In “Onslaught,” director Adam Wingard returns to his action-horror roots with a fun romp of a genre flick that is sadly more interested in looking cool than telling a gripping story.
Adria Arjona stars as Celeste, an Army veteran who owns and manages a trailer park in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Unbeknownst to the residents of this community, the government has set up a research facility in the area led by the comically villainous Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), an imported Nazi doctor looking to create an army of super soldiers capable of superhuman violence, devoid of conscience.
When a trio of super soldiers escape containment, Celeste’s trailer park finds itself in the warpath. Over the course of one hellish night, Celeste and her neighbors must work together to survive.
Wingard started his career in independent horror alongside longtime collaborator, screenwriter Simon Barrett, finding critical success with “You’re Next” and “The Guest,” winning combinations of action and horror that hearkened back to more grimy genre B-movies of the 1970s and 1980s. While “Onslaught” achieves some of the charm of those earlier pastiches, it lacks the lean, original storytelling and feel for riveting suspense and action that allowed those other films to excel.
While “Onslaught” possesses some fun iconography, the filmmakers give more attention to building lore than telling a satisfying story, perhaps an unfortunate side effect of Wingard’s career pivot into the big budget franchise filmmaking of “Godzilla vs. Kong” and its sequel. The story starts off slowly, setting up Dan Stevens’ mad scientist and his comic-book-esque creations, monsters named “The Cockroach,” “The Crybaby” and “The Butcher.” When it comes time to pay off these deliberate setups with action scenes that have all of the ingredients to be something special, I was left regrettably cold, thinking, “Really? That’s it?”
Wingard seems more interested in filming these super soldiers in silhouette, in wide stances with their weapons to their side – as if they’re posing menacingly for a death metal album cover – than showing them operating like highly trained killing machines. For as much as characters talk about these creations as the future of combat, they prove to be remarkably inept at actual soldiering, struggling mightily when dealing with a handicapped older man, a PTSD-riddled single mom and a literal child.
An arsenal of guns, a mysterious government agent tripping on MDMA, Rebecca Hall as a Nazified Lady Macbeth – all of these intriguing concepts go nowhere, as if they exist only for an extended universe that will most likely never come.
Even as “Onslaught” never quite meets its cult or genre film potential, it is nevertheless an enjoyable thriller with committed performances and an amusing blend of spooky and action-packed ideas.
A version of this review was posted at Curt On The Movies.
“Onslaught” Directed by Adam Wingard. Written by Simon Barrett. Starring Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson, Michael Biehn, Alex Pereira, Drew Starkey and Rebecca Hall. Running time: 92 minutes. Genres: Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller. Rated R for strong bloody violence, some gore, sexual material/nudity and language.
