Weapons — Characters & Cast

Initially self-preservation and the need to clear her name; increasingly a genuine, unshared responsibility toward children who were hers to protect.

Begins as a competent, well-liked third-grade teacher and is instantly recast by her town as the only plausible villain. Her chapter tracks the erosion — suspension, vandalism, harassment, self-medication — until isolation paradoxically frees her to pursue the truth no one else will touch. She moves from defending her innocence to actively hunting an answer.

To bring his son home, and failing that, to convert unbearable helplessness into action of any kind.

A father of one of the missing boys who refuses the passivity of official channels. His chapter escalates from frustrated parent to surveillance, confrontation and trespass, and the film is careful to make his conviction both sympathetic and dangerous — he is right about the existence of a secret and wrong about almost everyone he suspects.

Keeping his private life and his mistakes from surfacing, with the case a distant second.

A local police officer whose personal entanglements and misconduct constantly outrank the investigation in his own priorities. His chapter exposes the machinery of the town's failure from the inside: the institution meant to find the children is staffed by someone managing his own exposure.

Immediate survival and the next fix; the truth arrives as a byproduct of trespass rather than a goal.

A homeless addict and burglar living at the town's margins, whose chapter supplies the piece of the picture no respectable citizen could have obtained. Precisely because he is invisible to Maybrook, he sees what Maybrook cannot — and his account is worth nothing to anyone who matters.

To sustain herself by feeding on the vitality of children, using a boy's love for his parents as the leash.

Alex's supposed 'aunt' — a distant, homeless relative invited into the Lilly house who immediately takes possession of it. She functions less as a character with development than as an appetite that reveals itself in stages, from odd houseguest to the organising intelligence behind everything the previous five chapters could not explain. Madigan's performance was the film's most singled-out element, earning her Best Supporting Actress at both the Academy Awards and the SAG Awards, plus a Golden Globe nomination.