Running Time: 92 minutes
This feature film from A24 opens exclusively in cinemas on September 4th, 2026.
Genre film director Adam Wingard started making a name for himself among horror enthusiasts about twenty years ago, before really hitting the mark with the memorable titles, You’re Next and The Guest. In recent years, he’s graduated to big studio pictures like Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. For his latest venture, it seems the moviemaker has decided to return to his indie roots. The result is Onslaught, a bloody action/horror picture that offers a handful of tense moments and amusing nods to genre tropes, but ultimately doesn’t patch together as effectively as the two efforts that first gained him notoriety.
The story follows Celeste (Adria Arjona), a traumatized veteran Army sniper now working as a trailer park manager in a remote desert area. She still gets the shakes, experiencing jarring visions from her time in combat. One day, Celeste is visited by her ex-husband, who leaves their daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) in her care. Handling a child is difficult enough, but things get considerably worse when secret government experiments escape from a nearby military base. It seems that researcher Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), has ties to fascism, and his cohorts, including daughter Hanna (Rebecca Hall), have all been working to develop an unkillable super-soldier with no conscience. When government official Baylor (Micheal Biehn) arrives to see their progress, three test subjects escape and go on a rampage. It isn’t long before the killers arrive at the trailer park, where Celeste must keep her daughter safe.
Early moments in the film are promising. It’s clear that this picture is taking some inspiration from John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York). In fact, the synthesizer score sounds like it could have belonged to one of Carpenter’s movies. Additionally, it is impressively shot many striking widescreen images, whether they be desert landscapes and trailer park, or a low-angle shot of a truck moving down a highway and reflecting a background locale off of a hubcap. Some of the photography again harkens back to Carpenter. And there is an eerie opening credit crawl connecting Nazi imagery to the present day (which one wishes had been further developed).
The cast is also good, with Arjona engaging as the lead and managing to make viewers invest in the flawed character. Some of the neighbors also make a positive impression. Perhaps the most notable is Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), a kindly senior and fellow war vet living on the property, who has a few witty interactions with Celeste. While less than subtle, Stevens is excellent as the villainous Kammler, sporting albino-like features and a German accent. Unfortunately, he isn’t in the film nearly long enough, with one of the villain subplots instead honing in on Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a government “cleaner” sent to wipe any trace of the experiment.
So, what exactly is wrong with the picture? The tone is all over the place, veering from deadly serious to exaggerated attempts at comedy from a few of the terrified residents. And, while the three mute super-soldiers do make for a threat, they are essentially brain-dead, which makes them less-than-engaging as characters. All traces of humanity are gone and they’re mute killing machines, which isn’t as interesting as having verbal interplay between the warring factions.
There are all sorts of logistical issues that also hurt the end product. First, it is implied that these soldiers are essentially unkillable. Then, it is noted that, after a certain amount of time, some of their functionality isn’t as reliable. When they are cold and calculating early on, as soon as they encounter the main protagonists, they attack one-at-a-time. Celeste’s response is to battle them head on, but it would have been preferable to have the protagonists use their brains and outwit the monsters. The same goes for the daughter, who isn’t given much to do but scream and get saved. And there are a handful of strange edits. One of which involves a character literally having their face and head soaked with blood, only for the fluid to disappear in the next shot.
And, of course, the movie ends with an awkward attempt to set up a sequel. There are certainly some entertaining genre film elements on display here and I enjoyed bits and pieces of the movie, but there are too many clumsy sections, and the end result doesn’t effectively cohere. Onslaught provides plenty of bloody mayhem, but still manages to miss the mark.
