Weapons (2025) and Eddington (2025)
Beyond allegory?
In my previous post on the function of allegory in A24 and so-called "elevated horror" I posited some ways in which filmmakers might go beyond constructing clunky, over-determined allegories. In short, my recommendations were:
Puzzle box films (such as The Crescent, 2017; The Cabin in the Woods, 2012; Mulholland Drive, 2001). This is not my personal favourite approach to horror since I think an overly slick, elegant construction paired with a neat, unambiguous conclusion is liable to undermine the eerie potentialities of the genre and its ability to linger in the mind of the viewer. However, I think the aforementioned films succeed as horrors, even while not quite functioning as allegories. The Crescent, I wrote, “contains enough emotional depth and sheer eeriness that it still manages to linger”. The humour in Cabin in the Woods was mean-spirited enough that it didn’t undercut its (surprisingly) nihilistic horror. While the main mystery of Mulholland Drive’s narrative is arguably straightforward, the film’s dream logic ensures that any sense of resolution is only ever partial. Christopher Nolan, of course, is the ESTJ prince of puzzle box films and it would be interesting to see if his particular skillset could translate to the horror genre [though some would argue Satoshi Kon got there first].
Visceral excessiveness (such as in Together, 2025; The Substance, 2024; Raw, 2016). I would argue that an allegory’s lack of subtlety matters significantly less if the film’s stylistic excessiveness submerges the audience in the embodied experience of what the allegory represents, rendering its latent content excessive. Rather than a trait of so-called “elevated horror”, this approch to allegory was typical of many celebrated horror films of the 1970s and 1980s, with Dawn of the Dead (1978), The Fly (1986) and Society (1989) all gratifyingly splattery examples of the form. So, the bodily adhensions of Together might be an over-obvious extended metaphor for a co-dependent relationship, but they evoke the discomfort and claustrophobia of cloying co-dependency with much greater viscerality than a straightforward drama could achieve. It is notable that films working in this mode tend to be darkly funny, probably because excessive grotesquerie tends to engage the audience’s sense of the absurd. Perhaps laughter is actually closer to vomiting than it is to screaming.
Ambivalent allegories (such as A Place Without Fear, 2024; The Wolf House, 2018; INLAND EMPIRE, 2006). These are allegories in which meaning is unstable or diffuse, where it is impossible to settle upon a definitive conclusion about what the film is an allegory for even while it seems to invite allegory readings. Such films tend to lie towards the avant-garde end of the spectrum of commercial-to-experimental filmmaking. The inherently abstracted (or, at the very least, iconographic) nature of animation means that adult animated horror films (outside of mainstream Disney or anime traditions) often work in this register. This is very much in my personal wheelhouse but mileage will vary.
Literal allegories (such as Hereditary, 2018; Nosferatu, 2024; Eddington, 2025). This title may seem like a contradiction in terms, but that is because in such films the allegory’s manifest and latent content – the shell and the kernel – are intertwined, partaking of each other like yin and yang. For example, the demonic possession in Hereditary is not just a metaphor for family trauma, but literally the site of that trauma at the same time. The end of the film insists upon a literal reading of what the audience has seen, even while they have been clued into reading the film metaphorically through its foregrounded symbolic register. Likewise, I wrote of Nosferatu, “the viewer is certainly meant to take Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok as having an earthily embodied presence, but I don’t think that shuts down more abstract readings”.
Eddington – though more of a political thriller in the aesthetic wrappings of a western than a horror – continues the trend Aster established in his first two features towards the “literal allegory”.
Weapons – my favourite film of 2025 thus far – ambitiously weds the “puzzle box” sub-genre to the “ambivalent allegory” before tipping fully into “visceral excessiveness” in its final moments.
The poster for Zach Cregger’s Weapons established it firmly as a puzzle box film, with its text (in place of a more traditional logline) reading:
LAST NIGHT
AT 2:17 AM
EVERY CHILD
FROM MRS. GANDY’S CLASS
WOKE UP
GOT OUT OF BED
WENT DOWNSTAIRS
OPENED THE FRONT DOOR
WALKED INTO THE DARK…AND THEY NEVER
CAME BACK.
Immediately the mystery is established. The trailer only revealed enough to hook in the potential audience, with the opening narration of the film basically reminding viewers of the premise already outlined on the poster and in the trailer.
Structurally the film then adhered to what one would expect from a 21st century puzzle box film a la Nolan’s Memento (2000) or The Pestige (2006), Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) or Benson and Moorhead’s Resolution (2012) in that the plotting jumps around in time and space as the viewer tries to weave together the chronology. While the focus upon an ensemble cast (Julia Garner’s teacher, Josh Brolin’s grieving father, Cary Christopher’s schoolboy, etc.) draws obvious parallels with dramatic ensemble epics of the 1990s like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) or Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), the way in which the tragedy unifies members of a small town against a scapegoated victim reminded me more of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter (1997) in which the inciting, unifying incident in a group of school children dying in a bus crash.
During the opening half-an-hour or so of the film I had been set up by Cregger (and his editor Joe Murphy) to search every corner of the frame for clues as to what might have happened to the disappeared children. The stylistic and narrative similarities in this section of the film to the aforementioned dramas of the 1990s (similarities smartly reinforced by Cregger repeatedly name checking Magnolia in interviews) is a brilliant cinematic feint since it manipulates the audience into speculating mainly upon more earthbound, less supernatural explanations for the disapperance. Because Cregger’s first feature Barbarian (2022) was (inevitably though frustratingly) often reviewed in terms of its relation to elevated horror, cuing the viewer into scanning the screen for clues will have simultaneously got many of them pondering (me included!) what those pesky disappearing children could be a metaphor for…
Addiction!
School shootings!!
Issac Rouse and Tasha Robinson of Polygon debate whether the film can effectively function as an extended metaphor for the traumatic communal fallout of a school shooling. Is it good or bad? [ed. These are the stated two sides of the debate].
Victims of the culture war!!!
Victor Stiff expounds “Weapons is an allegory for a nation in denial, a country that would rather tear itself apart than stake the economic vampires bleeding it dry. It’s a genre-fuelled reaction to the culture wars and misplaced outrage fuelling today’s toxic political discourse”.
Society!!!!
Harrison Brocklehurst bestows upon us “the actual deeper meaning of Weapons” from TikTokers telling us that the real villain of the film is society and how it – to quote content creator Jack Knight – “turns us into villains against each other”.
Are you exhausted yet?
The discourse is a long way from asking “What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?”, now demanding and insisting that we have our take on everything. And if you can’t think of a take? Don’t despair! YouTube explainer videos will confidently give you the real, singular, unambiguous interpretation of any and all content, from the notoriously multiply-authored Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017) to the eerily ambiguous Petscop (2017–2019). [Is MatPat responsible for the decline of media literacy amongst Gen Alpha? I like to think so!]
In fairness to all the writers claiming that the allegorical messaging of Weapons is singular and unambiguous, Cregger foregrounds stark visual symbols to cue the audience into adopting certain readings, though I suspect which interpretation a given viewer adopts depends more upon their pre-existing ideological alignment and interests rather than where their eyes are focused during a certain scene. So, Knight sees the triangle logo within the ‘o’ of the film’s title as “reminiscent of a PlayStation controller”, while Phillipson sees it as recalling the AA logo. A scene in which Brolin’s father sees the giant spectre of an assault weapon hovering like a potent above a house is so aggressively (even humerously) over-determined that it it just as likely to convince some viewers that the school shooting angle is a red herring as it is to convince others as definitive proof that it is the symbol kernel of the film.
Part of my frustration with all the “explainer” articles and videos on Weapons is that they often insist that the seemingly supernatural elements of the film are a ruse – shallow, surface level horror for the idiots who aren’t thinking about the film deeply enough. For instance, Brocklehurst writes:
Weapons is a film that people have been desperate to unpick to find the deeper meaning, and now people think they’ve cracked it and found what it’s really about, what makes it SO terrifying – and it’s nothing to really do with Aunt Gladys the parasitic witch at all.
Not only do I chaff against the idea that one can “crack” what a piece of art is “really” about, if Weapons were simply functioning in this way, it would not be my favourite film of the year. In a slightly sardonic, critically clear-sighted piece of criticism, Jon Ware, co-creator of the remarkable horror-fantasy podcast The Silt Verses, criticised True Detective (2014) as a piece of weird fiction, lambasting showrunner Nic Pizzolato’s snobbery about cosmic horror:
Pizzolato’s self-satisfied comments annoy me because of the implied snobbery towards the horror genre, coming from someone who has been pillaging wholesale from the horror genre throughout his own TV show.
They annoy me because I don’t like to see artists leaving breadcrumbs for their audience, and then gaslighting that audience as ‘myopic’ or ‘obsessive’ for following them.
They annoy me because if the existential horror theme is dropped, we’re forced to accept that True Detective’s shithead, self-aware-misogynist stabs at sexual politics are meant to be compelling in their own right. (“All that big dick swagger and you can’t spot crazy pussy?” Good lord.)
But they mostly annoy me because when viewed in the ‘realist mode’, the show’s plotting stops making sense. It becomes a lesser, patchier, stupider work without the nightmare logic of horror to back it up.
[…]
No, all of these scenes and references [to Thomas Ligotti and Robert Chambers] were deliberately and cynically dropped into the show because they evoke horror. They were brought in to provoke a feeling of existential dread and greater depth that there was never any intention of resolving.
The “existential dread” of Weapons should not be handwaved away with a neat and tidy explanation. In this view I am in agreement with Jesse Hassenger of The Guardian when he contends that “[a] frenzied search for answers in the wake of the box office smash has some assuming there’s a weightier allegory but its power is in something simpler and more primal” and that, ultimately, “[t]he combination of the concrete and slippery is what makes horror such a compelling field; there may not be a genre better suited to blurring the lines between reality and a heightened dream state”.
Early in his article, Hassenger references a terrific little 2022 review of Alex Garland’s Men (2022) by AA Dowd that is well worth reading in full. Dowd wearies of films “that basically write their own academic papers aloud, doing the interpretative labor for the audience”. Not only do I agree that this exemplifies clumsy filmmaking, I also fear that (in microcosm at least) it indicates the decline of critical literacy on the part of viewers. In my last years working at the University of Suffolk in the late 2010s I increasingly found I was teaching film students who were confident and eager when it came to making aesthetic (“the acting is bad!”) and moral (“the director/screenwriter is bad for writing this bad character!”) declarations against a film, but were incredibly nervous about making any kind of symbolic or thematic analysis that they hadn’t already seen online or been given by myself. I tried to encourage students to test out theories and to also sit with their uncertainties and ambivalent feelings, but this was something that clearly did not come easily to many of them.
While it is rare to find myself agreeing with a Telegraph article, Tim Robey also resists a straightforwardly allegorical reading of Weapons. After cautioning parents to not “let your children see this deranged horror film” (in fairness, journalists often don’t get to write their own headlines), Robey compares the film to the stories of Roald Dahl, explaining that it ultimately works according to “fairytale logic”.
//Spoilers follow//
It turns out that the reason all the children disappeared was due to:
Amy Madigan plays Gladys and she’s an evil witch. She’s so evil she used magic to hypnotise the children to run to her house in the middle of the night where she keeps all the children in the basement, seemingly feeding off their life energy to regain her youth. Gladys is scary in the way Roald Dahl’s witches are scary. She wears a wig but is bald underneath, her face is plastered with make-up and her performance of dotty grandmotherliness is pitched just a little too high and ingratiating – immediately dropped to reveal a steely coldness as soon as adults aren’t around. I’ve read enough Dahl to feel secure in asserting that a lot of his writing was misogynist and The Tab, Polygon and Collider (amongst others) have all criticised Weapons as an example of a “problematic” hagsploitation movie [albeit with great nuance by Polygon’s Jesse Hassenger].
And, honestly, it probably is. I’m inclined to think that horror and comedy tend to contain problematic aspects by necessity since they work off reactive attitudes. If you’re eliciting pre-rational emotional affect from your audiences then you’re drawing from their baser instincts. Being scared of the “archaic mother” might be regressive, but a fear being problematic doesn’t magically make it disappear. When Gladys tells Cary Christopher’s child character that she can make his parents eat each other it disturbed me on a deep, primal level that I hadn’t experienced in a horror film for a long time. Hassenger notes that “[t]he idea of a grotesque babysitter controlling and essentially replacing a child’s parents plays like something out of an updated dark fairy tale. That’s what Weapons turns into as it hurtles toward that memorable climax, cleverly morphing from a parent’s nightmare into a child’s nightmare”.
Ultimately Cregger pushes past the seeming rationality of Weapons allegorical messaging to a place of murky irrational horror (before a wildly cathartic carnivalesque ending). Cregger has produced a remarkable children’s horror movie for adults.
If you don't like the ending of Weapons, the ending of The Substance or the ending of Hereditary, maybe you don’t like horror at all, but psychological thrillers. The film works as a surprisingly humanistic portrait of flawed addicts of different stripes, but that’s not the deep, hidden meaning here... the deep stuff is the infantile horror of it all, precisely the Goosebumpsy cannibalistic stuff. It's effectively an inversion of allegorical elevated horror and, for that, God bless it.
Ari Aster’s Eddington is, as mentioned, not a horror films, but it is more unsettling and troublesome than many horrors. It is intriguing, engaging, even confounding, but not nearly as brutually emotionally affecting as Hereditary nor as funny as Beau is Afraid. It would make for a brilliant double-screening with Tim Heidecker’s Mister America or as a visual accompaniment to the Indelicates’ similarly provocative album Avenue QAnon. I didn't mind the both-sidesism because I took the film as broadly descriptive rather than prescriptive as with Simon Hanselmann’s graphic novel (serialised during lockdown) Crisis Zone.
Eddington is descriptive in the sense that it aims to evoke the feeling of overwhelm produced by engagement with the discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic (and, arguably, ever since). Each character seems to be stuck inside their own ideological echo chamber, with everyone shouting (and eventually slapping and then shooting) as they fail to cross communicative divides. Every film written and directed by Aster thus far could be analysed productively in terms of the dialectic it stages between order and chaos. Charlotte Simmons has already done incredible work unpicking how the film demonstrates that the traditional markers of ''liberal'' and ''conservative'' have become decoupled from the policy positions they used to represent, but instead simply work as markers for partisanal labels (even even when positions are incoherent). She explains how all the characters in the film, especially Joaquin Phoenix’s protagonist Joe Cross, are caught in a fight between order on one hand and freedom on the other.
Joe is introduced in the film as asthmatic and this causes him to disagree with the masking policy that has been imposed to try to stop (or slow) the spread of Covid. Simmons writes:
Joe is not dreaming beyond the institution that props up the order that he relies on to square his reality. His beliefs belong to a system, rather than him; to order, rather than freedom […] With this world of Eddington honouring the conservative fantasy of order over freedom because people are bad and cannot be trusted, Joe’s ultimate existential wish — whether or not he realizes it as such — is fulfilled by the film’s end […] Where he first allowed his beliefs to belong to a system, the near-entirety of his expression has been outsourced to external players and forces. Freedom is gone, and therefore conservative freedom has been attained.
I’m not going to spoil the exact ending of the film for those who are yet to see it. However, what I think is worth noting is that the system that Joe might seem to be in thrall to (law-and-order conservativism… perhaps even MAGA) is not actually the system puppeteering his behaviour. He is, as Bob Dylan once sang, “only a pawn in their game”, but as in Hereditary, the game being played in the shadows of the film may not be the game you think is being played as the viewer.
Ultimately, Eddington is not so much of a metaphor as it is a microcosm or a synecdoche for the operation of surveillance capitalism (specifically through AI data harvesting).
The link embedded in the brackets above explains this convincingly at length. What I am most interested in is the fact that Aster has returned to the conspiratorial plotting of Hereditary, but with a far broader, more ambitious socio-political reach.
Midsommer was an extended metaphor for the break-down of a toxic relationship. Beau is Afraid used psychoanalysis as an symbolic decoder ring to allow the audience to make sense of its absurdist plotting. Here, in Eddington, we once again have a microcosmic chamber piece – a diorama sans free will – except playing out not mainly within a domestic space but upon the broad panoramic canvas of the Western.
Both Weapons and Eddington are wildly ambitious works by still relatively young filmmakers. Though both are confounding, even frustrating, it is exciting to see them engage with the potentials (and limitations) of symbolic/allegorical filmmaking in some fresh, unusual ways.