By 
Forty years ago, a movie like Adam Wingard’s Onslaught would have all the markings of a John Carpenter flight of fancy. This is after all a picture with diabolical Nazi scientists working for the U.S. government; experimental super soldiers who look ever so much like masked, Michael Myers-shaped serial killers; and one woman who is smart and badass enough to take it all on with a pint-sized child by her side. (Okay, so there’s a dash of James Cameron in there too.)
But what’s remarkable about the 2026 revival of such delightfully lurid genre trappings is how much more visceral and immediate it feels in a current climate where Nazi-saluting billionaires hold powerful, if brief, positions in the U.S. government, and veterans like Adria Arjona’s reluctant mama bear Celeste seem often left to fend for themselves. By virtue of being an A24 release, there is definitely a high-minded ambition to director Wingard and co-writer Simon Barrett’s approach, right down to the movie confronting the most popular boogeyman of the 2020s zeitgeist: that unkillable beast we call “trauma.” And yet, these are also the happy horror mavens of slippery tonal mashups like You’re Next and The Guest. So after nearly a decade in the blockbuster realm of studio IP (particularly for Wingard), they seem energized and eager to strut along the demented stomping grounds of their youth, and to this time play it as slick as the obvious Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog influences.
In other words, Onslaught is simply cool as hell whenever it lets Arjona rip, often quite literally once a chainsaw gets involved.
Before that cathartic release, however, the baser pleasures of Onslaught lie in how patient the picture is during an economical first act that doesn’t waste time, even as it makes sure to stop and savor the lasciviousness of its table-setting. Hence before we are properly introduced to our heroine in the present, we first meet Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), the grandson of a German expat who retains his family’s unhealthy interests in science and eugenics. He also could fit just as easily in a ‘70s grindhouse flick (or a mid-2000s revival from a certain auteur) as Wingard establishes how suppliant he is in his adopted homeland when old Hans crawls on hands and knees before the toes of his handler and wife (a vamping Rebecca Hall).
It seems Hans has been experimenting on seriously wounded veterans from America’s various Forever Wars in the deserts and has perfected three killing machines whose brute force cannot stop, will not stop, until they meet an immovable object. Her name’s Celeste.
Also a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Celeste is content enough to make ends meet by working as the superintendent (or perhaps glorified kapo) for the other vets who populate a remote trailer park in the American Southwest. She’s friendly with her avuncular neighbor Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) and tolerates the rants of her conspiracy theorist deadbeat tenant Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), but mostly wants to keep her head down and lick her wounds in perpetuity. That is a problem for her ex-husband, though, and more pertinently their young daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy), whom Celeste sees only every other weekend.
Unfortunately, today turns out to fall on the same weekend where the Nazi down the road reaches a crescendo in his work, raising serious questions as to whether this trailer park of abandoned American soldiers was purposefully left in the path of any potential lab breaks? There are plenty of other civilians, too, who get in the way of the three murderous super-soldiers, leading to a rather meek and stoned government fixer (Drew Starkey) to clean up the mess by any means necessary.
Onslaught has plenty of subtextual ice beneath its calm surface, but the shrewdness of Wingard and Barrett’s approach is their refusal to dive deeper, at least in terms of exposition or superfluous dialogue. The worldbuilding of the film relies almost wholly on aesthetics and “vibes,” to use the modern online parlance. The picture retains the inviting sleek neons of Wingard’s detour into Godzilla vs. Kong kitsch, but it pairs nicely here with the stark, barren landscapes of the desert at night.
Shot mostly in crisp wide and medium shots and diegetic lighting, the darkness of the red waste juxtaposes the otherworldly fluorescence of a gas station’s overhang, and the multitude of stars bear witness to the carnage exacted on a trailer park. The film echoes the primal simplicity of Carpenter’s best films in the 1970s and ‘80s while chasing The Guest team’s more current muses.
One of those is the aforementioned cynicism and paranoia of governmental authority that feels a lot less like a pulp novel in 2026, but it is also the dread of parental responsibility adorned by Celeste. Embodying that woman, Arjona appears to be on the cusp of stardom. Already a beguiling presence in Hit Man, and a haunting one in Andor, she gets to tap into some Sigourney Weaver and modern Jamie Lee Curtis grit here and looks ripped straight from a Drew Struzan poster when rocking a chainsaw in one hand and a makeshift eyepatch-bandana across her face.
The sparseness of the film’s overall approach, however, doesn’t leave her with enough firm ground to stand on if the goal is to create a 21st century Ripley. Arjona and the film find quiet joys to layer the character when Celeste teaches her estranged daughter how to eat a burrito, but there’s not enough meat between the characters of mother and daughter to really drive the emotional heft of the film.
Truthfully, Onslaught is just too eager to bask in the weird-kid choices of Dan Stevens, who three films in appears to be a kind of muse for Wingard, or occasionally drop the gallows fun for a genuinely disturbing sequence like when the super soldiers mow down an entire convenience store of civilians. Even a third act reveal about one of the merciless Shapes’ past doesn’t quite add the gravitas Onslaught might hope to the final showdown between past and present, Celeste and the vet they now solely refer to as “The Butcher.”
Nevertheless, Onslaught rips and roars when it stops to smell the gasoline. The movie and its makers seem to genuinely fret about the direction the world has taken, even in the scant 12 years since The Guest last visited the veteran experience in genre uniform, and now they examine it with a retro sense of aesthetic cool that’s grown increasingly rare. Sometimes you just want to see mom grab the sniper rifle, say everything is going to be alright, and then expel the boogeyman in a blaze of glory. Onslaught offers that by the buckshot-full.
Onslaught is in theaters on Friday, Sept. 4.
The post Onslaught Review: Adria Arjona Channels John Carpenter Vibes appeared first on Den of Geek.
