Onslaught Review w/ Adria Arjona

Effectively builds anticipation for an onslaught that never comes

Originally published at Reviews on Reels

After spending the last decade making increasingly expensive (and increasingly terrible) studio blockbusters, Adam Wingard returns to the scrappy genre filmmaking of You’re Next and The Guest with Onslaught, a pastiche of 1970s and 1980s genre cinema that blends action, horror, science fiction, and slasher conventions. Adria Arjona stars as Celeste, a former Army sniper living by herself in a New Mexico trailer park while still carrying the wounds of her time at war. Her ex shows up unannounced and leaves their daughter with her for the weekend, which happens to be the worst possible timing, as three genetically engineered super soldiers have just escaped from a nearby military facility and are killing everyone in their path.

Onslaught marks a deliberate homecoming for Adam Wingard, who stepped away from a third Godzilla x Kongfilm after directing two entries that grossed nearly $1.1 billion combined to reunite with longtime collaborator Simon Barrett on a $15 million A24 production. Wingard has described the film as an attempt to reclaim the filmmaking identity he felt he had put aside during his studio years, returning not only to the smaller scale of You’re Next and The Guest (which he has stated take place in the same universe), but to New Mexico, where he shot the latter in 2013. John Carpenter became the central reference point, particularly Assault on Precinct 13, alongside Halloween and The Terminator, with Wingard approaching Celeste as the sheriff of a modern Western and Adria Arjona as a more grounded descendant of Ripley and Sarah Connor. Despite its $15 million budget, the film became a lesser priority for A24, which gave it a relatively modest theatrical rollout and marketing campaign during what has otherwise been the studio’s biggest commercial year.

For much of its first half, Onslaught is a pastiche built on understanding what made the films it draws from so effective in the first place. There are, of course, plenty of cheeky references, from casting Reginald VelJohnson and Michael Biehn in obvious roles to more direct visual and auditory callbacks. Oren Soffer gives the New Mexico locations an appropriately desolate quality, while Matt Pusti’s synth-heavy score captures the deceptive simplicity of John Carpenter’s own compositions. Most importantly, Onslaught feels like a Carpenter film in the patience with which Wingard sets his pieces in motion, allowing long scenes to play out as Celeste goes about her mundane existence and seemingly disconnected characters gradually enter the picture. There are passages that could easily be mistaken for padding in an already brief film, but this unhurried approach creates an effective sense that something terrible is slowly making its way toward these people. Watching the pieces gradually come together builds considerable anticipation that the film ultimately fails to live up to.

It all comes down to how surprisingly tame Onslaughtfeels, lacking the intensity that Carpenter, Cameron, and other far superior filmmakers achieved 40 years ago with considerably smaller budgets and greater restraint. Films like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Terminator could make their villains terrifying simply through the way they walked, moved, or refused to stop, and to Wingard’s credit, the first encounter with a super soldier establishes that same menace quite well, with a striking image of them appearing as silhouettes with glowing eyes, a trick the film returns to more than once. They are introduced as unstoppable killing machines, intelligent and brutal, yet the threat they pose never becomes relentless. The film inexplicably gives its characters plenty of breathing room between attacks, rather than gradually wearing them down and closing off avenues of escape, and every subsequent confrontation makes the soldiers weaker and easier to defeat than the last.

The action also becomes repetitive, at one point even having the same character rescue Celeste twice in a row in almost exactly the same way, while another scene teases an electric-saw fight that never actually materializes. Meanwhile, several characters given lengthy introductions never contribute to the escalation we expect, while the conflict over Celeste reluctantly caring for her daughter barely registers once her maternal instincts inevitably take over. In retrospect, all that admittedly effective setup starts working against the film, promising a much bigger and more intense collision than Wingard ever delivers. Give me more onslaught in a film called Onslaught, damn it!

There is also a fascinating angle in how these veterans, lost after returning home, find a sense of purpose again when a crisis calls on their old instincts. They immediately rush to help and even sacrifice themselves for others, now fighting almost zombified soldiers created by the same military machine that damaged their own lives. It gives Onslaught a uniquely compelling thread that Wingard, frustratingly, fails to explore.

Read the full review at Reviews on Reels