Amy Madigan

The bright wig, cardigan and slightly overdone make-up invite a laugh. As Gladys in Weapons (2025), Amy Madigan then speaks with a flat cheerfulness that makes ordinary conversation sound threatening. We laughed and felt frightened almost at once, because her delivery gave us no reassurance that the joke was harmless. It is a fine performance in a good horror film, and a useful introduction to an actor too often reduced to the word tough.

Madigan made her film debut in Love Child (1982), but the early casting soon settled around the tough or feisty supporting woman. Streets of Fire (1984) belongs to that pattern; Twice in a Lifetime (1985) and Field of Dreams (1989) sit within the steady film work of the following years. In Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone (2007), she plays Bea McCready. Its missing-child investigation grows too contrived, though the performances keep it painfully personal. Film and television work continued, with fewer substantial offers before the renewed attention brought by Weapons.

Much of Gladys’s effect depends on how carefully Zach Cregger’s film sets her up. Costume designer Trish Summerville supplies the bright wig and clothes, but Madigan’s flat delivery makes the appearance unsettling without needing to announce a threat. Production designer Tom Hammock helps with a house whose curtains are drawn and whose tables hold things that do not belong in a family home. She holds to that cheerfulness, letting the house supply some of the menace instead of pushing harder herself.

There is a limit to what even this performance can do for Weapons. We preferred its frightening first hour to the louder, sillier final half-hour; Gladys does not make that problem go away. Her success suggests that casting Madigan for toughness alone wastes the possibility of something odder and funnier. Start with Weapons if horror is your sort of evening, but allow for some noise towards the end.