Weapons: Did Aunt Gladys reveal her past with just one phrase? Here's what it could mean

Weapons won't give you cheap scares and then disappear from your mind. It will linger because it plays with deeper ideas like fear and control. At first, it looks like a typical 'missing person' trope or story. But once you sit through the movie, you realize it’s much more. The movie uses its characters and their struggles to show how fear is not always something external. It is also within us in the form of regrets and guilt.

Alex is the little boy who ends up being the unexpected hero in Weapons. But before that happens, we see how his supposed Aunt Gladys brings troubles into his family’s life. When she enters the house, his house becomes dull. She is frail and bent when we first meet her. But through the children, she drains energy to grow stronger. Her spell makes the children into extensions of her dark will. They become tools or weapons.

The movie knows how to balance the supernatural with raw human fear. You see this clearly in Archer, played by Josh Brolin. He has a haunting dream about losing his son. The dream shows us that his deepest fear is not being able to protect the only family he has left. The children in the movie are not only under Gladys’s control but also act as mirrors. They force adults like Archer to confront what they dread the most. The eerie and the emotional moments are what make Weapons hard to forget.

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Weapons: Did Aunt Gladys reveal her past with just one phrase?

When Principal Marcus wanted to meet Alex’s parents, only one person showed up. It was a lady who said she was Alex’s aunt. This was Aunt Gladys. She came wearing very bright clothes and had a strange smile on her face. Marcus was confused about her and even asked about Alex’s parents. Gladys then said that Alex’s father could not come because he had a "touch of consumption."

This phrase surprised Marcus in Weapons. Who even uses that phrase today? A touch of consumption was something people used to say in the 1800s. It was an old way of saying tuberculosis. Nobody talks like that anymore. So why did Gladys say it? Was it just random, or did it mean something deeper?

This one phrase could actually be a hint about Gladys. It is possible that she has been alive for around two centuries. If she is a witch, then she has probably used dark powers to stay alive for so long. If that is true, then she might have done the same to many towns before Maybrook. She could be draining energy from others to survive. That could explain why she knew and used words from a much older time.

If there is a prequel or sequel to Weapons, we might finally learn more about Gladys. We might get to know where she came from, why she chose Alex’s family, and if she really is even Alex’s aunt. Alex’s father had said they had not seen her for fifteen years. Then why did she suddenly return now? The next movie, if there is one, might give us the answers. And maybe then we will know for certain why she used that strange old phrase in Weapons.