By 
Forget whatever Adam Wingard has been doing for the past decade. This is what he’s good at. Both a throwback to mindless ’80s ass-kickers and a rollicking good time at the theater, Onslaught capitalizes on the writer-director’s greatest skill set, combining a silly premise, brisk pacing, standout sound design, a killer score, and a kickass final girl to concoct a simple but effective good time at the movies.
Before Wingard busied himself with increasingly oversized IP adaptations, he made a pair of super-effective horror-tinged action movies in You’re Next and The Guest, both of which showed a director with serious genre instincts and a willingness to get goofy. That promise seemed increasingly squandered with each subsequent film. With Onslaught, Wingard appears to have rediscovered what made him special in the first place, and quite frankly it isn’t anything enormously complicated. It’s the willingness to let go, be silly, move fast, and not treat every ridiculous premise like it needs six sequels and a Wiki page explaining the mythology.
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘You’re Next‘ directed by Adam Wingard and starring Sharni Vinson]
The setup here is pretty rich. Dan Stevens plays an evil scientist in an aggressively silly bald cap and shock of white hair, part of a long lineage of Nazi scientists transplanted into the American military-industrial complex. He’s been experimenting with super soldiers and decides the best way to test their full capabilities is to engineer an outbreak at the facility containing them. Soon three genetically juiced-up killing machines are loose in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by little more than desert, truck stops, and trailer parks.
One of those trailer parks is home to Celeste (Adria Arjona), an Army veteran and single mom. We meet her unloading a veritable armory at target practice, so there’s never much question whether she can handle herself once things inevitably go sideways. Whether the rest of her life is similarly under control remains considerably more debatable. She’s distant with her kid, quick to anger, living in a trailer park surrounded by assorted losers and maybe beginning to wonder whether she has become one herself. Then the super soldiers show up and suddenly being really, really good at shooting things becomes useful again.
The soldiers are brute forces of nature driving the film. Decked head to toe in black military gear with glowing red eyes, they’re basically three Jason Voorheeses sponsored by Raytheon. They don’t need banter or more than a few lines of backstory. They stalk forward with this blank, machine-like menace, flex hard enough to deflect bullets, and turn Celeste’s little corner of nowhere into a proper siege movie.
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘The Guest directed by Adam Wingard and starring Dan Stevens]
There are little gestures toward a larger world. Secret government programs. Shadowy organizations. A hilariously MDMA-addled operative cruising the field trying to contain the spillover from this experiment gone wrong. Wingard and Simon Barrett’s script is content to suggest all this nonsense exists without drowning the movie in explanations for it. Thank God. Onslaught is in and out in barely 85 minutes and has no interest in stopping the violence so somebody can explain the pipeline of imported Nazi Scientist to American Military Command Chain.
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Blair Witch’ directed by Adam Wingard and starring James Allen McCune]
That economy is certainly one of the movie’s greatest asset. Onslaught starts ticking almost immediately and basically never stops. Even the sound design feels wound tight, every gunshot, impact, footstep, and splattery bit of foley landing with this crisp, tactile snap that pulls you deeper into the foray. Great horror movies tend to understand how much of the experience happens through your ear holes, and Onslaught does just that. The grinding, synth-heavy, Carpenter-ish score from Matthew Putsi only adds to the industrial pulse of Wingard’s creation.
The trailer park residents are sketched in with similarly broad strokes, including the kindly but slightly curmudgeonly older Black neighbor Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) who feels imported directly from an ’80s genre movie and Eric Wareheim from the Tim and Eric Show just out there radiating major Eric Wareheim energy. The performances operate on roughly the same wavelength. Stevens is fucking delightful as the evil German scientist, listening to calming music, slobbering on his wife’s stiletto, and looking completely ridiculous while committing to every second of it. As is so often the case with him, he knows exactly what movie he’s in.
Arjona, meanwhile, absolutely owns the screen. Celeste could easily be a “badass mom” archetype, but Arjona makes the contradictions of her character believable. She can play the emotionally distant single mother who just wants her kid to feel comfortable around her, the explosive woman who can barely keep a lid on her anger, the person whose life has stalled out somewhere in the desert, and the hardened Army veteran suddenly required to become extraordinarily violent. There’s a raw physicality to the performance that makes all those pieces fit together into something believable and whole.
If anything though, Onslaught could stand to get even nastier. It’s bloody and never exactly pulls its punches, but this is such an unapologetically grindhouse-y piece of pulp that there are moments where Wingard seems poised to go completely gonzo with the splatter and stops short. After spending so much time establishing these soldiers as nearly unstoppable killing machines, they get dispatched with a little less creativity and difficulty than expected. For a movie this happy to be stupid, bloody, and loud, pushing the last twenty minutes even further into lunacy would have sent it over the top into full onslaught excellence.
Still, Onslaught feels like getting Adam Wingard back. It exists comfortably alongside You’re Next and The Guest, enough that the three almost form a loose trilogy of synths, violence, dangerous people, pumpkins, and nights going horribly wrong. Everything Wingard has made since has ranged from forgettable to downright bad, but this is the lane where his instincts actually sing. If Onslaught finds even a modest audience, hopefully he stays exactly in this lane for quite some time.
CONCLUSION: A pulpy, bloody grindhouse throwback to when movies existed to make you feel something for 90 minutes and then let you get on with your life, Onslaught is a nasty little crowd-pleaser that knows exactly what works for audiences and pushes hard on it. If only Wingard had pushed the blood, carnage, and lunacy just a little further, it might have been something truly unforgettable.
B+
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The post ‘ONSLAUGHT’ Brings Adam Wingard Back to What He Does Best appeared first on Silver Screen Riot.
