Onslaught review – super soldier slasher doesn’t go hard enough

5 hours ago 16

There’s something rather fascinating about an indie director who heads to the A-list before returning to their roots, a wider skillset and different perspective gained for better or worse. Working within a stricter system – the tiniest of choices being agreed upon by the largest of committees – can often be a creatively crushing experience that we’ve heard gruesomely detailed by many who survived it but the expansion of what one is allowed to technically do with a bigger budget can also be instructive and enriching. The dream scenario is bringing back the good and allowing the bad to inspire new work that makes the most of how unshackled one again now is.

There are plenty of examples of how this hasn’t worked. Neill Blomkamp following Elysium and Chappie with chintzy low-budget horror Demonic (easily his least effective film although since opening his own AI “studio” I imagine the worst is yet to come), Marc Forster following Quantum of Solace and World War Z with a blind Blake Lively film that, ironically, no one saw while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck went from the greatness of Half Nelson to the blandness of Captain Marvel to the headache of Freaky Tales. But then we were also gifted with the hometown intimacy of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma after he came back from space for Gravity and Hogwarts for the Prisoner of Azkaban while Karyn Kusama brushed off the nightmare of Æon Flux with the brilliantly creepy dinner party thriller The Invitation.

Adam Wingard is a writer-director who broke out with the original low-budget thrillers You’re Next and The Guest before moving on to franchise fare like 2016’s Blair Witch sequel, a Netflix adaptation of Death Note and then, with a combined budget of about $300m to play with, two Godzilla vs Kong films. He did an excellent job with the first and a so-so one with the second, perhaps reflecting his growing frustration with the limitations of wrangling franchise IP and after bowing out of more studio fare (he reportedly turned down Face/Off 2), he’s gone back to basics.

He calls his new film Onslaught “an A-plus B-movie” because he tried to deliver all of the gonzo fun of a B-movie but with the A polish he’s learned in recent years. I’d call it a B-minus success, Wingard certainly showcasing that polish (a movie that looks like an actual movie is something to be cherished in 2026) but not quite giving us enough of the raucous fun we were promised. There’s something strangely restrained and at times a little tame, as if he’s still haunted by the ghosts of Warner Bros execs peering over his shoulder and restraint isn’t really what you want in an action slasher about genetically engineered super soldiers …

The film imagines what would happen if an unstoppable Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees type was created and weaponised by the government (the first wink, wink scene has a line of Halloween pumpkins getting obliterated). Evil German doctor Hans Kammler (Wingard regular Dan Stevens, doing a lot and then some) calls them “the human equivalent of a heat-seeking missile” and after an experiment goes awry at a research facility, they are unleashed on the local population. Out in the desert, that number is rather small, mainly the unfortunate residents of a trailer park, managed by ex-soldier and single mother Celeste (Adria Arjona), battling PTSD while struggling to take care of a young daughter who’s more put together than she is.

With her in-trailer armoury of guns, it’s no surprise that Celeste is going to step up to the plate and it’s a deserved lead vehicle for Arjona, who has slowly become one of the more magnetic rising stars of late. She was easily the most attention-securing part of Zoe Kravitz’s patchy Epstein thriller Blink Twice, a film that acted as a perfect sizzle reel of both her action star and final girl capabilities and here she gets to shoot, quip and chainsaw her way to the centre of the frame (I look forward to seeing what she brings to Michael B Jordan’s Thomas Crown Affair remake next year yet the obligatory superhero role carries far less excitement). But as suited as Arjona is to the role, there’s a limit to what she’s able to do with it. The shallowness of her character isn’t a problem (there’s very little we needed to know about, say, Laurie Strode or Sarah Connor) but the situations she’s placed into are not quite thrilling or inventive enough.

In trying to tick off both action and slasher, Wingard often falls in the unsatisfying gap in-between. Arming slasher villains with guns is just plainly not that interesting (there’s a reason why Michael, Ghostface and Jason rarely touch them while even the killer in the 1981 second world war veteran horror The Prowler prefers a pitchfork) and even when they’re forced to improvise, there’s not enough gnarliness to the carnage. Wingard often decides to not even show it, as if he’s still trying to secure a studio-friendly PG-13 rating and it proves to be a strange mix of sanitised violence and brief flashes of gonzo perversity (Drew Starkey having plenty of fun as an S&M-loving cleanup agent having to hunt the soldiers down after having just taken MDMA or the perennially underused Rebecca Hall, a Wingard favourite, as a cold-hearted German dominatrix) and I wish Wingard had leaned harder on the latter, giving us the balls-to-the-wall mayhem we assumed we would be getting. For an action film it feels like we’re missing a set piece or two and for a slasher it feels like we’re missing some gore and seat-edge suspense. It’s decently entertaining and I appreciated Wingard transferring his sleek studio style but it just never goes hard enough. After all, we were promised an onslaught.