On a certain level, it almost feels beside the point to review Onslaught,Adam Wingard‘s new blood-soaked throwback action thriller. Whatever your reaction is to the premise — military veteran Celeste (Adria Arjona) must defend her daughter and neighbors from an ultra-violent attack by a group of mysterious super soldiers, who descend upon her isolated desert trailer park with murder on their minds — is probably an accurate reflection of how much you’ll enjoy the actual movie, which fills its tight 92-minute runtime with likable heroes, bloody violence, and ever-rising stakes.
But Onslaught is more than a mindless shoot-em-up (though, for the record, many, many, many people are shot, as well as stabbed, sliced, barbecued and chainsawed over the course of the film, in increasingly gruesome ways). Onslaught finds action-horror auteur Wingard (You’re Next, Godzilla vs. Kong) in peak form, delivering a feature that is simultaneously a critique of our modern military industrial complex and a campy showcase for Dan Stevens to sport a bald cap and crawl around, licking Rebecca Hall‘s stilettos.
In short, Onslaught is fun, and serves as thoroughly effective counter-programming to the dour action films that seem to have taken over our cinemas in recent years. Wearing its love for ’80s popcorn flicks on its sleeve (Jean Claude Van Damme‘s Universal Soldier, another tale of super soldiers gone rogue, is an obvious influence) and injecting periodic shots of Tarantino-esque exploitaitive sleaze into its proceedings, Onslaught will be an utter pleasure for anyone who has a soft spot for Escape from New York or other classics about an imperfect hero who has to make a near-impossible last stand against the enemy. The fact that it’ll also leave you thinking about the military’s relationship to traumatized veterans and the American public is just the icing on the bloody cake.
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What Is ‘Onslaught’ About?
Image via A24
Celeste (Arjona) is an action hero cut from the classic ’80s cloth: she’s a veteran who, despite her achievements on the battlefield, has been struggling with her return to civilian life. Even though she’s still a crack shot years later, that doesn’t help her deal with a daily existence that involves managing the wacky residents of the Windy Oasis trailer park, or dealing with her ex, Griffin (Jacob Scipio), who unexpectedly leaves her to care for their young daughter, Daisy, (Blake Kennedy) over the weekend.
But it will help her deal with three unexpected visitors to Windy Oasis — a trio of super soldiers, engineered by German mad scientist Dr. Hans Kammler (Stevens, having the absolute time of his life hamming it up as a Nazi Dr. Frankenstein). Kammler, the film eventually reveals, is a “third generation Paperclip” — meaning, an employee of Operation Paperclip, a real-life government program that secretly brought German scientists to the U.S. after World War II to utilize the Nazi’s technological innovations. But Kammler’s newest invention is thoroughly biological: he’s engineered a group of veterans into mindless “perfect soldiers” who will obey any command, and become unstoppable killing machines until they achieve their goal. After an experiment proves that they’re a little more unstoppable than anyone expected, the ghoulish soldiers hit the road, setting out for Windy Oasis and slaughtering anyone who crosses their path along the way.
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En route, we also meet Drew Starkey‘s Cyrus, a sleazy government “cleaner” who absolutely steals every scene he’s in, as well as Hall’s Frau Kammler, who makes the most of her brief screen time as the doctor’s coolly evil wife. But the real action is at Windy Oasis, where Celeste’s neighbors, including the wise, fellow vet Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) and goofy boozehound cop Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), help her and Daisy try to survive the titular onslaught.
‘Onslaught’ Is More Than Just a Throwback
Movies that try to evoke the pleasures of ’80s blockbusters have become a category unto themselves in recent years, and Onslaught absolutely represents the peak of this micro-genre. Appearances from ’80s action legends VelJohnson (Die Hard) and Michael Biehn (The Terminator, Aliens) fully telegraph the film’s allegiances to an earlier era of Hollywood, as does Arjona’s performance as a lovable, beer-guzzling fuck-up. Celeste is Snake Plissken by way of Beatrix Kiddo, but despite her hoard of guns and regular target practice, she thankfully could not be farther from the strong, silent types littering our post-John Wick action film landscape. Whether she’s chatting with Josiah about their mutual PTSD, ragging on her ex’s overly formal parenting technique, or landing kill shots with only one functioning eye, she’s thoroughly, messily human.
But even though it delights in over-the-top thrills and gore (a repeated cut-away to one especially gnarly kill seems equally designed to delight fans and disgust anyone prone to finger-wagging about violence in film), Onslaught also serves as a no-punches-pulled political critique of the American military. This begins almost immediately, with the film’s opening credits, which roll across a fevered mash-up of real-life clips from 70+ years of media coverage about U.S. wars. When we’re first introduced to the super soliders, they’re restrained in contraptions that evoke the tortures committed by U.S. military personnel in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; eventually, it is revealed that the soldiers were created because regular human service people had too many qualms about turning their military might on American civilians.
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Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
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🎈Pennywise
🪆Chucky
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01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
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02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
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03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
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04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
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05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
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06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
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07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
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08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
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Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
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Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
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He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
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But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
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You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
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The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
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You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
Onslaught is a loose sequel to Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett‘s 2014 film The Guest, another action-horror hybridthat smuggled a critique of the U.S. military into a gory tale that also involved Dan Stevens acting like a lunatic. But Onslaught makes it even more explicit; midway through the film, Josiah wonders about why the government “just can’t stop fucking with us vets.” The super soldiers, who kill without a word or a thought, chillingly stand in for a military that seems to compulsively get involved in wars that most Americans neither support nor understand, and grows increasingly comfortable with turning its power against its own citizens.
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The film has so much fun playing with conspiracy and invests so much emotionally in its military critique that when the real reason for the siege is finally revealed, it feels underwhelming; similarly, Onslaught ends a bit abruptly, with a resolution that seems to be more focused on setting up a sequel than making sense of the big topics raised in previous 90 minutes.
But those feel like relatively small qualms for a film that so thoroughly delivers on the promise of its premise. Wingard, like so many great directors of his generation, has spent the past decade locked in the IP realm, so it’s an absolute joy to see him and frequent collaborator Barrett working together on an original idea that is obviously a passion project. The movie works because every single person involved is clearly having such a great damn time, and their joy is infectious. Onslaught is definitely the most fun you’ll have this fall watching chainsaw fights that contain subtext about the military’s failures at home and abroad…but it also just might be the most fun you’ll have at the movies this fall, period.
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