For many a genre fan, there were few movies to be more excited for this year than Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s Onslaught. A kinda-slasher Universal Soldier starring Adria Arjona as a PTSD-riddled ex-military sniper defending her young daughter and the desert trailer park she calls home from hulking, silhouetted super-soldiers? Come on. That shit should practically sell itself. But while there is certainly plenty about Onslaught that I absolutely fuck with, I ultimately walked away wishing I loved it as much as I thought I would.
After spending a decade in the franchise studio system making Blair Witch, Death Note, Godzilla vs. Kong, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Onslaught feels like a genuine homecoming for Wingard. This is the filmmaker getting back into the groove of the grimy, R-rated filmmaking of his earlier work like You’re Next and The Guest, with Wingard and his screenwriting partner Barrett once again allowed to make their own rules. The influences are worn proudly on its sleeve: early John Carpenter and James Cameron, action exploitation cinema, and even some of the mythology and themes from The Guest interwoven in for diehard fans. Wingard has described the film as his attempt to turn the military-industrial complex into a slasher movie, and to Onslaught’s credit, it does largely work to that degree.
The film opens with the thunder cracks of gunfire and a ticking clock, immediately dropping us into the isolated Windy Oasis trailer park in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Our reluctant hero Celeste (Arjona) lives there surrounded by guns, booze, and eccentric neighbors, spending her days shooting targets while her PTSD repeatedly drags her mind back to her Middle Eastern campaigns. Her daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) arrives unexpectedly for the weekend, and the contrast between the two is immediately compelling. Celeste is a volatile mess barely holding herself together, while Daisy is remarkably composed for her young age, soothing herself with calming sounds and even cleaning up the trailer her mother has neglected.
Not too far across the desert, in a secret government facility, three super soldiers lie dormant. The Crybaby (Tyler), The Cockroach (Dave Campbell), and The Butcher (Alex Pereira) are genetically enhanced killing machines created by the gloriously ridiculous Nazi scientist Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), whose flowing white outfit, exaggerated German accent, and sheer theatricality make him a deliciously pulpy villain. Stevens (Abigail, Cuckoo) is clearly having a blast, as is fellow Wingard favorite Rebecca Hall (Godzilla vs. Kong, Resurrection) as his equally unhinged Nazi wife, but Onslaught unfortunately doesn’t give either of them nearly enough to do before the credits roll (unless a sequel is in order, which I would never say no to).
When the soldiers escape, the movie gets rolling, and bullets start flying, Wingard goes for the jugular right away by staging one hell of a titular onslaught. A truck stop massacre is easily the highlight of the entire film, if you can consider something so viscerally violent a highlight of anything. What initially feels like another piece of exaggerated grindhouse gore becomes genuinely upsetting, particularly because Wingard presents the slaughter with a disturbing immediacy. There is something deeply uncomfortable about watching weapons of war brought home and unleashed on ordinary civilians with tactical precision, and the sequence taps into one of the film’s biggest ideas: the endless violence America exports around the world eventually finding its way back home. Onslaught doesn’t always know exactly what to do with that idea, but in this moment, it absolutely lands.
When these things arrive at the quiet community of Windy Oasis, naturally, Celeste has headphones on as the indiscriminate killing begins anew. The assault on the trailer park is exactly the sort of gleefully nasty, blood-soaked action-horror that most come for. The hulking silhouettes, glowing eyes, gigantic weapons, pulsating synth score (shout out Matt Pusti delivering big in that department), and sheer physicality of these creatures are so deeply in my wheelhouse that I couldn’t help but grin. Wingard and Barrett clearly understand the appeal of turning a Michael Myers-style slasher into a military-grade killing machine.
I also love that the headbanging opening credits basically depict the Nazi takeover of America from within, with secret military programs and conspiracy imagery eventually morphing a sonnenrad into the American eagle. You can’t make something that pointed and expect me to hate your movie. The way those ideas literally bleed into the modern day with the current imagery and controversies surrounding U.S. military and police is quite the hefty load for a movie to carry, and Onslaught does so with almost poetic savagery.
Unfortunately, Onslaught also peaks too early. Once the initial massacre wipes out much of Windy Oasis, the movie struggles to maintain the same sense of danger. These soldiers are introduced as practically unstoppable killing machines, yet the third act repeatedly has them inexplicably stop being good at killing people. The surviving group of Celeste, the not-even-ten-years-old Daisy, elderly Vietnam vet Josiah (a scene-stealing Reginald VelJohnson), and an incompetent comedy relief cop (Eric Wareheim) can suddenly evade attacks that should have easily annihilated them. The villains become considerably less threatening precisely when the movie needs them to be most terrifying, as the only characters left are the ones we might actually care about.
There are also maybe too many ideas fighting for space. The military’s treatment of veterans, PTSD, American imperialism, conspiracy theories, Nazi scientists, mass shootings, parenthood, and good old fashioned genre excess are all floating around here. I appreciate the ambition, especially because Onslaught arguably pushes the anti-military sentiment of Wingard’s excellent The Guest even further, but the characters here aren’t developed enough to give all of those ideas the weight they deserve. The whole endeavor is heavily layered and yet a bit too thin at the same time - the gift and curse of a nice, lean 90 minute runtime.
Arjona (Andor, Hit Man) is inarguably fantastic, which makes you wish that this particular protagonist of hers got even more screentime. Celeste is messy, angry, damaged, and not particularly good at being a mother, and Arjona never tries to sand down those rough edges. She makes the character’s transformation into a feral protector feel physical rather than sentimental, and commands the screen with every intense action beat that’s required. Drew Starkey (Outer Banks, Queer) is also wonderful as Cyrus, a bizarre, drug-addled deep state “janitor” who appears to have wandered in from almost an entirely different movie. I just wish the script knew what to do with him.
Ultimately, Onslaught is disappointing because it’s just on the cusp of being great. There is so much here that I love - the vision, the aesthetic, the score, the super-soldiers vs trailer park concept, the politics, the nastiness, the Carpenter worship, and some genuinely incredible standalone sequences - but it never quite comes together into the bona fide masterpiece I was hoping for. Still, there's more than one chainsaw death here, plus a dominatrix-fueled character intro that's quite exciting if that floats your boat, so who's to say whether or not this movie is good or great?
‘Onslaught’ is now playing in theaters.
