There are shots from Zach Cregger’s film “Weapons” that I think about daily.

The writer and director knows how to supercharge a scene with dread and hypertension-inducing suspense, then release it with a scream—or a laugh. If that talent wasn’t clear enough in his 2022 debut “Barbarian,” it’s on vivid display in “Weapons.”

But roughly six months after its release, the scene that has stuck with me most is not a scary one. It’s not a funny one, either. It is simple exposition, although in this film’s flip-flopping timeline, the most important introductory facts are revealed at the very end. The scene shows a third-grader named Alex (Cary Christopher) bearing an intense, gut-wrenching loneliness that he is unable to share with any adults in his town. For reasons I’ll get to later, he’s left alone to feed and care for his parents without any help.

Cregger shows Alex and his family subsisting off canned soup for weeks. The young boy grocery shops alone each day after walking home alone from school. There’s one small detail that really brings the burden of isolation to life: Young Alex switches to a soup brand with pull-tab tops because he struggles to use the can opener.

“Weapons” is a mystery and a thriller, but also a modern-day fable complete with a narrator, an evil witch (a spine-chilling performance that earned Amy Madigan an Oscar nomination last month) and a moral. “Weapons” is a story about polarization and paranoia. The film shows how often we respond to tragedy with even more destruction. We allow our most base emotions to take over, rather than supporting the neediest among us in its wake. The consequences prove catastrophic—in “Weapons” and in real life.

I will have to eventually spoil the central mystery of the movie, which is introduced by the nameless narrator in the opening shot: Why did all but one third-grade student in Mrs. Justine Gandy’s class at Maybrook Elementary School get up one night at 2:17 a.m., leave their houses and disappear into the woods? Where did they go? What happened to them? Why is Alex the only kid who didn’t run away?

Gandy, played by Julia Garner, is immediately the center of her neighbors’ suspicions. The beginning of the film follows the harassment and vandalism she’s subjected to, especially from class parent Archer Graff (Josh Brolin).

Gandy genuinely cares about her students and feels a responsibility to find out what happened to them. But it’s also clear that her care and responsibility take a back seat to clearing her own name. Like most of the characters in “Weapons,” Gandy fails to help Alex when it matters most—not because she’s unfeeling or cruel, but because she centers herself in the tragedy.

The film then switches to Graff’s perspective. He is a man teetering on the edge of sanity because of the unexplained loss of his son Matthew, one of the boys who (we learn later) bullies Alex in Gandy’s class.

Graff sees what happened to Matthew as a personal moral failing. He too is trapped in his own grief and lashes out at everyone around him, especially Gandy. Cregger draws plenty of parallels between the two characters. Both are losing control of their lives. Neither seems to care very deeply about how their destructive actions impact others. They are so consumed by their own emotions that they irreparably damage relationships as they compulsively try to unearth conspiracy and “solve” this tragedy.

It takes a random, bizarre and inexplicable physical attack against Gandy by the principal of her own school—a truly unhinged portrayal by Benedict Wong—to reconcile her with Graff and shake his suspicion. Gandy and Graff begin to lower their guard, to understand the anguish fueling the fury of the other. It takes a shared experience of violence with a common enemy to tear down the wall between these two characters.

The end of “Weapons” reveals the perspective of Alex himself. Before the disappearance, Alex’s parents begrudgingly take in his Aunt Gladys, who has nowhere else to go and is nearing death from a terminal illness. Gladys uses dark magic to bewitch Alex’s parents into a helpless, mindless state. She threatens to kill them unless Alex remains silent about her powers and keeps them alive for her. As he does so, Gladys draws vigor from the life forces of his unresponsive parents.

Alex, who was shy even before Gladys arrived, retreats into himself. He spends his days at school, at the grocery store and at home in silence and fear. Loneliness engulfs him. So when Gladys threatens to kill his parents unless he helps her kidnap his classmates to give her more life forces to feed off of, is it a surprise that Alex agrees?

Some audiences saw “Weapons” as an allegory for a school shooting. It’s not a huge leap, especially in this age of “elevated horror.” The most critically acclaimed horror movies of the past decade-plus, films like “Get Out” and “It Follows” (and “Barbarian,” for that matter), stood out because of their commentary on salient social issues. Some have done that very successfully. Many others have not.

In 2025, a number of these smart-horror movies came out and fell on their faces. Critics panned “Him” and “Opus,” both of which tried and failed to say something interesting about celebrity worship. Some writers were kinder to “Companion,” a Cregger-produced statement about artificial intelligence and modern toxic masculinity. I thought that one was fun but tried much too hard to elevate itself, to seem deep and poignant.

“Weapons” might appear similar on the surface. This movie, the story of a troubled young boy making his classmates disappear, could ostensibly be a message about the countless tragedies that have rocked schools across the United States.

It’s not, though: Cregger told the Guardian as much. And I think searching for the “right” answer in a story like this, combing through the film like detectives for confirmation of one theory of the other, is a mistake. The moral of this story is a much broader one.

“Weapons” is about flawed people and how their small acts of selfishness can compound. Using the film’s shifts in perspective, Cregger highlights how every decision has a consequence, often unbeknownst to the character in question. Nothing happens in a vacuum; each event sets off and shapes the others. Yes, a bloodthirsty witch is the prime mover behind all of it. But the other characters, who let their suspicion and anger divide them instead of banding together, bear responsibility as well.

Division is a powerful enemy to overcome. In “Weapons,” unity is ultimately the only solution. The same is true in real life, as well.

Christopher Parker is a St. Louis-based journalist and former O'Hare Fellow at America. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Berkshire Eagle, the Smithsonian magazine and Notre Dame magazine. He is currently a reporter and digital editor for The Missourian, a newspaper serving Franklin County, Mo.