This article contains spoilers for Weapons.Those who saw Weapons in the theater experienced something shocking in the movie’s final moments. Admittedly most of us went into Weapons expecting to be shocked. After all, director Zach Cregger certainly unnerved us with his twisty solo debut feature, Barbarian. But Weapons fills audiences with an unexpected emotion in its final scenes where young Alex (Cary Christopher) gains access the magic abilities that the witch Gladys (Amy Madigan) has been using to control his parents and his third-grade classmates.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});In a delicious reversal, Alex sends the children chasing after Gladys, following after her as she runs through the Pennsylvania suburb that she has been terrorizing. She flees in and out of houses, begging happy-seeming families for help. The kids rampage through the houses too, gleefully smashing through windows and finally tackling Gladys in a nice, green yard. In a shot that recalls something from the zombie attack in the climax of Dawn of the Dead, we watch as the children clutch at Gladys’ face and jaw, literally pulling the elderly woman apart.And what do must of us in the audience do in response to such carnage? We laugh, reveling at both the comedy of the chaotic kids and in the sense of justice meted out against the witch who tormented them. But then the laughter subsides as we learn that all is not, in fact, well in the end. In its last seconds, Weapons gestures back to the discreet mass shooting references that have been running through the film, leaving viewers with a sense of injustice that no movie, no matter how well made, can take away.The Witch is Dead… Now What?In the first few minutes of Weapons, a child’s voiceover (Scarlett Sher) explains the movie’s premise One morning at 2:17 am, all the students in Justine Gandy’s (Julia Garner) third-grade class woke up, left their homes, and went running into the night, their arms oddly akimbo. Only one of Ms. Gandy’s students showed up in class the next morning, Alex Lilly. In closing, the child’s voice whispers, the authorities never discovered any solutions to the problem. Thus what we’re going to see is secret information that the official record has not disclosed.Notice that the narrator promises secrets. She does not promise answers. Sure, by the end of the movie we understand that the children left their houses because of the influence of the witch Gladys, who has come to Alex’s home under the pretense of being his mother’s aunt. We know that Gladys gathered the children in Alex’s basement, using materials that the bullied Alex stole from his classmates. However, we never learn why, exactly, Gladys needs the children. Heck, we never even get confirmation that she’s actually his mother’s aunt. We don’t know why she came to Alex’s house, nor why she suddenly feels the need to leave, taking Alex with her. And we don’t fully understand why she makes reckless decisions, such as taking control of kindly Principal Miller (Benedict Wong) and sending him to strangle Justine in broad daylight.Instead of giving us answers, Weapons is more concerned with exploring emotional turmoil within the community. With a fractious narrative style that shows events from multiple perspectives, we spend time with troubled cop Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), drug-addicted drifter James (Austin Abrams), and Archer Gaff (Josh Brolin), a father who aggressively investigates the disappearance of his son. This approach gives us richer characters than the monster fodder most often found in horror movies. It also makes Weapons less a film about a witch invading a small town, a great subject for a horror story but not very realistic, and more about a community that fails to make sense of a senseless attack on its children. In other words, it becomes a movie about something that’s all too real to most Americans.Picturing Our ProblemsMidway through Weapons, Archer dreams about the night his son Matthew (Luke Speakman) leaves the house. In his dream, Archer follows Matthew out of the house and into the night, but his vision gives him no new information, no insight into his son’s motivations. Most bafflingly of all, Archer turns back to his house to see a ghostly assault rifle manifest in a vision above his roof. The gun doesn’t make sense to Archer, nor is it clear to viewers. After all, the narrator says that Gladys’ spell “weaponizes” the children, but outside of the taser that Paul threatens to use against James, guns don’t really figure into the story.At least they don’t explicitly figure into the story. Implicitly, however, Weapons is very much about guns, specifically guns used against children.Like the sights of building buildings which appeared in movies for more than a decade after Sept. 11, 2011, Weapons is filled with imagery that recalls our current scourge of school shootings. The shot of Justine entering an empty classroom, scenes in which Principal Miller tries and fails to calm attendees at a school meeting, the desperation of parents who are frustrated by the actions of police—we can find examples of all of these in real-life communities torn apart when a gunman kills children.It’s that frustration that makes the ending chase scene so much fun. It’s not just the utter rambunctiousness that Cregger and cinematographer Larkin Seiple capture with the kids’ rampage, though one does sense that the young performers had a blast shooting these scenes. It’s also the righteous fury that we viewers experience, watching the victims fight back against the monster that preyed upon them. We viewers experience catharsis when watching on the screen something we have not experienced in real life.But only to a point. Exhilarating as Gladys’ death is, and as heart-warming as it is to see Archer embrace Matthew and carry him away, Cregger does not give us a completely happy ending. In the final moments, the narrator returns to put things into perspective. Alex’s parents no longer hurt themselves at Gladys’s command, but they are essential comatose, now being cared for by the state while Alex is sent to live with another relative. Michael has been reunited with his father, no longer a weapon for Gladys to wield, but he and the other children remain vegetative, with only some eventually able to speak a few words.The ending shows us that killing the witch doesn’t fix the problem. The suffering lingers as the credits roll.Some viewers be dissatisfied by Cregger’s decision to undercut the ecstatic ending in which the kids kill Gladys. And they should be. As much as Weapons offers a revenge fantasy where the only thing threatening our children is a witch in wacky make-up who can be killed and the problem solved, it also understands that the real problem is far more complicated.We viewers have no witch to kill, no single bad guy to stop. Instead we live in a society that makes guns, weapons, easily available and a complicit political system that has no interest in changing that. We live in a society willing to sacrifice children by the classroom-full in defense of vague notions about personal rights and entrenched devotion to free-market capitalism. We live in a society that hasn’t done nearly enough to protect real children, a society that doesn’t deserve a happy ending.Continuing the StoryTo its credit, Weapons isn’t a moral allegory. Unlike so many modern trauma horror films, you can’t draw a one-to-one line between real-world evils and the monsters onscreen. As with Barbarian, Cregger does a masterful job combining tones and plot lines to create a lived-in world. The film never feels preachy, but it always feels immediate, urgent in its anger and trenchant in its terrors.In other words, it’s the best type of social issues movie: one that relates how it feels to live in the world without being too literal. The ending of Weapons best illustrates that quality. We don’t come away from Weapons feeling like we’ve been taught a lesson but we do leave with a vague sense of the disease. We walk out of the theater knowing that the movie showed us something wrong in our world. It’s up to us, not the Weapons, to put it right.Weapons is now playing in theaters worldwide.The post Weapons: The Uncomfortable Reason Zach Cregger Denies You Closure at the End appeared first on Den of Geek.