town infrastructure, the house, the doorbell camera with all its implications of surveillance, and finally, most importantly, the human body. As in his previous film, Barbarian (2022), Cregger fixates upon the devolution of the normative into the “barbaric” (a word that should never go unaccompanied by double inverted commas and is, among other things, loosely synonymous with “Gothic”): how a mother or father or daughter or policeman or school principal can degenerate into raving figures of violent frenzy. And both films suggest that manipulation, coercion, imprisonment, rape — in a word, dominative acts — effect this degeneration. That is to say, not only is the dominative act itself “barbaric” in character, but generates repeating patterns of increasingly spectacular violence. Control is a reproductive weapon.