The villain motivation of Aunt Gladys explained

This article contains “weapons” spoilers.

“Weapons”, the writer/director’s last terror function Zach Cregger, is a master class in manipulation, in more than one sense. Cregger’s previous film (his first as a solo filmmaker), “Barbarian”, was a film that was very intelligent in his bad direction, which led the public to believe that one thing was happening when he was not, and hiding what was really happening from the people until the proverbial trap was ready to be prepared. Given the rapid general response to that film, Cregger must have been aware that his follow -up would be under great scrutiny for any great turns and turns from the beginning, something with which “barbarian” did not have to deal with. As such, Cregger has built “weapons” around the very idea of an unsolved mystery. In other words, both the characters in the film and the visual audience are asking the same central question: what happened to 17 private children who left their homes early in the morning/one night and disappeared?

Due a debt to other movies and mystery shows such as “Knock in the cabin” and “The Leftovers”, “Armas” obtains its narrative energy to follow a set of characters, since everyone tries to solve and/or deal with this mystery in its own way. The general public has been trained to look for clues and gather them thanks to decades of sinuous stories, and there is an impulse that some have to jump to the wildest imaginable theory in an effort to overcome the filmmaker (if the response to the “Westworld” of HBO is any indication). Cregger subverts this impulse hiding the answer to the view towards the beginning of the film. In the first segment of the film focused on Justine (Julia Garner), the school teacher whose class is the only thing that all missing children had in common, the woman’s car is shattered, the word “witch” painted aside.

In fact, there is a witch to blame the disappearance of children, but it is not poor Justine. Instead, it is Gladys Lilly (Amy Madigan), Alex’s aunt (Cary Christopher), who is the only child who did not miss the Justine class. This relatively direct revelation can further frustrate some spectators given the large amount of ambiguity that surrounds Gladys’s methods and motivations. Here, then, it is all we know about Aunt Gladys, followed by an attempt to try to establish what he could have been doing exactly.

In the 1988 Thriller of the Dutch filmmaker George Sluizer “The Vanishing”, the protagonist is tortured and finally undone because of the possibility of never knowing what happened to his kidnapped girlfriend. In the same way that one could see the end of that film as a twisted phrase, Cregger uses Gladys’ character in “weapons” as an equally ill joke, one that has played more at the audience than in the other characters. With the exception of seeing her withered and fragile in some of her private moments, Gladys is often portrayed in the film as a striking, unexpectedly educated and Chipper figure. Her exaggerated makeup and bright red hair almost make her look like a kind of clown. Of course, this links it to the long history of murderous clowns in real life and fiction, but it seems that “weapons” are not trying to make a comparison of John Wayne Gacy or Pennywise as much as it is interested in the tonal juxtaposition of Gladys’s character.

This range of tonal colors for Gladys is something that actress Amy Madigan takes out with aplomb. It turns out that his skill with paper is one of the main reasons why Cregger was eager to give him the part. As the filmmaker explained in an exclusive interview with Chris Evangelista de /Film ::

“… I have always been a great admirer of her, and I only know that she can do anything. You see her in ‘Field of Dreams’ and she is this firecracker and totally inflatable and really funny. And then you see her and ‘Gone Baby Gone’, and she is heavy. And then you see her in” Carnivale “, and she is intimidating. “, and she is intimidating.

Together with Cregger who wants to make Madigan play a variety of tones and emotions, Gladys’s character has many layers of subtext and subversion for her. Instead of being a demonic intellectual author who plays an insidious and intricate long game (as with the witches seen in the “hereditary” of Ari Aster, for example), Gladys is simply a sick woman who uses her skills to try to get well and live longer. She is a manipulator both in her behavior (being too kind to strangers to lower their guard) and in her witchcraft (controlling the minds of others to use them for their vital force or as weapons). She obtains her true power to hide in sight, like the “witch” track in Justine’s car.

One of the ingenious aspects of “weapons” is how he leans in his allusions to the true crime and a supernatural mystery, two subgenres that are famous for getting into the weeds of a mystery and finding outrageous and intricate theories. Where Justine, Archer (Josh Brolin) and the audience can have their accelerated minds with possibilities with respect to the missing Maybrook children, Gladys produces as a replica of all that. Gladys, again, is not a master mind; She is simply an opportunist. The main reason why he used his witchcraft to kidnap 17 children from a classroom is that he could ask his nephew in that class, Alex, who substitiously obtains the objects he needed of them without suspicion. She puts Alex’s parents under her spell because they are her family and the two closest people with whom she can start. She avoids putting Alex in her slavery to help maintain public normality as long as possible. She only attacks Justine, Archer and others when they get too close to discovering her secret. She is very practical!

Taking into account that practicality, the reason for the abduction of Gladys children seems to be only for any supernatural process that allows him to divert a vital curator force of their bodies (or souls, perhaps). Cregger even adds an additional subversion on Gladys’s plot, which is that this spell does not work as well as expected. Similar to someone who thinks that taking eight tylenol instead of the two recommended will silence the headache, Gladys is simply trying to increase the dose of his healing spell with the children. One of the ironies in the film is that, if Gladys knew in advance that it would not be so effective, perhaps he would not have had all the problems of kidnapping, cover -up, etc.

This feeds one of the central themes of the film, which is that a large number of tragic and horrible events sometimes have worldly explanations, which is sometimes worse than any explanation. The theme can be seen throughout the film, and perhaps it is better exemplified by the non -significance of the time of 2:17 am, when children leave their homes. Instead that this particular moment is somewhat important, it turns out to be simply when Gladys finished inventing his spell and executed it; It could have spent a minute before, a minute later, or half an hour later. In the way Gladys areee to the people around it, Cregger armizes the minds and expectations of the public against them. As “weapons” demonstrate, it is super effective.