Aunt Gladys from Weapons Needs 10 Hours

Zach Cregger’s Weapons gets a lot right for a two-hour horror film. Its humor lands in the smallest places: those casual, cliché-soaked conversations that turn darkly funny once a community realizes seventeen children are missing.

Then there’s the film’s grotesque lodestar—Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys—a magnificently vile parasite who embodies the loser-relative archetype: the houseguest who arrives “for a few days,” never leaves, and drinks your sanity like it’s iced tea. Madigan plays her as equal parts mildew and menace.

But two hours isn’t enough runway. The world Cregger sketches begs for a longer canvas. I kept thinking of the HBO series The Leftovers, Tom Perrotta’s grief-haunted universe that needed several episodes to breathe. Weapons feels like it wants ten one-hour episodes—time for Gladys to poison the neighborhood vein by vein, and for the side characters to develop from silhouettes into people you’d fight for.

As a feature, it’s an elegant appetizer—canapés and olives—when the material is crying out for a slow, unhurried feast.