Just watched Josh Brolin’s Weapons (2025) on the plane. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t yet watched it. Not a movie to remember or that I’d normally care to comment on, but there’s one scene where Josh Brolin, in the role of a dad whose son has abruptly gone missing along with 16 other schoolkids, dreams of a giant AR-15 rifle above the roof of the house. The gun bears the time of the kids’ disappearance. I took it an allegory of school shootings: an entire classroom sitting empty the day after; grieving parents desperate for answers that don’t exist; and society as a whole under a collective spell which renders it unable to confront the root cause (the gun culture). In the movie, the spell is provided by a literal witch, whose voodoo rituals allows her to control the minds of the kids and meddling adults. The witch is eventually killed, but the kids are never quite the same after that, just like survivors of school massacres. And of course, the movie title itself is a giveaway if you subscribe to my interpretation. Dark and heavy movie with some bouts of levity. Probably only worth watching if you’ve enjoyed Hereditary.