Film / Weapons (2025)

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Weapons is a 2025 horror mystery film (with elements of Black Comedy) written, directed, and co-composed by Zach Cregger. It stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Amy Madigan, June Diane Raphael, and Benedict Wong.

Welcome to Maybrook, Pennsylvania, a quiet town where nothing out of the ordinary ever happens — until one Wednesday, something does. At 2:17 a.m., 17 children from Mrs. Justine Gandy's (Garner) classroom got out of bed, went downstairs, opened their front doors, ran outside into the night, and disappeared without a trace.

This bizarre case flips the town on its head as Justine, concerned parent Archer Graff (Brolin), and the community try to untangle the many mysteries coming to light. What pushed the children to vanish like that? Why only the kids from Justine's class?

And who — or what — is behind it all?

Told via Simultaneous Arcs, we're introduced to the whole story, character by character, until everything slots into place and we understand why Alex Lilly (Christopher), the only boy left in the class, was spared.

The film was released in theaters on August 8th, 2025. Gladys, a prequel featuring the origin story of Amy Madigan's character, has been announced and is slated to release in theaters on September 8th, 2028.

Previews: Teaser, Maybrook News viral site, Trailer, Second Trailer, Perfect Score

Tropes featured in Weapons include:

• 1-Dimensional Thinking:
  • James just runs straight ahead from a police cruiser while being in an area said cruiser can't drive into, with numerous side alleys and places to hide. And he just runs forward. All Paul has to do is drive around the block and wait for James to run right into him. It's especially obvious when the scene is shown from his perspective. Justified by James being a very Addled Addict who is clearly not very coherent on even his best days because of it.
  • The weapons in general will always travel in the straightest possible line to their target, only ever switching directions if the target moves in a way that would offer a path of less resistance, such as them going far enough around a corner. They're not very intelligent, being unable to do more to attack than running at their targets and mauling them with their bare hands like animals. This works against the weaponized James and Paul in the climax, with the former being too weak to take down the muscular Archer, and the latter not having the intelligence to stop Justine from shooting him with his own gun. Marcus similarly just charges ahead desperately grasping at his target, even crawling under Justine's car after her when it'd be easier to just stand up and run to the other side (like Archer does). Likewise, the weaponized kids simply plow straight through any and all obstacles in their path to kill Gladys with no regard for their safety, which actually allows them to catch up to her when she tries turning and opening a door before running out on to a yard.
• Accidental Murder: The weaponized Marcus dies this way, as he runs headlong into traffic while chasing Justine, resulting in a driver accidentally running into him and turning his head into chunky salsa. The driver is horrified by this and screams her head off while surveying what she'd accidentally done.
• Adults Are Useless: The employees at the supermarket don't seem to care about or question Alex when he regularly buys enough canned soup for 20 people all by himself for weeks.
• Advertising by Association: The trailers and main poster tout writer-director Zach Cregger as the director of Barbarian.
• Afraid of Needles: Played with. There's no indication that Paul is afraid of proper medical injections, but getting his finger poked by a hypodermic needle while searching James causes him to freak out and punch James in the face. He later gets stabbed in the face with three more needles, after which he flat-out asks James if he has AIDS or hepatitis and is clearly not satisfied with the answer he gets.
• Airplane Arms: Played for Horror. The kids all run in the exact same posture, with their backs held ramrod straight and their arms outstretched, as if they're running in play but made ominous by the context of it being the dead of night and staying completely silent (because they've been ordered to sneak out). We later see that all of Gladys's possessed victims do the same. The pose in the film is inspired by an infamous photo of a child in the Vietnam War fleeing from a chemical weapon attack.
• The Alcoholic:
  • Justine Gandy has a drinking problem that predates the events of the film, but is only made worse by almost every child in her class vanishing. In the first act of the film alone, she visits a liquor store twice, a bar once, and is seen pouring liquor into a cup of soda shortly before Alex's mother takes a lock of her hair.
  • Paul is in recovery at the beginning of the film and attending AA meetings at the urging of Donna. Justine gets him to fall off the wagon with very little effort, though given Paul's apathy towards attending meetings, it's questionable that he was ever very serious about staying sober.
• All-Accessible Magic: Anyone with access to the required magical tools and knowledge of the ritual can replicate Aunt Gladys's magic - and even turn it against her.
• All Take and No Give: A recurring aspect of the cast, even some of the more sympathetic ones, befitting the film's themes of social parasitism. Paul is an ungrateful jerk to a wife who does nothing but love and support him and a father-in-law willing to bend the law to protect him. James robs people left and right to support his drug habit without giving anything back to the community. Justine prods Paul into falling off the wagon just to make herself feel better. Archer becomes so consumed with finding the missing kids that he neglects or exploits everyone else around him without regard for their feelings. And Gladys herself - in more ways than one - gets by through leeching off innocent people and expects total obedience from Alex, all without paying anyone back or even killing them to avoid it.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • The film implies, but notably doesn't show, that Archer is the one who vandalized Justine's car. This is in contrast to almost every other event in the movie which gets shown Once More, with Clarity in another character's chapter, the only things getting skipped over being stuff we've already seen in full.
  • It's left unrevealed what's up with the weird dreams and visions involving Gladys that multiple cast members have. It doesn't seem to be something she's personally causing (intentionally at least), and by the end it's one of the few mysteries that hasn't been answered.
• Anachronic Order: The film shows various scenes out of order, explaining the horror after the fact. Of particular note is why Marcus was blood-splattered and homicidal.
• And Starring: "With Benedict Wong And Amy Madigan."
• Apathetic Citizens: 
  • The owner of the store Justine flees into when she is attacked by a possessed Marcus doesn't so much as lift a finger to assist her or Archer in subduing him, and even tells her to get out of his store as she flees for the door.
  • Nobody tries to intervene when a bug-eyed and blood splattered Marcus runs all the way across town in a straight line to attack Justine, receiving only confused looks at worst.
  • Played for Laughs when the 17 children go essentially feral and chase Gladys all over town. The townsfolk only barely react to the strange, panicking elderly woman running through their homes, only reacting to the explosions of breaking windows from the aforementioned children. As a culmination of this effect, a man mowing his lawn sees the event in the distance, and at most finds it a bit confusing rather than alarming.
• Arc Number: 2:17. It's the time the kids disappeared, and it resulted in, out of Justine's classroom, 17 disappearing and 2 remaining (Justine and her student Alex). It's also the time the livestream "Are you watching?" ends abruptly. Some movie theaters even had their premiere screening at 2:17 PM.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Human bodies are not designed to sit or stand perfectly still for entire days, never mind months. Alex's parents and all the children in the basement would be in no condition to chase anyone by the time they're set loose.
  • It's noted by Gladys that the weaponized people have to be fed and tells Alex to feed all of her victims canned chicken noodle soup. That is not enough as the soup lacks sufficient nutrients and carbs to keep them in a well-enough shape to chase people down and rip them apart.
  • While feeding the kids is all and well, they'd still create excrements, and while the children are in a dire state, they do not look to have been standing in 3 months' worth of their own filth.
• Artistic License – Education: There are some liberties taken regarding the Alex segment.
  • For starters, on the first day his dad doesn't show up to pick him up, he decides to walk home while a faculty member lets him. Unless he was given authorization beforehand, Alex would have remained in the office while admin made a call to his family.
  • Secondly, Alex is able to sneak away into Justine's empty classroom to steal the name tags of his classmates while everyone is at the gym, including Justine. Out-of-classroom subjects like music or P.E. are handled by specialized teachers instead of the class teacher, who remains in their classroom for planning.
  • On a related note, Justine tries to get Marcus to investigate the odd things she'd noticed about Alex's house (the newspaper on the windows, all the lights being off, Alex's odd behavior, his parents sitting motionless on the couch in the dark) by pointing out that he's a mandated reporter and he could talk to Alex's parents to find out what's going on, so he doesn't need to talk to CPS. However, as a teacher, Justine should also be a mandated reporter, and the "mandated" part of that means that she would in fact be required to report her suspicions to CPS.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Gladys, after everything she has done to Alex, his parents, his 17 missing classmates, and the whole town of Maybrook, faces a gruesome demise when Alex turns her victims against her using her own magic.
  • James and Paul to an extent. The former being a scummy junkie who only tries to report the missing kids' locations for a cash prize and the latter an unfaithful Jerkass who doesn't appreciate his loving wife and would rather cover up his mistakes - up to and including impulsive Police Brutality - than own up to them. Their subsequent weaponization by Gladys and ultimate deaths are more or less their own faults in contrast to all the other victims. At the same time, their fates are portrayed as horrific and tragic, with Justine in particular being traumatized into broken tears by it; they may have been jerks, but it's obvious they didn't deserve what was done to them.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: With his background in architecture, Archer's able to narrow down the rough area that the kids ran to by looking at security camera footage of the night they disappeared, determining the direction they were headed, and measuring out two lines that intersect near Alex's house, which lets Justine lead them right to Gladys at the eleventh hour.
• Bad Black Barf: While under Gladys' spell, Marcus attacks his husband Terry by violently spewing a torrent of Ominous Obsidian Ooze into his face.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • On one of her regular trips to the liquor store, Justine is being followed by a blonde woman while menacing music plays, implying that the woman is a parent to one of the missing children out to accost her. When the woman actually does attack her, it's revealed that the woman is Paul's partner Donna, who is much less estranged from him than Paul claimed.
  • The scary figure who recurs in the early chapters is pale with bright red hair and lips and the figure's appearance in dreams and random places is evocative of a spiritual or demonic figure, offering leading supernatural connotations that misdirect from the truth that the figure is not only a quirky, garish mortal old woman instead of a Monster Clown or demon, but is also using witchcraft as the main threat.
• Being Evil Sucks: Gladys doesn't really seem to enjoy her parasitic lifestyle, nor the blood magic and scheming she has to engage in to maintain it, and it's hinted that she's actually rather lonely deep down and wants Alex around and free-willed so she has someone to talk to. She seems to keep doing it all mostly because she can't conceive of any other way of living after so long of extending her life.
• Beneath Notice: The only reason Gladys isn't discovered as the culprit behind the kidnappings is because she comes across as an eccentric but harmless old woman whose presence in the community is Hand Waved in-universe as her being an aunt taking care of Alex and his "stroke-ridden" dad. Her facade is further helped by the cops being too sympathetic to Alex and his family to intrude too deeply into their lives and clearly unconvinced of Alex himself knowing anything.
• Big Bad: The person behind the disappearance of the 17 children is revealed to be Gladys, a witch posing and acting as a great-aunt of Alex Lilly, using Blood Magic to turn people into People Puppets and planning to use the 17 children to prolong her own life, killing anyone who stands in her way.
• Bittersweet Ending: Gladys is finally killed, breaking whatever control she's had over the 17 children, Alex, and his parents. In the end, Alex, Justine, and Archer have survived and Justine's name is cleared of suspicion... but four people (Paul, James, Marcus, and his partner) are dead, the missing children and Alex's parents are all catatonic as a result of having been under the control of Gladys for nearly a month, and/or the emotional and mental trauma they've all endured. The narration says that over the following year, some of the children have begun to speak again, and Alex's parents had to be institutionalized, which meant Alex moved away from Maybrook. Thankfully, however, the poor boy is with a real and caring aunt, and there's an implication that after a longer period time, all the kids will fully recover, and even Alex's parents might do so as well. Even Matthew turns around when his dad first calls his name - showing that even if they can't talk, they're still aware and can recover.
• Black Comedy:
  • The weaponized James tries to attack Archer time and time again. Each time, Archer is able to fling him like a rag doll through a series of objects.
  • The chase leading up to Gladys's death. Gladys runs through several lawns and even homes, with the weaponized children crashing through everything in their path and screaming wildly in front of numerous shocked and horrified onlookers. One guy, after seeing a terrified old woman running behind a house with a horde of screaming children gaining on her fast, just goes back to mowing his lawn. The following scene of Gladys being ripped apart by the children could be seen as equally horrifying as it is funny.
• Blame the Paramour: Donna attacks Justine for sleeping with Paul, either unaware, in denial or not caring that Paul initiated it by lying that he was single now.
• Blood Magic: Gladys's magic requires the caster's blood on the branches that conduct the spells. We first see Gladys cut herself on a thorn and smear her blood on a branch with one of Marcus's ribbons on it to enslave Marcus, and she uses the same branch after bleeding herself to conduct the second spell of siccing Marcus on his husband Terry, using a lock of Terry's hair. When Gladys ends Marcus's attack and demonstrates her magic to Alex by making his parents stab themselves with forks, she drops the bloody stick she used in water both times to break the spell by washing the blood off. We don't see her putting blood on the stick she uses to send Marcus after Justine, but it's implied it's there. Later, Alex sends the children after Gladys by putting his own blood on a branch and wrapping her hair on it and snapping it, but he doesn't create any weapons, indicating that multiple spells can be cast on the same stick if blood remains on it, but that blood must be added to "activate" any stick for any purpose.
• Bond Villain Stupidity:
  • Gladys could've avoided her own death if she didn't use her magic stick to make Alex's parents mutilate themselves in front of him. While she mainly did this to intimidate Alex into compliance with her plans, this also indirectly taught him how her Blood Magic works, which proves to be her downfall in the finale.
  • While she has Justine dead to rights, sleeping in her car in front of her house, she makes Alex's mom... cut a lock of her hair, to designate her as a target for the Weapons later. While perhaps understandable that she didn't want to kill her on the spot for the police to later discover a corpse in front of her house, this would also have been a perfect chance to steal one of Justine's belongings to turn her into a Weapon. She was already hated by everyone, so seeing her "snap" and try to kill somebody would only have solidified her supposed guilt in the minds of the townsfolk. Instead, Gladys only manages to prove her innocence by sending a weaponized Marcus against her.
• Boom, Headshot!: It takes Justine using Paul's gun to finally put down Paul and James, both with a bloody shot to the head.
• The Bully: Matthew (Archer's son) is revealed to be one before and after Gladys appears, kicking Alex on his left side while he walks down the school hallway after the school day is over, and throwing a pencil at him after they have taken a test in Mrs. Gandy's classroom.
• Bury Your Gays: Marcus is forced to kill his husband Terry after Gladys weaponizes him, and he himself is killed soon after when he's struck by an oncoming car while pursuing Justine.
• The Cameo: June Diane Raphael as Donna, Paul's wife and Sara Paxton and Justin Long as Mrs. and Mr. Bailey.
• Camp: Gladys acts over-the-top and performative after showing up at Marcus' house, which clearly amuses his husband to the point that he invites her in, despite Marcus's objections. She drops the "eccentric old woman" act after she cuts off a lock of his hair and starts slicing her palms, but by that point it's too late for both of them.
• Catapult Nightmare: Played for Black Comedy, as after his surreal Dream Sequence, Archer bolts up in his son's bed and yells "What the FUCK?!"
• Central Theme: Parasitism, both literal and metaphorical, and exploitation of people for one's own gain.
• Company Cross-References:
  • Archer's son Matthew has a poster for Mad Max: Fury Road in his room. That film also features an elderly figure using young people to enact violence, who is ultimately ripped limb from limb by the people they tormented.
  • As seen when Archer sleeps in his bed, Matthew's bedding has a prominent pattern on it—the Batman symbol. Like Batman, protagonist Alex's relationship with his parents is his driving motivation throughout the film, triggered by them being violently taken from him at only 8 or 9 years old. What's more, his character arc sees him become something of a Kid Hero like Batman's sidekick, Robin.
  • There's "blink and you'll miss it" reference to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, when Alex's parents are pursuing him in the film's climax, his mother breaks a hole in the door and tries to put her head through it, a visual reference to the iconic shot of Jack Torrance as he chases his own wife and son. It's easy to miss amid the chaos of the scene. The film's Arc Number 217, in addition to the personal meaning to director Zach Cregger (see Shout-Out), also doubles as a reference to the Overlook Hotel's most infamous room.
• Creator Cross-References: The movie's viral website features an article referencing the director's previous film. Cregger has been tight-lipped on whether the two films share a storytelling universe, however.
• Creepy Basement: Just like with Barbarian, the basement ends up being the most important room in the house, as it is where Gladys has the missing children hidden.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: As implied by the unknown narrator:
  "A lot of people die in a lot of really weird ways in this story, but you're not gonna find it in the news."
  • Terry takes the cake by getting his face caved in by his weaponized husband... who does the deed with his forehead.
  • Second place goes to Gladys, who gets slowly ripped apart by the weaponized children. The only reason why she isn't first is because she actively deserved it.
• Death Glare:
  • When Archer fails to convince the mother of one of the abducted children to let him see security footage of the night they disappeared, he instead goes to the father for permission; the mother spends the rest of the scene staring daggers at her husband for allowing it.
  • The chief of police gives a nasty one to Paul through a window after he learns that Paul cheated on his wife, the police chief's daughter.
  • School secretary Marge spends most of her limited screentime giving Gladys the stink-eye, clearly having them pegged as bad news from the get-go.
• Decoy Protagonist: Justine is implied to be the protagonist initially, but it eventually becomes clear the real hero is Alex. His perspective on the film's events is shown to the audience last, but reveals that he played the central role in the kidnapping and set the plot into motion. He also delivers the decisive blow against Gladys that ultimately leads to her death and frees her surviving victims from possession.
• Devoured by the Horde: Though she isn't actually eaten, Gladys's ultimate fate in the movie is to be chased down and ripped apart by the 17 children, who brutally tear her to shreds after catching up to her. It also counts as both The Dog Bites Back and Karmic Death.
• Dirty Cop: One of the first things the Opening Narration tells the audience is that the Maybrook Police and other authorities carried out a cover-up of the events of the film, and over the course of the movie, the viewers get to see firsthand Paul repeatedly disable his dash cam and police captain Ed Locke coach Paul about what he can do to conceal the act of Police Brutality Paul just committed. Downplayed, in that while they're shown to be generally lazy and apathetic, they're not evil and many of them are shown legitimately doing their best when it's needed. They're just... well, lazy and apathetic about their jobs and community, furthering the film's themes of parasitic interactions between people.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The film opens with the sudden disappearance of school children, followed by police investigations, a memorial outside the school, and a flood of angry, grieving parents looking for an explanation. The entire situation is uncomfortably reminiscent of the aftermath of a school shooting.
  • A humorous example; when the mother of one of the missing children denies him access to her home's security footage, Archer just waits for the husband to come home and asks him instead, coming across like a child going around one parent by asking the other; the mother's visible irritation is no doubt something many parents are familiar with.
  • Alex is forced to comply with Aunt Gladys's demands by threatening to kill his parents, forcing him into silence while taking care of his weaponized parents - specifically, she claims that if he tells anyone, no matter where he is when he does so, she'll know. It's framed very much as domestic abuse where a child's loved ones are threatened by an abusive adult forcing the child into a caregiver role... or something worse.
  • Alex's entire subplot with Gladys resembles a child's reaction to having an Alcoholic Parent. Things are great, until some outside influence comes into his house and ruins his parents' ability to care for him, forcing him to take care of them instead, all while he's terrified of letting anyone else know and suffering in silence.
• The Dog Bites Back: After being forced to help his wicked aunt kidnap all his classmates under threat of his parents' lives for at least two months, Alex turns the tables on her by using Gladys' own magic to sic said classmates on her; this also applies to the bewitched children themselves, as the lack of Airplane Arms when they're chasing Gladys down implies that this time, the weapons want to kill their target.
• Dream Sequence:
  • Justine has a nightmare about entering her dark classroom, with all of the students catatonic at their desks. Alex looks up at her with a sudden demonic face and she snaps awake.
  • Archer has one of him following Matthew out the front door of his house and through the woods beyond to a mirrored version of the same house, where he sees a colossal AR-15 rifle emblazoned with "2:17" floating above it before finding his motionless, glassy-eyed son lying in his bed and tearfully apologizing to him.
• Driving Question: What happened to the kids in Mrs. Gandy's class? They were possessed and kidnapped by the malevolent "aunt" of Alex, the lone remaining child.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Justine starts hitting the booze fairly hard to cope with the town's open distrust towards her. It's understandable to an extent, but she also drags Paul off the wagon and shows no apprehension toward driving after drinking, implying a larger problem.
• Dub Name Change: The Brazilian Portuguese release gives the film "A Hora do Mal" ("The Evil Hour" or "The Hour of Evil"), while the French releases have two different titles: "Évanouis" ("Vanished" or "Gone") in Europe, "Heure de Disparition" ("Time of Disappearance") in Quebec. In Polish version the title was "Zniknięcia" ("Disappearences").
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • A scary clown-like figure appears infrequently throughout the film in every segment but Paul's. The figure appears in the nightmares of Justine and Archer, and waves at James in the middle of the woods. In Marcus' chapter this figure is revealed to be Aunt Gladys. Alex's chapter also makes this clear that she was the woman in blue sitting next to Alex and his father during the police interrogation in the opening sequence.
  • James first appears during Justine's chapter asking her for money outside the liquor store on two separate occasions before becoming a major character in Paul's chapter and receiving his own focus chapter.
• Empty Promise: Gladys promises Alex that while she'll hurt his parents if he fights back, she'll leave his family alone once she gets what she wants, that being her illness cured. While she grows progressively better, the growing number of people coming to the house has her growing antsy, and she ends up telling him that they're leaving for another town. While she could just be relocating their operation until she's back to full health, it's heavily implied that she really had no intention of ever letting Alex go and was going to use him as her slave indefinitely.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Archer believes Justine knows more about the children's disappearance than she lets on and ends up repeatedly harassing her about it. But when Marcus attacks her, he immediately leaps to her defense. For all his issues with her, he doesn't want her to die.
  • The pawn shop owner whom James fences goods to refuses to take the tablet James tries to sell him as it is transparently a child's belonging that James stole. The owner later takes stolen silverware with no issue. While there are additional practical reasons, given tracking, he's mostly just coldly disdainful towards James for sinking so low as to rob a child and refuses to take the electronics for what amounts to James almost giving them to him for free.
  • Ed Locke may be a bit of a Dirty Cop willing to cover up bad things if they'd bring embarrassment to the department, but he's surprisingly reasonable when he actually gets the motivation to do his job; he calls out Archer and the other parents for using Justine as a scapegoat and making a bad situation worse, organizes search parties to find the kids, refuses to judge Justine for her past mistakes and addiction issues, and is nothing but sympathetic and understanding to Alex's family. He's not a good cop by any means, but he clearly takes the badge more seriously than his screw-up of a son-in-law, Paul.
• Exact Words: When she first shows up at Marcus's office to talk about Alex, Gladys tells Marcus that Alex's parents are suffering from "a touch of consumption." While this is a clue that Gladys is far older than she appears, it's also the literal truth — their lifeforce is being directly consumed to revitalize Gladys.
• Eye Pop: Played for Horror. The adults that Gladys turns rabid all have their eyeballs nearly pop out of their sockets during their perpetual Death Glares.
• Facial Horror: All over the place.
  • Gladys possesses Principal Marcus and makes him furiously headbutt his husband in the face over and over again until Terry's head is caved in and Marcus' face is smeared with blood. Marcus is later hit by a car as he pursues Justine, his own head crushed to bits as a result.
  • Gladys compels Alex's parents to stab themselves in the face with a fork in order to keep him in line.
  • James stabs Paul in the face with multiple drug needles, believing him to be Gladys after being pursued by her.
  • Later, while Justine fights a possessed Paul, she manages to peel two strips of skin off his face with a peeler. It doesn't faze him.
  • Finally, when Gladys is ultimately caught by the horde of children and torn to shreds, the coup-de-grace is when they rip the top half of her skull off her jaws.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • While rifling through the Lillys' living room, it takes James several moments to notice the catatonic Mr. and Mrs. Lilly sitting on the sofa, mostly because they're completely motionless like statues and James is perpetually high.
  • Justine, despite catching Alex mere seconds after the act, doesn't notice the absence of the labels he stole off the other kids' bins.
• Fairy Tale Motifs: The film bears similarities to the stories of The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Hansel and Gretel:
  • The children of a town (except for one) are led away by a mysterious force that wishes them harm, leaving their parents devastated.
  • An elderly witch lures in children to try and eat them (though here it's their life force instead of their flesh) and she's ultimately killed by one of her victims using her own tools against her (though unlike the oven in the story, here Alex figures out how to use her own magic tree to cast a spell).
• The Farmer and the Viper: Alex's parents allowed what they believed to be a distant and eccentric aunt to stay with them for a while. It got them possessed (with Gladys forcing them to stab each other to keep Alex in line), their son enslaved by the witch, and resulted in the Pied-Piper style kidnapping of seventeen children (not to mention the deaths of four people and the near-murder of their son at their own hands).
• Faux Affably Evil: Gladys's very exuberant and friendly demeanor when out and about is quickly proven to be nothing more than a mask as the movie progresses, with her acting coldly and authoritatively to Alex, forcing his parents to stab themselves in front of him after he tries putting up resistance to her demands.
• Feel No Pain: The weapons don't even seem to have the unconscious reflexes that people have to avoid pain and exhaustion, shrugging off miles-long sprints, potato peelers, and getting shot point-blank through the throat.
• Fiending for a Fix: James is an Addled Addict who steals a child's backpack to sell the contents, to the disgust of the pawn shop owner he tries to sell them to. Played with, too, because he makes an effort to do a good thing (report the location of the missing children) but solely for his own gain (collecting the reward money for drugs). He's far from evil, but his addiction is clearly driving him to deeper and more pathetic lows with each day.
• Fire-Forged Friends: The encounter with the weaponized Marcus, causes the previously quarreling Justine and Archer to bond and ultimately set aside their differences to investigate the Lilly house without argument, and they proceed to mutually protect one another against the horrors there.
• Foreshadowing: 
  • Justine's car is smeared with the word "WITCH" on it written in red paint. As it turns out, the main threat of the movie actually is a witch, one who uses Blood Magic and other bizarre rituals. She even wears a brightly colored wig in a very similar shade of red as the graffiti on Justine's car.
  • The children and those who are similarly affected by the strange phenomenon are compelled to run towards or attack a single target, always moving with outstretched Airplane Arms whilst in motion. It makes them resemble a marionette dancing or moving on a puppeteer's strings, and they've been robbed of their control over their bodies, resulting in them being "puppeteered" through Gladys's Blood Magic.
  • The fact that Justine is on a first-name basis with the bartender at the local bar hints at a reveal later on that she has issues with alcohol abuse, which is partly why the parents suspect her so badly.
  • Likewise, Justine was teaching her class about parasites shortly before the kids were taken, and Principal Marcus is seen watching a documentary about cordyceps and its effects on ants. This involves robbing them of their free will and making them do whatever the parasite wants, which mirrors Gladys taking over Alex's household and possessing people via her magic.
  • Justine, Archer and James all suffer dreams/hallucinations that feature the same creepy clown-like figure. At first this just seems to be scares for scares' sake, but it's eventually revealed that this figure is Gladys, a witch, and the true culprit behind the 17 kids' disappearance.
  • One of the things James notices while sneaking around the Lilly house is a can of Campbell's soup. It is later revealed that Alex is feeding his parents and the kidnapped kids Campbell's soup on Gladys' orders.
  • In order to get him to behave, Gladys warns Alex that can she can make his possessed parents do all kinds of horrible things to each other, including making them cannibalize one another. After Alex turns Gladys's Blood Magic back on her, the 17 kids run her down and rip her apart in a similar fashion.
  • The narration that lays out the premise of the film says that all the children who disappeared "never came back". At the end, they're physically rescued, but the horrible experience and the things they've been forced to do have left all of them catatonic and in shock, taking the following year for some of them to start to talk. The poor, innocent children that left the houses never returned as they once were.
  • At one point during Marcus' run through town, a car can be heard screeching its brakes and honking presumably because it almost ran them down. Marcus ends up killed when he runs into an intersection and an oncoming SUV flattens him, unable to stop in time.
  • Paul pricks his finger on a hypodermic needle while searching James and it bleeds. Later on, it's revealed that Gladys uses Blood Magic via pricking her finger.
• Friend to All Children: Justine Gandy. She even says that she wants an answer just as bad as all of the parents at the assembly and declares that she loves the kids in her class like family. She also drives a girl home after she missed the bus, and she does whatever she can to talk to Alex Lilly and make sure he is okay as both the only non-disappeared child in her class and one now going home alone. It's deconstructed, however, as Marcus calls out how her mothering nature to her students has repeatedly breached professional bounds and gotten justifiable complaints from parents, which only worsens the suspicions around her when the kids disappear; they're not her children, no matter how much she seems to wish otherwise.
• "Friends" Rent Control: Justine is a single, twenty-something elementary school teacher who is described as not doing so well in life, but she lives in a nice, well-furnished, multi-bedroom, suburban house.
• Frying Pan of Doom: When she's attacked by the bewitched Paul in Alex's house, Justine tries fending him off by chucking a cast-iron frying pan at his face, but it doesn't even faze him.
• Genre Shift: Similar to Zach Cregger's previous film, it takes a while for Weapons to reveal what kind of movie it really is. The first half sets up a Psychological Thriller angle, with Justine suffering under the weight of public scrutiny following the kids' disappearance. The film then slightly shifts genres as it goes, such as Archer's story being more of an investigative thriller, while Paul's is a seemingly unrelated police story about a Dirty Cop, and James' is darkly comedic slice of life piece about an addict out for a fix. It's only when James goes into the Lilly house and Gladys shows up in Marcus' segment that the film's true designs as a supernatural horror story are fully revealed.
• Gilligan Cut: Paul tells Justine that they're not going home together, then we immediately cut to him waking up the next morning in her bed.
• Good Parents: Alex's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lilly, are kind, loving parents before Gladys arrives, and it makes their ordeal even more tragic because they clearly love each other and their son very much, being affectionate and fully committed to him.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: When Gladys arrives at Marcus's household, she acts frantic to fish out if Marcus has alerted law enforcement to Justine's concerns. Upon discovering he hasn't, she has Marcus murder his own husband and sends him after Justine.
• Head Crushing: Marcus first does this to his partner, caving the poor guy's face in with a series of headbutts while being controlled by Aunt Gladys, and ends up getting his own head reduced to hamburger under the wheels of an SUV while pursuing Justine. It ain't pretty.
• He Knows Too Much: Gladys weaponizes Marcus and tries to use him to kill Justine (causing his death in the process) because both of them are snooping too much into the Lilly family's situation for her liking. Later, she weaponizes both Paul and James after they stumble upon the truth, and wisely decides to begin preparations to leave since Paul's fellow officers at the precinct will obviously notice his disappearance.
• The Hive: The titular Weapons are this; puppets of Gladys who act entirely in accordance with her will.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Alex uses his own blood and a lock of Gladys' hair to turn her Blood Magic against her, resulting in all 17 kids chasing her through the neighborhood and through other people's houses before the angry horde catches up to her and tears her apart with their bare hands. For bonus points, he only knows such a thing is even possible because of her unwittingly demonstrating the technique to him earlier for the purpose of threatening his parents. Furthermore, Gladys was totally hairless when she first (chronologically) appeared in the story. By choosing to drain the life-force of others to restore her own health, her hair grows back - allowing Alex to turn the weapons on her with the same blood magic she used on everyone else.
• Home-Early Surprise: After Justine drops him off back home, Paul finds that Donna is already there, her business trip being called off early. He doesn't have an explanation for where he was, she's not happy, and he ends up coming clean about both how he cheated on her and how he's fallen off the wagon.
• Hyperlink Story: A major aspect of the film's structure is hopping between the personal stories of various people in Maybrook and steadily revealing how those stories connect to one another and the mystery that underpins all of them.
• Implacable Man: Played with. The weapons are incredibly persistent and take astonishing amounts of injury before going down, but it seems less that they're made supernaturally durable and more because the Blood Magic controlling simply means they don't care about the horrific damage they subject their bodies to while carrying out their orders, and thus the only way to stop them from trying to do so is to either outright kill them or break the spell.
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • In Justine's story, immediately after the school meeting where the parents are all but baying for her blood, Justine stops at a liquor store. She reaches the right section, pulls down a bottle of vodka, considers a moment, then pulls down a second bottle. Days later, she's at the liquor store again, implying those two bottles lasted way shorter than they should have.
  • Paul starts drinking again after a particularly rough day on the job, not that Justine's influence helps. His section of the film reveals that he's dealing with the triple stress of being poked by a possibly-contaminated needle, punching the culprit out cold in full view of his dashboard camera, and a failing marriage.
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Subverted when Archer tries subduing James by repeatedly punching him in the face, having to stop after a few blows because it hurts his hand. It's played straight with the weaponised Marcus when he punches in Justine's car window trying to get to her, but only because the magic influencing him means he doesn't feel the pain such an act would usually cause.
• Irony: Because of the 17-child disappearance from her classroom, Justine is targeted by the community in a witch-hunt that goes as far as having the word "WITCH" painted on her car. Turns out that the community witch-hunt was completely oblivious to the actual, literal witch in the town who used magic to cause everything--Alex's supposed great-aunt Gladys.
• It's All About Me: A running theme for all the (adult) viewpoint characters in their own way, to various degrees and for various reasons, feeding into the story's parasitism motif:
  • Though Justine is sincerely concerned about Alex for his own sake, she also admits that part of why she wants to speak to him is so that she doesn't feel so alone and rejected herself, as Alex is the only other person who even somewhat understands what she's going through, and she makes rationalizations for not putting Alex's own possible feelings ahead of hers on the matter of contacting him. Likewise, whatever Justine's genuine feelings for Paul, her willingness to jeopardize his crumbling marriage and his sobriety for her own comfort is decidedly self-centered.
  • Archer sincerely loves his son Matthew and grieves his loss, but admits in his dream that he was never able to express those feelings to him, which may explain why Matthew has turned into a bully at school. Furthermore, from his wife's brusque reaction to him, Archer has obviously turned inward in his grief and given her little if any support for hers; he also has no care for how he upsets fellow parents Gary and Erica by browbeating them into showing him the footage of their child disappearing if it gets him closer to finding Matthew. Conversely, the moment when Archer finally shows concern for another's feelings — sincerely asking Justine, "Are you okay?" after Marcus's death — is also when the intertwined plots finally begin moving towards a positive resolution. Although even after Archer allies with Justine, it's still clear by his actions or lack thereof throughout the movie's ending and climax that his own son is the primary concern on his mind over her well-being and that of the other 16 kids.
  • Paul tries briefly to be a helpful friend and counsellor to Justine, advising her to stop drinking and initially refusing to go home with her, and makes at least an effort to do his job as a police officer properly, but is ultimately too driven by his own fears, selfishness and the perks of his position to do the right thing or take responsibility for his own screw-ups. He's also totally ambivalent and ungrateful to his wife and father-in-law, who both clearly love him and help him out whenever he needs it, but get nothing in return for it.
  • James, as an addict, cares for absolutely nothing beyond getting the money for his next high; even his attempt to report his discovery of the missing children is motivated solely by the reward.
  • Most brutally of all, Gladys: if you're not her, she doesn't care about you or your feelings at all. She has nothing but callous disdain for Alex's concern for his parents and manipulates the poor boy with veiled threats.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While the parents are blatantly using Justine as a scapegoat for their fear and grief following the disappearance of their children, they also do have legitimate (if incorrect) reasoning to suspect she's somehow connected to the tragedy and are just concerned families trying to find their abducted kids. And it isn't an entirely new issue; it's shown that, prior to the disappearance, Justine had repeatedly gotten in trouble for overstepping professional bounds with her students, and while she was always doing so in the name of helping said students, Marcus is far from wrong when he calls her out for behaving as if they're her kids and not just attendees of her class.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Archer initially approaches Justine at the gas station to antagonize her about his son's disappearance, but then immediately rushes to help her when she's attacked by a possessed Marcus. In general, while he's shown to be the most abrasive and volatile of the bereaved parents, he's also just that: a distressed father who clearly loves and cares about his son Matthew very much, being willing to do anything to find him and regretting all the times he didn't say "I love you".
  • Justine herself is kind of acerbic and prickly at the start of the film (though she is justifiably suffering from paranoia and public scrutiny), but she is ultimately a good, kind-hearted teacher, who loves and adores children, and is absolutely dedicated to her class's safety.
• Jump Scare: Several, mostly during the dream sequences in the early half of the film. A particularly nasty one comes during the climax, as Archer searches the pitch-black basement of the Lilly house with a flashlight, only to land on Gladys as she lunges at him.
• Karmic Death: Gladys ends up torn apart by the children she planned to "use," after having happily used so many innocents as her murderous proxies before.
• Kid Hero: Alex Lilly is the one who puts an end to Gladys's terror by putting his blood on one of her magic sticks with a strand of her hair wrapped around it, snapping it in half, and freeing his 17 classmates from the witch's control. They then proceed to rip her apart, breaking the spell on themselves, Archer, and Alex's parents.
• Laborious Laziness: Gladys is so dedicated to her lifestyle of leeching off people - literally and figuratively - that she does downright byzantine levels of work and effort to maintain said lifestyle, more than she'd probably have to do if she just lived like a normal person.
• Lightning Bruiser: The weapons are seemingly unencumbered by the limitations the human mind normally places on the body in order to prevent self-injury, and thus are capable of running for prolonged periods of time without exhaustion, have no reaction to attacks intended to cause pain, and are capable of using their bodies' full strength. The end results include a man in average shape sprinting for miles before attacking and nearly killing someone, another man having no reaction when a woman takes a potato peeler to his face, and a group of eight- and nine-year-old children tearing someone limb-from-limb with their bare hands.
• Living Weapon: The titular "weapons" aren't literal weapons, but people who have become enslaved by Gladys' magic. They are entirely robbed of their personhood and turned into flesh-and-blood tools, becoming empty shells who, when not being weaponized as attack dogs, literally do nothing but breathe as they await commands.
• Logical Weakness: Gladys' weaponized puppets are single-mindedly focused on whatever task she sets for them to the point that they're virtually incapable of self-preservation; Marcus is splattered by an oncoming car while chasing Justine, Paul doesn't even notice that Justine is aiming his own gun at his head, and James keeps mindlessly attacking Archer even when he's clearly outmatched. Their single-mindedness also stops them from adapting to changing situations or from using simpler methods of killing such as, ironically, using weapons themselves, as seen when Paul tries to strangle Justine instead of using his gun (which leaves it open for her to use against him), and Gladys doesn't even try to get help from a weaponized Archer or Mr. and Mrs. Lilly when the children start chasing her down. On a larger level, their near-mindless nature means that they aren't actually useful for tasks more complex than "go here", "grab that", or "attack this". The last one is what forces Gladys to both maintain a complex cover-up and leave Alex un-weaponized so she has at least one "minion" with basic intelligence.
• Made of Iron: The weapons seem to be this trope, if the fact that they can smash through plate-glass windows and shrug off a cast-iron frying pan to the face is any indication.
• Match Cut: Used extensively through the film, often leading to either indicating a long passage of time or tying nightmares and visions with reality.
• Missing Child: Most of the film's plot is driven by a group of children (specifically, the entirety of Justine Gandy's third-grade class, save one student) disappearing in the dead of night. Interestingly, no other children seem to be affected, with Archer questioning why only Justine's students disappeared. It turns out to be because Gladys ordered Alex to specifically help bind his classmates to her magic, and she can only maintain that magic through personal belongings or body parts of the people she's trying to hex.
  "Mr. Graff, I can understand your passion and I don't mind having these conversations with you because, God forbid, if it was my child, I'd be demanding answers, too. Those kids walked out of those homes. No one pulled them out. No one forced them. What do you see that I don't?"
• Monster Clown: Both Justine and Archer see glimpses of a frightening person wearing clown makeup while dreaming about the missing children, and James catches sight of a similar figure waving to him in the woods while he might be hallucinating from drug use. This turns out to actually be Gladys, who is responsible for the disappearances, but actually just cakes on excessive amounts of makeup and wears a bright orange wig when out in public to try and conceal how unnaturally old and ill she is.
• Mood Whiplash: Wouldn't be a Zach Cregger film without it.
  • Archer's nightmare begins on a somber note with him desperately trying to catch up with his disappeared son Matthew, before tearfully admonishing himself for not letting his son know how much he loved him before his disappearance. It then ends on a jump scare as Gladys appears in Matthew's place, sporting a particularly grotesque Slasher Smile before he awakens with an exasperated "What the FUCK?!" In one scene, the mood jumps between tragic, scary and comedic.
  • During the climax, Alex's parents are battering down the bathroom door to get to him while Justine is incapacitated by a weaponized Archer, with Gladys seemingly triumphant. Then Alex performs the stick trick to get the captured children to attack Gladys, and the film turns into borderline slapstick as an elderly woman runs screaming through a suburban neighborhood, chased by a horde of implacable third-graders smashing through doors and windows to get to her, with stunned onlookers wondering what the absolute hell is going on. Then the third graders start physically ripping her apart and eating her, at which point... it either stops being funny or gets funnier.
• Muggle in Mage Custody: Aunt Gladys is revealed to be controlling several adults, and all the missing children, using Blood Magic spells. She also treats Alex as a slave without outright controlling him, since she needs at least one "worker" who can perform more complex tasks.
• Never Trust a Title: Played with. Outside of a shot of a floating AR-15, the plot has very little to do with actual weapons. Thematically, however, the title is more than appropriate, referencing various aspect and themes of the film, most notably in how Gladys' victims are made into her metaphorical "weapons". This is in line with the director's previous film, Barbarian, which featured no actual barbarians, but did have strong themes of barbarity.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • Although he technically appears in both trailers, the fact that Alex is the one child in Justine's class that does show up to school that day is vital to the film and is completely unmentioned in most trailers. Trailer 1 even says the room was "totally empty", which is shown to be incorrect in the first few minutes of the film.
  • Some of the marketing gives the impression of that the plot involves the citizens of Maybrook being menaced by the missing kids, a la Children of the Corn. In reality, the only person the weaponized children attack is Gladys herself.
• Nobody Poops: While it is noted by Gladys that the titular weapons have to be fed, none of them are shown needing to pee or poop, nor is there any indication that they have soiled themselves the entire time they were under Gladys's control.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • Marcus' husband letting an old woman into their home against Marcus's wishes and discomfort for a drink of water gets them both killed when Gladys weaponizes Marcus and makes him beat his husband to death before siccing him on Justine.
  • Alex's parents allowing (what they believe to be) a sickly old relative stay at their home quickly sees them weaponized and their son virtually enslaved by Gladys, who uses him to weaponize the rest of his classmates to restore her own health at all of their expense.
• No Ontological Inertia: Zig-Zagged. Gladys's death causes all the affected people to come to their senses no matter where they are, but only Archer, the most recently-weaponized who was only under her control for a few moments and didn't do much, is back to normal right away. Alex's parents and the missing children are still catatonic, and the ending narration says that some of the children, after some time, are beginning to talk again, while Alex's parents still need someone to feed them (for now - it's implied some kids beginning to talk again is the start of a full recovery for all of them, and if they're going to recover, Alex's parents might even have a chance themselves). Tying into this, any injuries, including fatal ones, that the weapons take obviously remain after the spell is broken.
• Noodle Incident: A few played for comedy:
  • The cop inspecting the graffiti on Justine's car talks about his own mischievous youth and recalls, "A buddy of mine smeared some of his own-" before the scene cuts away.
  • As Justine copes with depression by watching a cheesy dating show, we hear the bachelorette earnestly telling a candidate, "We got off to a rocky start with everything that happened in the Jacuzzi..."
• Nothing Is Scarier: The film never explains several things about Gladys; who (or perhaps what) exactly she is, where she came from, why she chose to stay in Maybrook, if she's even actually related to Alex's family, the exact nature of her magic, where she planned to go after being discovered, or what her ultimate goal was after regaining her strength.
• Obviously Evil: Gladys being the villain, or at least connected, is incredibly obvious when you compare her to other characters. Her appearance and demeanor are uncannily... "quirky", she's connected to the only child that didn't disappear from Justine's class, and she keeps assuring Marcus that everything is fine when she shows up for a meeting instead of Alex's parents. Though this façade only goes on for a little bit, her creepiness keeps getting more and more blatant before her dark magic is explicitly shown to the viewer - and to a visibly unnerved Marcus.
• Offing the Offspring: Almost and unwillingly. Gladys warns Alex not to cross the salt barrier in front of her room, a trigger for her enslaved victims to instantly attack a trespasser. When Alex defies her, his parents instantly attack him with lethal intent, forcing him to flee them and frantically find a way to stop Gladys. The attack only ceases when Gladys is torn apart and Mr. and Mrs. Lilly come dangerously close to ripping their own son apart.
• Off the Wagon: Paul is said to be attending AA meetings, but he's very half-hearted about it, and Justine gets him drinking again without even really trying.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Paul freaks out when he gets pricked by a potentially dirty needle, and than freaks out even worse when he realizes that he punched James out in full view of his patrol car's dashboard camera.
  • Gladys has one when she hears a soft ding, realizing what that means for her; her weapons being turned right back on her.
• Older Than They Look: An interesting case since Gladys already looks very old, but her referring to tuberculosis as consumption, which Marcus points out is a term that hasn't been widely used in several decades, indicates she's well over a hundred years old and that her leeching of other's lifeforce to heal herself is a form of immortality she has to semi-regularly refill.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: A possessed Marcus vomits a tar-like substance onto his husband while attacking him. He's the only possession victim seen doing this. Similarly, Paul's corpse bleeds black ooze instead of red blood when Justine is forced to shoot him to save herself after he's weaponized against her.
• Once More, with Clarity: Done repeatedly as part of the film's unfolding, jigsaw puzzle structure. If you see something weird or unexplained, chances are you'll see it again later in more understandable fashion, often from a different viewpoint.
• The Oner: Justine's chapter concludes with her passing out in her car while staking out the Lilly household, followed by Mrs. Lilly walking out the pitch black front door with a pair of scissors, entering Justine's car and snipping off a lock of her hair, all shown in one unbroken view from the perspective of Justine's passenger seat.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Voodoo Zombie is probably the closest thing to describe the fate of the people under Gladys' thrall. They are people who have been bound to Gladys' will and slowly drained of their lifeforce by way of her witchcraft, and when she commands them to attack others, they behave like the "fast" zombies out of any number of modern Zombie Apocalypse films, complete with Gladys herself being Devoured by the Horde after she loses control of them from Alex turning them against her. Shooting them in the head seems to be a surefire way of putting them down, but only because they don't react to any other forms of pain (like a bullet to the throat for one). What's more, not only are they still alive, which means that they need to be fed and are as vulnerable to injury as any normal human, but the spell is reversible, with all of them returning to normal after Gladys dies. Lastly, it's implied that they remember everything they did and were fully aware and thinking when they were under Gladys' spell, with many of the children still being catatonic due to the trauma of having been compelled to eat somebody.
• Outside-Context Problem: A mass kidnapping of young children, while rare, isn't unheard of and all available resources are poured into finding them. The trouble is, they've been taken by a literal Wicked Witch with very real, very potent Blood Magic powers, something that nobody could possibly predict or even consider possible in the modern world.
• Parents as People: It's implied Archer was not the most attentive father, given Matthew's bullying tendencies. He still deeply loves and misses his son and will stop at nothing to find him.
• Plot Armor: Justine not only surviving being strangled by the possessed Paul and Archer in close succession for minutes by both, but also doing so without any marks on her throat or difficulty in breathing/speaking immediately afterwards despite the 'Weapons' being so strong that even children were able to rip Gladys to pieces fairly quickly.
• Police Are Useless:
  • Despite Captain Ed Locke's protestations of them vigorously following every lead, Gladys is able to put up a façade that everything is fine in the Lilly household with the police being none the wiser, mostly because they don't want to push too hard investigating what they see as a futile lead. Given the level of scrutiny Alex and his family should've been under, Gladys' cover story would have been taken apart by more competent/motivated investigators in a matter of days. They can be forgiven for not realizing Gladys was a witch but they should still have realized something was up. It's stated by the opening narration that they hushed up the weird events of the film in its aftermath, implicitly out of embarrassment for letting something like this happen right under their noses.
  • Additionally, pretty much all modern police cruisers come equipped with GPS trackers tied into their Automatic Vehicle Locator hardware. One would think that after Paul drives off from the police station in a rage, and then doesn't show back up for what is clearly several days, a competent police force would have looked at the GPS location of his cruiser being obviously parked in front of the same creepy house for days and investigated further.
  • There's no real reason ever given why the cops never did the exact same thing Archer did which let him and Justine to the Lilly house. Police would've had easier access to the same footage and could have just as easily traced the same paths on a map, and would have had access to even more tools to validate their hypothesis (such as other neighborhood doorbell camera who could've seen the kids run by).
• Police Brutality: After accidentally getting stabbed by a needle in James' pocket, Officer Paul clocks him good right in front of his dashcam, meaning he has to let him go and hope he doesn't get reported. When he later spots James walking to the station, Paul is so enraged that he races after him to beat the shit out of him again.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Gladys doesn't mind control Alex like she does her other victims. Not out of kindness, but simply because she does, in fact, need someone with their full mental faculties to handle jobs for her beyond basic menial labor and attacking enemies, the only things that the weapons are really good for.
• Product Placement: Coca-Cola and Campbell's condensed soup are featured prominently... though probably not in a context that'd make you want to buy those products.
• Race Against the Clock: Gladys seems to understand that, even with her covering her tracks and the Maybrook PD initially not regarding the Lilly family as a lead worth following, someone will eventually catch on to her shenanigans, meaning that she only has so long to eat and heal up before she has to move on.
• "Rashomon"-Style: At various points where we see the same scene from different perspectives, there are very mild differences to indicate the characters' personal perceptions of events. For example, in Paul's portion of the film, his arrest of James ends with him apologetically promising to leave him alone if he doesn't show his face in town again and helping him to his feet with some empathy. In James' portion, Paul is noticeably colder when warning him and simply commands him to "get the fuck up".
• Really 700 Years Old: Implied with Gladys, who accidentally uses Antiquated Linguistics while talking with Principal Marcus (e.g. claiming Alex's parents are sick with "consumption"), cryptically tells Alex that she has been sick for "a long time," and is seen slowly rejuvenating herself through the movie, with her regaining a full head of white hair, though she is killed before she can revitalize herself any further.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Principal Marcus is stern but also entirely fair. He's sympathetic to both Justine and the parents in the difficult situation following disappearances, doing everything he can to find a compromise that works out best for everyone, and doesn't dismiss complaints out-of-hand even when he personally thinks there's nothing to worry about. It's implied that this is part of why Gladys decides to weaponize him and cause his death; he's competent, observant, and sensible enough that it's only a matter of time before he pieces together that something is wrong at the Lilly house.
  • While Captain Locke is far from a great cop, when properly motivated, he shows that he does have the potential to be a good one, laying down the law when necessary without being too harsh and calling out Archer and the parents for harassing Justine when she's clearly innocent. And while he's willing to bend rules to protect his son-in-law Paul from trouble, he only goes so far on that front and no further, noting that he'll let things slide if James doesn't pursue charges but also that he can't and won't shield Paul from the consequences if the issue goes public.
• Red Herring: The focus on Justine in the first act and the fact that the missing students were all in her class seems to imply that, even if she isn't personally responsible, the children's disappearance has something to do with her. The reality is that the students were abducted because of their connection to Alex, the sole remaining student. The same thing would have happened even if Alex were in the school's other third grade class, and apart from trying to kill Justine a couple of times when her snooping gets irritating, Gladys isn't concerned with her at all.
• Red Is Violent: Gladys wears a reddish-orange wig, and although she never kills anyone herself, she is responsible for every death in the movie.
• Rescuing the Abused: After Gladys is killed by the children, all of her victims are taken out of her house and given proper care. Unfortunately, it's too late for four of her victims (Principal Marcus, his husband, Paul, and James), and the others have barely made it: Mr. and Mrs. Lilly are institutionalized due to their catatonia, and the 17 missing children are in similar states, with it taking the next year for some of them to begin talking again, and it'll be longer until the rest do.
• Rewatch Bonus: When Alex is being questioned by the police in the opening scene, his parents sit stiffly beside him as a result of Gladys's influence on them. Gladys herself is also present, shown from behind wearing her red wig.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • Did Archer really paint WITCH on Justine's car? He had the right-colored paint and the motive, but is otherwise always shown unafraid to confront her (or anyone else) face-to-face. Most of the other plot threads are explained in other chapters, but this event never receives a Once More, with Clarity.
  • What's up with the dreams the cast suffers of Gladys? Is she causing it somehow, or something else? Is it part of her "feeding"? Is it something she's doing purposefully or unconsciously or just as a by-product? Is it because the characters have seen her due to her initial attempts to cover up her activities and are subconsciously noting something off about her?
  • Where did Gladys send the kids while the police searched Alex's house?
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • Archer is convinced that the Maybrook PD is mishandling the investigation into the children's disappearance by not focusing their resources on digging deeper on Justine, one of the only two people connected to the class who didn't vanish. He is entirely correct in that the police would have found the children if they had focused their efforts on investigating the remaining individuals of Ms. Gandy's class, but is just wrong about which one. If the police had focused more on Alex Lilly and his family, they would have noticed the bizarre goings-on at his house weeks earlier.
  • Despite being entirely and obviously motivated by the reward money, James does do the right thing and tries to report the fact he's found the children multiple times, even though he admits how he found them would involve him confessing to burgling a house. Unfortunately for him, Paul throws a rather large spanner into the works and ends up getting them both possessed.
  • The parents' accusations of Justine being a witch turn out to be more correct than they realize. Not because she's responsible for anything, but because a witch is the one behind everything.
• Right on the Tick: All the children run from their homes at exactly 2:17 in the morning.
• Rule of Symbolism: In Archer's dream, he sees a giant, floating automatic assault rifle outfitted with a digital display showing the time 2:17. It's a metaphor stating a "weapon" was employed at the time to lure the children away, as well as that the kids and other victims are themselves weapons of a sort for Gladys.
• The Runaway: The children all left their homes in the dead of night with no prompting from anyone. Or rather, no physical prompting.
• Running Gag: Almost every lead character (save Alex) yells "What the FUCK?" (or even just "Fuck!") during their portion of the film. Understandably so.
• Salt Solution: Gladys booby-traps Alex's house by placing salt lines in certain rooms. Stepping across it triggers Gladys' "weaponized" people to relentlessly pursue and attack whoever crossed the line.
• The Scapegoat: With no one claiming responsibility for the children's disappearance, the city turns Justine into a pariah, capped off with Archer (possibly) painting the word 'WITCH' onto the side of her car:
  Justine: Believe me, the message is loud and clear: I'm the problem. Got it.
  Archer: You know what? I think that's the first honest thing I've heard you say. You are the problem.
• Scenery Dissonance: Several harrowing scenes such as Marcus killing his husband and then attacking Justine, as well as the kids chasing Gladys, take place in broad daylight.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Gladys is able to take control of Paul easily once he shows up at the Lilly household, but she realizes that a police officer showing up unannounced means that there's too much heat on her, so she demands that Alex pack his things because they're leaving the next day. Thankfully, Justine and Archer decide to investigate the house before she's able to disappear.
• Shaky P.O.V. Cam: At the end as the kids catch up to Gladys, the camera follows Matthew as he closes in on Gladys, from the point of view of presumably the kid right behind him.
• Shout-Out:
  • The movie's Arc Number, 2:17AM, is the approximate time of death of Trevor Moore, close friend and fellow The Whitest Kids U' Know member to writer/director Zach Cregger. He noted his grief around Moore's death was the original impetus for writing the screenplay, and the film opened on the 4th anniversary of Moore's passing. 
  • During Archer's nightmare sequence, the face Gladys takes on is a dead ringer for the infamous "Phantom" from Inland Empire. Appropriate, given that David Lynch was cited as a major influence on the film.
  • James finds a DVD of Willow, another film with a wicked witch, in Alex's house.
  • Gladys is bald and wears a wig, just like the titular characters from The Witches.
  • Principal Marcus and his husband are shown sitting down to a lunch of seven hot dogs.
  • Gladys' faux-benevolent description of the catatonic state of Alex's parents' as "They're just resting," is exactly how Lisa, another magical woman of mysterious origin, describes the catatonia into which she puts a protagonist's grandparents in Weird Science.
  • Gladys's ultimately futile mad dash through the neighborhood to escape the weaponized children that Alex turned against her plays out like a horror version of the climactic running sequence in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
  • What actually kills Gladys — having her head ripped in half jaw-wise — looks remarkably similar to the death of another older woman in Hatchet.
  • The film's narrative structure in general of a Hyperlink Story connecting various dysfunctional people is influenced by Magnolia. Making the homage clearer is that Paul's outfit and hairstyle make him look a lot like John C. Reilly's character in said movie, who is also a semi-bumbling cop.
• Significant Anagram: One version of the teaser trailer displayed the monologue with some letters in red; those letters are PEAWNOS. Rearrange them, and you get the film's title.
• Skewed Priorities: After the possessed mob of children have come smashing through his house in pursuit of Gladys, one homeowner seems more concerned with the damage they did to the front lawn than the fact that they were the seventeen children missing for over two months.
• Sneaking Out at Night: All of the disappeared children left their houses in the dead of night, specifically at 2:17 am.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: When the kids are chasing down Gladys, rather than any music playing in the background, there is just no music whatsoever, making the scene feel more like a slapstick than an actual thrilling chase. Once they catch and tear her apart, a triumphant, almost fairy tale-like music cue starts to play, contrasting with the insane brutality and gore of the scene.
• Super Window Jump: While pursing Gladys, some of the kids jump through house windows to catch her while others take the door...right out of its frame.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Archer punches James several times in the face during their tussle; hitting someone's skull barehanded repeatedly is a great way to break your hand in Real Life, and Archer visibly grimaces and shakes his damaged hand after the last one. Afterwards he resorts to throwing James around the room instead.
  • Similarly, Archer is fairly tall and muscular, while James is a shorter, rail-thin junkie, meaning he lacks the strength to meaningfully attack Archer. The latter pretty effortlessly picks him up and throws him around, only getting caught off-guard when James pushes him down the staircase.
• Sympathetic Magic: It's eventually revealed that Gladys is a witch, and her magic works in this fashion. She requires a personal belonging from someone to take control of them, either by wrapping it around a branch from her tree or by mixing some kind of brew, and activates the control of her "weapons" by ringing a bell. She then uses hair from her chosen targets wrapped around a branch from her tree and snaps the branch to send a "weapon" to relentlessly and directly pursue and kill whoever's hair has been wrapped around the stick. Gladys later collects the hair of the bewitched children on a stick to inititate another command to make them temporarily flee the Lilly house when investigators come around. Alex turns the tables by taking a hair of Gladys's from her wig and repeating the attack spell on the stick that commanded the children to hide, thus selecting the kids as the weapons and Gladys as the target.
• Tick Tock Tune: As the children flee into the night, the teaser trailer is backed by the ticking of a clock.
• Title Drop: Courtesy of Archer, who explicitly states that Gladys's magic turns people into weapons.
• Torn Apart by the Mob: The 17 kids brutally kill Gladys in this fashion after Alex uses her magic stick to make them go after her. After the traumatizing ordeal and hell that she put Alex and the kids through throughout the film, it's quite justified.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The opening narration states that the local police and federal agencies scrubbed any and all evidence of what happens in the story, indicating some kind of conspiracy involving the local government. In reality, it's because the events that occurred are just far too bizarre to explain to outsiders, and frankly leave the police looking incompetent.
• True Blue Femininity: Gladys wears a blue pastel coat during a couple scenes.
• The Unblinking: People under Gladys's control stop blinking. This combined with the Unstoppable Rage they go into once weaponized causes a very realistic take on Red Eyes, Take Warning.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Paul's wife is nothing but supportive to him and his father-in-law is willing to bend the law and thus put his career at risk to protect him from the consequences of his mistakes. Both clearly care a lot about him. But the feelings are not mutual at all, and Paul treats their kindness towards him like it's an annoyance at best.
• The Un-Reveal: We never learn the identity of the child narrator.
• Unreliable Narrator: Downplayed as there isn't any outright lying and events play out almost identical, but each segment differs slightly from each character's perspective while still being third-person, as indicated in "Rashomon"-Style above. This is mostly shown by certain events either being shown or skipped over to indicate different priorities to the POV, such as with Justine and Paul's date at the bar. Justine's perspective shows her being a bit standoffish and skipping to the next morning, while Paul's perspective focuses on her moments flirting with him and shows them having sex before skipping over their conversation when she drove him to work.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: After he's possessed, Principal Marcus vomits black matter all over his husband's face. The audience gets to watch the whole thing.
• Wham Shot: After seeing dribs and drabs of imagery related to her in pretty much every preceding segment, seeing Gladys openly and in an actual speaking role for the first time in Marcus's story is a definite sign that either something is wrong or she's connected to the mystery in some way. As it turns out...
• Wicked Witch: Gladys is effectively the archetypal witch, being a cruel old crone who uses sinister magic with magic branches and bubbling pots to compel others to do her bidding and who kidnaps children for her dark ends.
• Witch with a Capital "B": Archer paints "witch" on Justine's car. In an R-rated movie with far worse language than the B-word, this may come off as strange, though it does serve as Foreshadowing on what the kidnapper actually is.
• Woman Scorned: When Donna learns about Paul and Justine's affair, she attacks Justine at the store and pours vodka over her.
• World of Jerkass: Most of them are sympathetic jerkasses, but few of the town's residents are nice guys, and almost none of the ones that really are that last for long. Many of the main characters are selfish and self-serving to varying degrees, and even the only one that's thoroughly selfless (Marcus) is forced to be a hardass by necessity out of professionalism. A few examples that really stand out are the shop owner who unsympathetically tells Justine to get out rather than intervene or even call the police when Marcus attacks her, the police chief himself who doesn't hesitate to cover up police misconduct by his daughter's husband on the force and the homeowner at the end who seems more concerned with the damage done to his property by the mob of children chasing Gladys than the fact that said mob consisted of the children who've been missing for the better part of two months.
• Would Hurt a Child: Gladys was willing to kidnap over a dozen children while enslaving one to help her find victims and keep them alive. Even though her plan to siphon the life force of the children is stopped before she can actually hurt them, all seventeen children are left in states of catatonia (likely deeply traumatized by what happened), and Alex Lilly is forced to move in with a relative after his parents are institutionalized.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Marcus' husband, Terry; while Marcus is rightfully suspicious of the creepy lady who previously came to his office showing up ''uninvited'' to his house at the weekend and asking to be let in, Terry complies. It was likely already too late for Marcus, since Gladys seemed to already have everything she needed to enthrall him, but without getting into the house and cutting his hair, Terry would have survived.
• Zerg Rush: Gladys is defeated when the seventeen children she's kidnapped are turned against her by Alex, pursuing her through the neighborhood in a screaming mob before overwhelming her with sheer numbers.