‘Onslaught’ Review: Adam Wingard Goes Back to Basics with a Lean Military Slasher

“Onslaught” is set, more or less, in the present day, but Adam Wingard’s film feels designed to resemble an obscure ’80s action flick that’s been rediscovered from the dustbins of an old VHS collection. Had the film actually been made 40-something years ago, the mute, hulking super soldiers who wander through the desert and into the home of main character Celeste (Adria Arjona) with the objective of murdering everything in their path would have probably been created by the Soviet Union, or some other boogeyman threatening good American values. In 2026, they’re the creation of a mad Nazi scientist, but one funded and supported directly by the U.S. military — a choice that says less about the film’s blunt political incision than it reflects a baseline level of distrust in the government that even pulpy genre plays where Adria Arjona kills a guy with a chainsaw now operate under.

A filmmaker who cut his teeth in the independent horror world, Wingard first broke out with 2011’s “You’re Next” and 2014’s “The Guest,” a pair of clever thrillers that didn’t necessarily subvert the basic tropes they worked with as much as they twisted their relatively standard premises into new shapes. His successive work has been far more anonymous, going from ill-fated projects like a “Blair Witch” reboot and a Netflix adaptation of the “Death Note” anime to two “Godzilla vs. Kong” crossover movies which were way more fun in theory than they were in practice.

“Onslaught” represents something of a return to Wingard’s roots, then, a 90-minute action slasher featuring a screenplay written by frequent collaborator Simon Barrett that shoots straight but knowingly winks towards its inspiration. The film plays heavily as a tribute to the works of John Carpenter in all its aesthetic excess, from Matthew Pusti’s discordant electronic score that brings to mind “Assault on Precinct 13” to the way Arjona’s Celeste, a veteran whose left eye gets shot out, begins to vaguely resemble a female Snake Plissken.

As far as directors to crib from, you can do worse than Carpenter, an incredibly influential figure whose specific brand of grit feels sorely missed in the modern landscape of antiseptic horror. Those vibes are enough to carry “Onslaught” into the realm of “generally good time,” even if an ungainly structure and thin politics expose that this is ultimately one of Carpenter’s many acolytes rather than the master himself.

‘Onslaught’Courtesy Everett Collection

Absurd as it is to say about a 90-minute film, the biggest problem with “Onslaught” might be the pacing, which circles the drain for almost an hour of set-up before finally getting to the home invasion shoot-out audiences are presumably buying a ticket to see. A largely pointless series of interstitials counts down the hours before the genetically engineered baddies break free from their government compound in the first act, while the film tracks the day of Celeste and all the shadowy government conspiracies happening hours away in the desert she calls home.

A former Army sniper with a surly attitude making a living as a landlord in a run-down trailer park, Celeste gets some meager bits of backstory through black-and-white flashbacks to her time in the military. But she’s a fundamentally simple character, a mother nursing the wounds from her failed marriage who gets her adorable, precocious daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) thrust on her by her ex-husband at the worse possible time. That she’s as compelling as she is has less to do with anything in the script and more with how fun Arjona is in this mode, bringing an exhausted, give-no-fucks attitude that’s never less than watchable and making the character’s predictable turn to hardcore mama bear still utterly enjoyable.

It’s when “Onslaught” strays from her that it ends up on much shakier ground. In parallel, the opening act follows Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), the Nazi responsible for the super soldier program, as he reactivates it. Stevens, who played the main villain in “The Guest” and starred in Wingard’s “Godzilla x Kong” sequel, excels at playing wacky genre weirdos, and he gets a solid one in this snarling, mincing fascist with balding grey hair and inhumanly pale skin. But Kammler’s campiness feels wildly out of place in this film’s tonal landscape, as if Marlon Brando in “The Island of Dr. Moreau” wandered into “The Thing,” and he’s discarded too quickly to ever amount to much of a compelling antagonist.

He’s not the only perfectly fine actor largely stranded in the film’s mucky sidequests: Rebecca Hall, also a player in Wingard’s “Godzilla” movies, gets what amounts to an extended cameo as Kammler’s cold wife, while Drew Starkey plays a slimy government fixer in a subplot that mostly seems to exist to justify him showing up to the bloodbath’s aftermath. The film could have only benefited from narrowing its scope away from all the government muck, an attempt to flesh out a mythology for its villains that are scarier simply as faceless, mysterious weapons of mass destruction.

‘Onslaught’Courtesy Everett Collection

When “Onslaught” finally cuts out the fluff and gets to the bloody trailer park shoot-out that serves as its main setpiece, the result proves plenty compelling. Wingard and cinematographer Oren Soffer have a knack for a set piece that presents the action in eligible but unexpected ways: an early massacre at a gas station convenience store shifts to the POV of the gun, while a chase between Daisy and one of the soldiers underneath one of the trailers makes good use of the environment for suffocating claustrophobia. The cinematography captures the lush expanse of the desert and bathes the characters in dark blues while never leaving the frame murky, and the use of steadicam and exaggerated zoom-ins plants the film’s feet more firmly in its ’80s inspirations.

The action has a satisfying crunch, thanks in part due to Wingard’s delight in dousing his actors in buckets of fake blood. Arjona is maybe a bit too traditionally beautiful to fully scan as a hardened vet and gun nut, but she acquits herself well in the action scenes and can sell a cheesy line like “don’t mess with mama” on pure charisma alone. While the supporting cast outside of the trailer park proves superfluous, Celeste’s neighbors and ragtag allies, played by Eric Wareheim and Reginald VelJohnson, add a bit of humor and camaraderie that helps keep the film’s tone from ever veering too serious.

A late-in-the-game twist connects Celeste more directly to the assailants and gestures toward “Onslaught” having something broader to say about the military. Like Stevens’ crazed sergeant turned slasher villain in “The Guest,” the veterans and soldiers in Wingard’s latest are exploited and experimented on by their government, robbing them of whatever souls and autonomy they once held. The opening credits of the film, featuring newsreel footage of military parades overlaid with glitchy effects and harsh techno music, appear to nod at some equating of the America of today with the authoritarian governments of the past.

But whatever anti-military ideals “Onslaught” might hold, this is still fundamentally a movie about how guns are rad and one soldier can stand alone and save the day. That’s not to say Wingard’s movie is necessarily politically confused, as much as its commentary takes a decided backseat to its thrills, with sensibilities that are firmly rooted in ’80s jingoism without fully subverting it. By looking so strictly towards the past, “Onslaught” winds up with not much particularly compelling to say about today.

Grade: B-

A24 will release “Onslaught” in theaters on Friday, September 4.