I’ve now watched Weapons twice.

The first time, it unsettled me. The second time, it confirmed something I couldn’t shake.

This isn’t the lingering discomfort of a smart horror film doing its job. It’s something more pointed. Something that settles in the body and stays there because it knows exactly where to press.

Weapons is structured as a series of fractures. Six chapters. Six perspectives. A town unravelled by the disappearance of seventeen children who leave their homes at exactly 2:17 a.m. and are never seen again. Each chapter reveals a different form of collapse: grief, suspicion, obsession, complicity, denial. By the time the truth emerges, the damage has already been done.

It’s a carefully made film. Controlled. Confident. Intentionally paced. Horror here is not chaos. It’s proximity. Homes are invaded. Families are turned inward. Love becomes a liability.

Amy Madigan’s Gladys is central to that unease. Her performance is chilling because it refuses spectacle. She is patient. Observant. Soft-spoken. She moves through the story like something ancient and inevitable. When she finally runs, late in the film, it sends a shiver through you not because it’s loud or sudden, but because it feels fundamentally wrong. The body registers it before the mind does.

The cast across the board is strong. Josh Brolin brings a bruised intensity to Archer, a father whose grief curdles into fixation. Julia Garner grounds the film as Justine, brittle, exhausted, and painfully human. And Cary Christopher, as Alex, is devastating. As the sole “survivor” from his class, his performance carries a quiet terror that deepens on rewatch. Every choice he makes feels weighted with responsibility no child should have to bear.

This is not a film careless with its craft.

Which is why the Marcus and Terry storyline is so confronting.

Marcus and Terry, played by Benedict Wong and Clayton Farris, are introduced not as symbols or statements, but as people. A married gay couple. Affectionate. A little goofy. Gently dorky. We see them shopping together, existing in small domestic moments that feel deliberately unremarkable. For many viewers, this mattered. It wasn’t tragedy or spectacle. It was queerness allowed to be mundane.

That normalcy is precisely what makes what follows so brutal.

When Gladys enters their home, the film does not simply kill a queer character to raise stakes. It engineers something far more intimate. Marcus is bewitched. His agency is stripped away. His body becomes a tool. He is made to enact extreme violence against his own husband.

This is not a quick or incidental death. It is ritualised. Prolonged. Personal. Love is not collateral damage. It is the mechanism of horror.

This is where Weapons crosses from unsettling into something more troubling.

I’ve written before about the bury your gays trope, but this is one of its cruellest evolutions. Not just killing queer characters, but forcing them to participate in their own destruction. Turning intimacy into spectacle. Turning love into a weapon.

Other characters in the film suffer horrific fates. They are hunted, possessed, torn apart by supernatural forces. But their violence comes from without. Marcus’s comes from within his marriage, within his home, through the bond the film has taken care to establish as safe and loving.

That distinction matters.

The controversy around this scene isn’t just that both men die. It’s that their deaths are framed as more intimate, more invasive, and more emotionally brutal than many others in the film. The queerness of their relationship becomes the site where the horror is allowed to go furthest.

Some viewers defend the scene as effective horror. And it is effective. It shocks. It lingers. Others point to the film’s moments of camp and excess, its tonal swings, and argue that Weapons exists in a space of queer ambivalence rather than outright hostility.

But effectiveness does not exist in a vacuum.

When queer relationships are repeatedly used as narrative accelerants, when their intimacy is treated as especially ripe for corruption, it reinforces a familiar message dressed in contemporary language: that queer love is fragile, unsafe, and destined to be turned against itself.

What troubles me most is not that the film depicts violence against queer characters. Horror is not obligated to be gentle. It’s that Marcus is made to carry out the violence himself. The film doesn’t just take his life. It weaponises his love, his body, and his grief in service of someone else’s terror.

There is no aftermath. No space for mourning. No narrative acknowledgement of what has been taken. Marcus is sent to kill again, fails, and is killed. The story moves on.

The first time I watched Weapons, that imbalance unsettled me.

The second time, it became impossible to ignore.

Knowing where the story goes reframes the early domestic scenes with Marcus and Terry. On rewatch, they no longer feel like grounding texture. They feel like emotional priming. The film invests in their ordinariness so it can extract maximum impact when that ordinariness is destroyed.

Watching it again confirmed that my reaction wasn’t about shock or squeamishness. It was about recognition. About seeing a pattern that becomes clearer, not softer, with repetition.

I want to be clear about something. I think Weapons is good. I really enjoyed it. I would still recommend it. Its performances are stellar. Its atmosphere is thick with dread. Its control is impressive.

And the treatment of Marcus and Terry remains, to me, deeply troubling.

I can hold both truths at once.

Liking a film does not mean giving it a free pass. In fact, it’s often the films that are smart, controlled, and taken seriously that deserve the closest scrutiny. Because when harm is wrapped in craft, it travels further. It lingers longer. It’s easier to excuse.

The second viewing didn’t change my mind.

It clarified it.