Weapons Ending Explained & Movie Recap: What Happens To Alex Lilly?

Zach Cregger’s Weapons is the most-awaited horror release of this year, and the watch is worth the wait. Horror as a genre has been on the rise since last year. We have been seeing some exceptional marketing around films—like how Longlegs came with its entire website full of documents, footage, and images. The point was to break the fourth wall, pull the audience in, and rewrite the film inside the audience’s head. With Weapons, which claimed to be this year’s best horror, there was no marketing gimmick. Just a simple trailer, which presented the premise—seventeen children from the same classroom disappeared one night. Where did they go? The trailer triggered an uncanny aura around the film and never addressed it. Meanwhile, the film saw high stakes—with Jordan Peele allegedly firing both of his managers after losing the rights to produce Weapons in an auction.

But what is Zach Cregger doing right to merit this hype? Weapons is a film that does not tell but shows. With his previous success, Barbarian, Cregger had already shown us what an exceptional storyteller he is. Barbarian begins with a meet-cute between a man and a woman with the potential to turn into a predatory horror, but it swiftly switches tone into a whole new film with the uncovering of the basement. The film mimics the structure of the house—and Cregger’s narrative is highly stylized and intelligent in balancing content with form. Weapons is almost the same in its craft—Cregger gives away the logline in the trailer itself and slowly moves to a chapter-wise narration, but then we realize he is playing with time. I have seen horrors with non-linear narratives, time jumps, and vignettes, but there is nothing like how Weapons chooses to tell its story. At the heart of the film lies the sudden disappearance of the seventeen kids from Justine’s classroom—and all the titular characters are placed at different points of time and space while being connected like dots in their stories. Cregger has created a massive cartographic wheel in Weapons, where all roads lead to Rome—the disappearing act. Before we go further into a notch deeper, let’s do a quick recap of what actually happens.

Spoilers Ahead

Justine Gandy is a kindergarten teacher who bears the brunt of the town’s hatred and outrage after seventeen students from her class disappear from their houses in the middle of the night. The footage found shows the children running away from their houses, unprompted, with hands floating on their sides, and disappearing into the darkness. Only one child—Alex Lilly—is left, who is resistant to being questioned and also refuses to talk to Justine when she tries to strike up a conversation with him. The film has six chapters focusing on Justine, the teacher; Archer Graff, one of the missing children’s fathers; Paul, the cop; James, a homeless junkie; Marcus, the principal of Maybrook Kindergarten; and Alex, the survivor, the villain, the victim, and the hero of the film. 

With the choir of a narration with multiple point of views creating a somewhat Rashomon effect, each character arc tries to lead to the point of what is happening behind the taped windows of Alex Lilly’s house and their brush with Aunt Gladys—who is eerily similar to the mother in the Barbarian. Cregger plays with the classic fairytale trope of a witch, which, if we may say, acts like a female version of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, luring children out of the household in the dead of the night. Aunt Gladys is a parasite—she has to leech off multiple victims’ energy to survive despite her terminal illness. It is very interesting to note that the film never explains what Aunt Gladys’ purpose is or why she was doing what she was doing. It simply shows her using very common tropes of witchcraft—plants, salt, hair, sticks, blood, twigs—working in different combinations and keys to form one elaborate arsenal. We see the parasites being mentioned thrice—once when Justine is teaching a class in a dream, once when she is actually teaching the class, and another time just before Gladys arrives at Marcus’ house to perform the first hex. Gladys’ act is simple—by making a certain talisman with twigs from a plant she carries, smearing blood on it, and tying a lock of the hair of the person she wants to manipulate, she can orchestrate any act, even acts of violence. She infiltrates Alex’s household, puts his parents under her control, and starts blackmailing Alex to bring all the children in so she can thrive off of them. Alex, optionless, becomes an accomplice in her actions and herds all seventeen of his classmates into their basement. 

Eventually, as the threads start detangling, Justine and Graff reach Alex’s house and find the children, while Alex, putting his efforts together, undoes the curse by hurling it right back at Gladys in the same way he had seen her do it. The children are now programmed to kill Gladys, with her hair on the twig. The flock of seventeen children chases her down, mauling her to death. Weapons ends just as it began, with a kid’s voiceover saying that the children returned home, and after a year or so, some of them began to speak.

Weapons is not a film that answers; it just lays the answers in plain sight. What, or rather, who are the weapons then? Aunt Gladys, Alex’s mother’s aunt with a terminal illness, comes over to stay with them, but things go wrong the very first morning. She puts a hex on Alex’s parents, subduing them in a state of rest, and starts to blackmail Alex into keeping his mouth shut. Gladys is doing this for her survival—she seems to be doing much better when there are more victims under her “consumption”. (When Marcus asks her what Alex’s parents are ill with, her answer is that they are under consumption). We see a certain kind of ant being controlled by a parasitic bacterium on Marcus’ TV when Gladys enters. Gladys’ motive can be figured out—she wants to live and live off others. However, to keep the plan moving, she has to have control over it. Her survival is tied to control, which in turn is tied to violence. In addition to the arsenal of the seventeen kids, Alex’s silence is also being weaponized. The children, and the adults, become the weapons in this simple scheme of things. With every snap of Gladys’ hexing twig, they look exactly the same—broken like a stick bent forcefully from the middle, hands floating by their side, jettisoning like missiles. But when do they snap back? We will find out later in this article.

Archer Graff looks through footage and figures out that the children ran like missiles to Alex’s house. Under the spell of Gladys, humans seem to lose their agency and start working like weapons with the assigned goal of killing Gladys’ desired target. This is a fantastic motif, with entire living rooms to hold space for symbolisms like thought control and geopolitical implications. The reality of the film—often shifting between dream and reality—follows distinct situational logic. Like the dreams are extremely dreamlike—Cregger has claimed that he has put elements in the film that he does not understand himself. Are we then witnessing the spectacle of an auteur’s subconscious as he proclaims a bold assertion over it? This is important for the birth of a new genre in horror. I was spellbound by the gun-clock that appears in the dream over Alex’s house at an image level, and how it superimposes itself on the main plot, quietly streamlining an explanation. 

Weapons can be viewed as two films—one on the surface level with exceptional and uncanny horror tropes involving a witch, her victims, and the revenge of seventeen children led by Alex Lilly, and another one with a deeper subtext that questions how weaponization works between the abuser and the abused. We have discussed the first version so far; let us now look at the second one. When Gladys takes Alex’s parents under her control, she has leverage over Alex. Alex’s household falls apart—with his parents assuming defunct, dormant roles, and Alex has to step in as a parent figure. We see classic tropes of domestic unrest in Alex—he represses his house situation, he parents his parents by feeding them and taking care of them, and eventually he takes on the assumed responsibility of finding a cure for Gladys’ illness just to make her leave. 

At this point in the film, Alex becomes an active accomplice in the disappearance of seventeen children. With careful precision, he brings an object from each of his classmates—and inches very close to the role of an enfant terrible. But if we look closely, Alex is but an effect of the cause—often children behaving erratically, with sudden outbursts of violence or rage, are the byproduct of domestic trauma and its repression, which finds channels through their activities. Like a magnet, he pulls the other children into his deeply sad, helpless existence. In a basement, he tends to them every day, making them a part of his reality. There are disturbing visuals of Alex being chased by the demonified versions of his parents, with his mother’s head breaking in through the bathroom door and raging at him. At this point, Alex, like any child, chooses survival, at any cost. Alex figures out how to subvert the curse and directs it at Gladys. 

The children become an arsenal of weapons who will not stop until they kill Gladys. It is a collective expression of sadness, of repression, and of rage. And it takes us right back to the beginning of the film in the counselling session of the parents, where grief is being discussed. The speaker says that sadness is not the only emotion that comes with the incident—anger is a pivotal emotion in the stages of grief. Alex’s grief, Alex’s suffering at home, heaves like a missile through the collective rage—in essence, he has now become the wizard controlling the army, just to save his childhood. The film subverts the enfant terrible trope to show us a distressed child, parenting his own parents, being emotionally blackmailed, shrivelled on the bathroom floor, desperately trying to make an escape.

The world of children is a mystery unto itself. I am reminded of Koreeda’s Monsters, and Weapons looks like its darker, spiritual sibling. The film begins and ends with a child’s narration. He ends the film saying that the children went back to their parents, and Alex’s parents had to move to a different facility where they are being fed soup now. Trauma dissociates a child—it makes them look at events from a distance, and it makes them assume the role of a third person. Alex, at once, distanced himself from the incident where he had to be a hero, even when he did not want to, and thus, played out the story of Weapons, where seventeen children disappeared at the dead of the night one day, exactly at 2:17 AM.